What’s this gray thing in my head for, if not a toy?

I had a floating holiday that needed scheduling, so I did that — use it or lose it.  Selecting December 12 arbitrarily for the occasion, I requested the holiday.  There’s a notes section, though, and it’s always dangerous to leave those unattended around me.

Notes:  Feast of Ma’arrat al-Numan – During the First Crusade, Crusaders breach the town’s walls and massacre about 20,000 inhabitants on this day. After finding themselves with insufficient food, they resort to cannibalism.

I sometimes wonder what the supervisory staff thinks when they read my leave requests.

Crossposted from Epinephrine & Sophistry

Bubbling up from the past

I don’t recall how it came up.  Something my coworker said about her teenager needing large sums of money to stay entertained.  However it came up, I related this:

Back in the day when I was a teen — you couldn’t go uphill to school both ways because gravity and inclined surfaces hadn’t been invented yet —

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Leaving Martyrdom By The Tracks

Today was terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad. I overslept. There was no coffee, and when I found things for breakfast it was a bad bran muffin that I never got to eat and a mushy banana that I only got a bite of by almost-lunch. Then I didn’t get lunch until 1:00 and it sort of sucked so much that I finished my mushy banana so that if I died the sucky lunch wouldn’t be the last thing I ever ate.

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Emptying Out — Filling Up

At work, which is fun, I am working at capacity, and daily increase that capacity. I’m designing SQL based reports, custom SQL views and stored procedures — and, I now recognize, my knowledge of SQL when I began this job was similar to the mathematics knowledge of a child who can count to ten. So, daily, I am teaching myself SQL on the fly so that I can understand what already exists and create something new. I’m already a match for people who have been on the job for several years, so clearly things are going well.The novel isn’t, so much. I know what I’m doing, and it’s fun, but I’m tapped out when I’m done with work. Even writing here is a tremendous effort. Apparently creatively exploring, learning, and problem solving uses some of the same resources that writing does, while not being as fulfilling. Having created a innovative solution to a problem gives me a feel of “well, that was fun” while writing something gives me a feeling of “see what I did!”

This is not a problem, mind you. As far as I can tell, I don’t have problems any more, as I used to define problems. Clearly, what is needed is some sort of new balance, where I am putting forth less than maximum effort at work, so that there is effort to be spent outside of work.

Hrm.

I am fond of speaking this pattern of thought, when enumerating directions that can be taken: “There is solution A, solution B, solution C … or something that I have not yet thought of.” There is always something I have not yet thought of.

And I just thought of one of them.

I have been approaching this as if resource and effort were finite, and their rate of replenishment a constant. Instead of finding a balance, I could find a way to expand the resource and effort available to me, or find a way to increase the rate of replenishment.

Or something I haven’t thought of.

Well. Those are two directions I’d not considered. If I can grow stronger physically, more enduring physically, then it makes sense that I could train myself up to be stronger, more enduring, and faster recovering, ah, psychically, as well.

I wonder how one goes about that process. Hmmmmmmmm.

Crossposted from Epinepherine & Sophistry