Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2013-01-29 10:29 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2013-01-29 10:29 pm
Entry tags:
Thinking about stuff!
So tonight my brain has been busily drafting several My Thoughts On, including, among other things:
My physical endurance is increasing! I know this because a) statistics, b) practice, and c) today when I was trudging through Deepest Suburbia, even though my knees were angry with me, I took a poll of my body, and my lungs were not unhappy, and while my muscles were getting a little annoyed and fatigued, they were not even close to having expended all their energy.
I seem to be developing more senses, both body-sense and emotional-sense, as I live in this body longer; it's like getting firmware upgrades: the hardware may have always supported it, and may have been giving all the details, and now that the firmware knows what to do with the data, it can handle it better. When I lost all my stamina and then would periodically push myself way too hard, I got to know the feeling where you're telling your muscles to move, and not only are they fatigued and painful, but there's this feedback coming from every little cell, saying "hi, you're asking for energy, and I'm here to tell you that you may be able to sort of vaguely move, but you're on your last reserves, and even if your life depended on it, you would not be able to actually move faster or more." This is a terrifying feeling, and it comes when you're already probably exhausted and in pain from having done whatever it was that you did to deplete your reserves.
It's like the nightmares where you know you need to run, and the need to run and terror are so intense they're a physical pain, and still you can't move, except this is real life, and maybe you're in the middle of an airport, too.
I do not recommend this experience, by the way.
So that's the "my mitochondria are yelling at me" feeling. Do not want. And today, even though I managed to hit my highest step count with the fitbit in the history of ever (though to be fair, the last 500 steps or so were on the little pedal-dealie under my desk), I did not get that feeling.
I was on Caltrain this morning (and I totally forgot to tag off, alas) and I kept checking the schedule in my hand, making sure I knew actually where I was, so I wouldn't miss my station (again). Someone else asked after station information. A thought popped into my head: an image, really, of a white glassy bead with tiny, neat, printed black letters in a serif font, giving the name of the next station.
So the Caltrain Rosary is taking shape in my head. Silver wire is very dear these days, but I can't touch many of the usual base metals. I'd need the station beads, and things between; I'd want to represent the distances between the stations (as the track winds) reasonably.![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
jai_dit asked which station would be the cross. I was torn -- should it be San Francisco? Gilroy? San Jose? Then in talking it over with ursamajor in IRC, it hit us: Millbrae. It's the station that crosses with BART, eh? :-P
#yuletide was talking about a How I Met Your Mother crossover with Buffy when I got in, where Buffy has a bar and the crew shows up there. Then I suggested that perhaps Willow and Lily were the same person, and when Lily found the Buffy sexbot that was in Barney's possession, she of course liberated it, which is why there's a Buffybot in Lily's closet.
Then #yuletide got onto unions in fanfiction.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
occupyfandom ensued. When lannamichaels added me as an admin, I noticed that the notice said "maintainer" (old terminology, inherited from LJ) instead of "administrator" as it ought to say. As the dutiful volunteer I sometimes manage to be, I filed a ticket for this; the ticket, of course, included context about the community. Under any other circumstances, I might not have gone into such detail about the Avengers example of the Your Fandom Needs A Union (which had been hashed out at some hilarious length in chat), but the fact remains that Rah handles most of the translation-system's-got-the-wrong-color-steam-again problems, and Rah's fictional biases are, shall we say, known. Steve won't cross the picket line.
Something, I'm not sure what, got me onto matters of sexuality, and some of the stuff that came up when I was nattering on last year: http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/6744083.html
Sometimes a person who might be perfectly well entitled to claim the extra tag "bisexual" for themselves, by virtue of being theoretically into, and by no means opposed, to getting it on with a gender other than the one that they've known themselves to be interested in since forever, chooses to not reach out and claim that label. Particularly, if claiming the label now might involve coming out to a) interested friends, b) sympathetic bystanders, c) dubious co-workers and/or neighbors, and d) oh god paaaaaarents aaaaaaaaaa. Perhaps one's not opposed to doing naughty things with a person of a different-to-the-usual appropriate sex, but the idea hasn't really made itself pants-meltingly imminent.
