There is always work. I am okay with coworkers having different political views most of the time. But oh it was hard going when a very savvy linux admin who knew the OS and the app we supported inside out said he was for Ben Carson. Just omg how how how? There are some things I don’t miss about working at the bomb factory.
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Friendships come and go. I am in a current dilemma of trying to decide if I want to continue in a friendship that is strained.
The friend in question is not a bad person whatsoever, the issue is he does not see how his actions are hurtful. I am a designer and illustrator. I have done a ton of design work for various projects for him at no cost whatsoever. We do a mini convention event and this year he did not consult me once on anything. He elicited help from various community artists and designers for tee shirt designs and art giveaways and such.
Is there anything wrong with that? Not at all. But not a single extension was offered to me. This is an event I helped build and create. The theme and look and feel from the logo to the color palette is all my creation and artistry. The issue is…he sees nothing wrong with leaving me out in the cold. He is obtuse to how what he did was rude and deeply hurtful. Its like having a good friend who is a professional chef and invite them to dinner along with a bunch of other people who you asked all of them to bring a dish and not the chef.
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coworkers. . . I literally worked at a company owned by Curt Shilling. In person he always seemed, like, super nice. His online persona is something else though.
I have a theory about how a savvy tech admin could have supported Carson actually. That sounds like a variant of Engineer’s Disease
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38 Studios?
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Yeah. Was employed by Big Huge Games, then they got bought by 38 Studios.
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Truer words were never said, but it’s really just an extension of what we call “growing up.” When we’re very young, all our nerve endings are fresh and new and sensitive, our skin is soft, and we have no real idea how to moderate our responses to stimuli. Allergies aside, bee-stings hurt with an exquisite agony to a four-year-old, whereas a weather-beaten, leather-skinned forty-year-old might not even notice one.
There’s a parallel between emotional hurt and physical hurt. Being too sheltered from pain results in one being less able to deal with pain when it is eventually experienced. And many people find that their first heartbreak is the worst one… or at least the one wherein it’s hardest to realize that it’s not the end of the world, that eventually the pain will fade, and that the broken pieces can be picked up, and that life will eventually go on again. These lessons only come with experience… and it takes a lot of courage to be able to face that experience.
My nine-year-old daughter struggles with things like this. She’s afraid of many things that younger kids have long since grown accustomed to. She beats her head against many a brick wall that her life’s experience has consistently taught her (to no avail) that she can’t change about the world around her. The world doesn’t revolve around her, she doesn’t always get her way, and clearly she needs to rewrite some of her emotional responses… and yet it’s all still a work in progress, with a very long way remaining to go. For some people this adaptability comes more easily than for others, but the hard truth remains that she’ll never be happy with her place in the world until she can adopt some measure of the ol’ Serenity Prayer and take it seriously to heart.
I have some weird mutation in my thought processes. Maybe I’m just sociopathic, but I have this tendency to expect my emotions to make sense. I don’t tend to get jealous (thought process: “why would I want someone to be with me if they’d rather be with someone else?”) and my fears tend to fade if they go long enough without coming true (which is why I’m no longer afraid of the dark, or of ghosts, or of being mugged, or of being bombed by a terrorist, or of being vaporized in a nuclear war). I like how this has turned out for me, but I recognize that I’m kinda unusual that way.
Nevertheless, irrational fears are irrational, which doesn’t eliminate them by any means, but does give a path toward weakening them. Nobody can talk you into overcoming a phobia, if phobia it indeed is. But an altering of perspective, a slight shift in viewpoint, can give added strength. You’ve mentioned your high self-esteem. That right there is a useful cushion at the bottom of your chasm. The key thing to remember is that that self-esteem is not dependent upon the regard of those who reject you. If someone turns you down, it’s not because you’re bad or hideous or a failure. You’re just not to their taste at that moment. (I don’t hate tomatoes because they’re inherently awful; zillions of people love tomatoes. It’s just that their charms are lost on me, due no doubt to some fault in my taste buds. I still hate ‘em. But it doesn’t hurt the tomatoes’ feelings.)
The only thing that reliably affords this kind of perspective is practice. The pain of rejection actually does build character. Surprisingly soon, one comes to realize that it doesn’t have to hurt. People don’t reject a polite advance because they want to lash out at you and hurt you. Typically, they’re either otherwise engaged, not on the market, or simply looking for something else. I find it helpful to think of myself as a used car. When I put myself on the market, I shine myself up as well as I can, change the fluids, maybe put on a fresh set of tires. But when it comes down to it, I’m still just a 1969 Donald with some fraying upholstery and a lot of miles on me, and that’s simply not gonna meet the needs of all the shoppers out there. And that’s okay. Sooner or later, someone came along and recognized me for the gem that I am, and took me home to her garage and relies on me daily and still takes me out for weekend drives whenever time allows.
I’m telling you: risk the grief. You don’t have to put that much importance on to any given potential Nimelennar-shopper, because you’re realistically going to appeal to just a limited percentage of them.
The more times you fall into that chasm, the shallower that ditch becomes. Seriously. Nobody has the emotional endurance to withstand the rollercoaster highs and lows of a love life if the amplitude didn’t mellow out over time. And it does. And even so, the highs that accompany the max-amplitude lows do make those lows bearable… and even worth it, once you get used to it. Do what you can to get yourself used to it. The payoff will be worth it.
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I sometimes wonder if there are some friends - often people we care about very deeply, who mean a huge amount to us - who only exist to disappoint us down the road.