This is perfectly okay! Both the "I could claim this label even though I am not actually on fire and haven't known it since I started thinking about romantic and/or sexual pairings" bit, and the "you know, if I never bring home a person of that gender to my parents, do I even need to have that Scene with them?" are entirely fine things to do.
It always goes like this: first the people who would literally die rather than deny their truth (whichever truth it is), go, and if they're lucky, they both survive and make a hostile world just that much better. Gradually the people with less imperative and more to lose follow. Eventually, inevitably, even while people are still burning out and dying against a hostile world, the "what-if" people show up and cautiously poke the edges. Maybe I am -- what if I found out?
Having made it safe enough for those people to gently investigate in their own time and way, is one clear sign that all the sacrifice wasn't in vain.
Today I did epic spreadsheet stuff -- and made it look easy. I have been teaching myself little corners of spreadsheet wizardry, and today was Baby's First VLOOKUP. My grandmanager handed me a handwritten sheet with names, departments, and emails, and asked me to turn it into a spreadsheet.
First I typed it up, leaving off the emails' domains, as they were all internal and all the same. This saved time and angst. Then I went through the employee directory, confirming the spelling of the name and email address. I was able to disambiguate a few folks, and get the canonical email address of some folks with aliases.
Because these sorts of things are inevitably followed up by other things, next I built the full email addresses (concatenation, copying the concatenated column, then pasting it special as values back in). Then I went to the meeting in question and copied out the list of invited addresses.
Pasting these in was a multi-step proposition. I put them in a separate sheet and imported my data as text to columns, using semicolon as the delimiter. Then I copied the area with the separate addresses, and pasted it special elsewhere, ticking the transpose box. Now I had a nice neat column with email addresses. I de-duplicated that, since occasionally some people lose their damnfool calendar invitations, and need re-inviting, and that makes duplicates on the organizers' end. Freakin' calendars. I fucking swear.
I fumbled around a bit next, but what I should have done was make sure to strip all the extraneous spaces out of all of these, the better to compare them with. I eventually did that. First I looked up the VLOOKUP syntax, and used that to see who in the "actually invited" column was present. Then (the VLOOKUP having exhausted my capacity for any new things) I copied the ones that weren't found, over into yet another sheet, as the folks who would need review from my grandmanager for formal inclusion upon the invitation list. Because I knew he'd take about five different requests to eventually get there, and I wanted to cut that right out, as I'd had a short night and there were hella things to do. I hope to improve my telepathy with said grandmanager so I can more reliably do these things.
In the department of telepathy, this morning I made coffee for my Overlady. I was nice, too, and she got the one without the espresso grounds all up in it. She wasn't quite awake enough to register whether the coffee was good or not, but since she did not recall it being bad, I'm counting that as a win. (I am tracking my department's preferences in these things, because if I can do things like manifest peppermint lattes when nobody's had enough sleep, I am doing my job right.)
My Overlady had not seen a Lego minifig in person before. (Rubber Chicken Guy is tentatively going to be a guest speaker at a thing; the only appropriate speaker gift for him is, of course, the Chicken Suit Guy minifig.)
I changed my nick in work IRC. I missed my erstwhile counterpart's last day (my erstwhile counterpart is to be congratulated on a new position; I feel bad for having missed any farewell ceremonies) and it didn't feel right being the only one.
My physical endurance is increasing! I know this because a) statistics, b) practice, and c) today when I was trudging through Deepest Suburbia, even though my knees were angry with me, I took a poll of my body, and my lungs were not unhappy, and while my muscles were getting a little annoyed and fatigued, they were not even close to having expended all their energy.
I seem to be developing more senses, both body-sense and emotional-sense, as I live in this body longer; it's like getting firmware upgrades: the hardware may have always supported it, and may have been giving all the details, and now that the firmware knows what to do with the data, it can handle it better. When I lost all my stamina and then would periodically push myself way too hard, I got to know the feeling where you're telling your muscles to move, and not only are they fatigued and painful, but there's this feedback coming from every little cell, saying "hi, you're asking for energy, and I'm here to tell you that you may be able to sort of vaguely move, but you're on your last reserves, and even if your life depended on it, you would not be able to actually move faster or more." This is a terrifying feeling, and it comes when you're already probably exhausted and in pain from having done whatever it was that you did to deplete your reserves.