One guy was pretty much my best friend for 4 years. He was very quirky, very old-fashioned. He had strange religious and ethical ideas but we’d have interesting discussions about them and ultimately I convinced myself he was a decent person. But my girlfriend has a chronic disease which causes her incredible pain every day. We pursued one treatment option which he believed was sinful. Well, if you’re asking us to choose between “sin” and her being in unbearable pain for the rest of her life, byeeeeee.
I had a teacher who was incredibly important to me. He introduced me to loads of books and poems and ways of thinking that were key to my development. He was friendly and lovely and I looked forward to knowing him for decades to come. A year ago he was convicted of storing child porn on his computer. Noooooopenopenopenope.
I’ve got a friend who’s great fun to be with, we have a lot in common. He and his girlfriend seemed happy and sweet together. Now it turns out he was coercing and belittling her, pressuring her into having sex, and she basically had stockholm syndrome. When she finally realised what was going on, she left him, in no uncertain terms. He then threatened her, phoned her house 20 times a day, contacted her new bf, her family, and in a joke threatened to burn down her house and kill her (I’M SORRY WHAT?) and consistently threatened to kill himself in order to leverage her. I’m still friends with this guy, but mostly because I JUST HOPE THAT I MIGHT BE ABLE TO TALK SOME FUCKING SENSE INTO HIM SO HE DOESN’T COMPLETELY SCREW UP THE NEXT PERSON TO COME ALONG.
Seriously, are people always this disappointing? Do we just end up alone, with a trail of shitty friends and disappointments behind us?
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Not all of them, no. I’m lucky enough to be able to say “not even most of them.”
Whether or not you end up alone, if you meet enough people you’ll inevitably leave at least an intermittent trail of shitty friends and disappointments behind you. It’s all just a part of being human. All of us fuck up sooner or later. Some of us fuck up a lot. A few of us are chronic and perpetual fuckups.
I’ve mentioned before the pretty talented and apparently personable drummer I jammed with a time or two who later turned out to be an actual body-dismembering murderer. I’ve known a few other friendly, intelligent, helpful people that everyone’s mom would think were “such nice young gentlemen” who ended up being world-class bigots, sexual blackmailers, rapists, thieves… even Trump-voters.
And yet most of the people I’ve known, while flawed to some degree or another, have turned out to be at least as wonderful as I myself am (to whatever degree that’s true). And I know I myself have profoundly disappointed some people over the years… sometimes painfully so.
But I never give up hope. All we can do is try to be the best person we can be… kind of expecting the worst and yet simultaneously hoping for the best.
Dwelling on it too long? That way lies madness.
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I like the German term “Fachidiot” – A derogatory term for a one-track specialist who is an expert in his field, but takes a blinkered approach to multi-faceted problems.
My wife works with heart surgeons, and sometimes she just needs to roll her eyes and get on with the job when they share their opinions.
Incidentally, there are a number of people I know who would do a lot better if they could have a lady’s maid or manservant. Not a partner, since too much mundane work would be required and too little affection would be offered. More like the “bedders” that Oxford students get.
I don’t think I’ve ever purposefully and definitively ended a relationship, but I’ve let a couple expire.
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What are those? And do they get them as part of, say, a residential package or something?
Oxford, Cambridge, and I think Durham all have variants of this: basically, housekeepers for dorm rooms, with a history of being somewhat caretaking in general. Not quite a personal servant, but in that vein, sort of.
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One example: my older brother is better now, but my mum was still posting things like socks and batteries to him into his 30s because he was much more focused on his studies. Academically, he’s one of the smartest people I know, but pretty famously low on practical skills as a young adult. His fiancee is a bit more practical, but with a similar emphasis on studies (history masters at Harvard, PhD at Cambridge. Now she wants to be a paediatrician for the family-friendly hours ¯\ _ (ツ)_ /¯ ).
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Rookie mistake. The only thing worse for “family-friendly hours” would be obstetrics.
Families freak out at 2:00am because Junior has a 99º temperature. Suzy falls from the tree she’s climbing at 10:00am on Christmas Day. Chris needs chemo but it’s the parents who need reassurances multiple times every single day for months. You’re never really off the clock when you work with babies/children in any way.
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I am relieved. I had been thinking that (as perhaps a long-obsolete service) Oxford was supplying people to… er… warm the beds, as it were, of those hard-working students too absorbed in their studies to cultivate romance. Or something. Sounded awful, but weirdly plausible.
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That reminds me of Roald Dahl’s story about how he had to warm an older student’s toilet seat each morning. He read several Dickens novels while using his bare bum to raise the porcelain’s temperature. Seems like a pretty good gig to me.
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And to think I’ve been doing that for free my entire toilet-trained life!
But man, that sounds so weird to me. I flatter myself that I have few irrational squick-factors, but I dislike sitting on a warm toilet seat. Somebody else’s butt-heat… bleccch. I prefer to wait the 60-90 seconds it takes to return to porcelain-cool. Somehow that always feels… cleaner.
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At Repton, which is an awesome name for a school.
Although I’ll always think of Repton as this, because of BBC Micros.
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I’m so gifted to find / what I don’t like the most
so I think it’s time for us to have a toast…
(the explicit version is So Much Better)
I recall being attracted to that song because I simply enjoyed the beat…and then I listened to the lyrics and found that I liked it even more because I do the same godamn thing.
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