It's like the nightmares where you know you need to run, and the need to run and terror are so intense they're a physical pain, and still you can't move, except this is real life, and maybe you're in the middle of an airport, too.
I do not recommend this experience, by the way.
So that's the "my mitochondria are yelling at me" feeling. Do not want. And today, even though I managed to hit my highest step count with the fitbit in the history of ever (though to be fair, the last 500 steps or so were on the little pedal-dealie under my desk), I did not get that feeling.
I was on Caltrain this morning (and I totally forgot to tag off, alas) and I kept checking the schedule in my hand, making sure I knew actually where I was, so I wouldn't miss my station (again). Someone else asked after station information. A thought popped into my head: an image, really, of a white glassy bead with tiny, neat, printed black letters in a serif font, giving the name of the next station.
So the Caltrain Rosary is taking shape in my head. Silver wire is very dear these days, but I can't touch many of the usual base metals. I'd need the station beads, and things between; I'd want to represent the distances between the stations (as the track winds) reasonably.
ursamajor in IRC, it hit us: Millbrae. It's the station that crosses with BART, eh? :-P #yuletide was talking about a How I Met Your Mother crossover with Buffy when I got in, where Buffy has a bar and the crew shows up there. Then I suggested that perhaps Willow and Lily were the same person, and when Lily found the Buffy sexbot that was in Barney's possession, she of course liberated it, which is why there's a Buffybot in Lily's closet.
Then #yuletide got onto unions in fanfiction.
occupyfandom ensued. When lannamichaels added me as an admin, I noticed that the notice said "maintainer" (old terminology, inherited from LJ) instead of "administrator" as it ought to say. As the dutiful volunteer I sometimes manage to be, I filed a ticket for this; the ticket, of course, included context about the community. Under any other circumstances, I might not have gone into such detail about the Avengers example of the Your Fandom Needs A Union (which had been hashed out at some hilarious length in chat), but the fact remains that Rah handles most of the translation-system's-got-the-wrong-color-steam-again problems, and Rah's fictional biases are, shall we say, known. Steve won't cross the picket line. Something, I'm not sure what, got me onto matters of sexuality, and some of the stuff that came up when I was nattering on last year: http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/6744083.html
Sometimes a person who might be perfectly well entitled to claim the extra tag "bisexual" for themselves, by virtue of being theoretically into, and by no means opposed, to getting it on with a gender other than the one that they've known themselves to be interested in since forever, chooses to not reach out and claim that label. Particularly, if claiming the label now might involve coming out to a) interested friends, b) sympathetic bystanders, c) dubious co-workers and/or neighbors, and d) oh god paaaaaarents aaaaaaaaaa. Perhaps one's not opposed to doing naughty things with a person of a different-to-the-usual appropriate sex, but the idea hasn't really made itself pants-meltingly imminent.
This is perfectly okay! Both the "I could claim this label even though I am not actually on fire and haven't known it since I started thinking about romantic and/or sexual pairings" bit, and the "you know, if I never bring home a person of that gender to my parents, do I even need to have that Scene with them?" are entirely fine things to do.
It always goes like this: first the people who would literally die rather than deny their truth (whichever truth it is), go, and if they're lucky, they both survive and make a hostile world just that much better. Gradually the people with less imperative and more to lose follow. Eventually, inevitably, even while people are still burning out and dying against a hostile world, the "what-if" people show up and cautiously poke the edges. Maybe I am -- what if I found out?
Having made it safe enough for those people to gently investigate in their own time and way, is one clear sign that all the sacrifice wasn't in vain.
Today I did epic spreadsheet stuff -- and made it look easy. I have been teaching myself little corners of spreadsheet wizardry, and today was Baby's First VLOOKUP. My grandmanager handed me a handwritten sheet with names, departments, and emails, and asked me to turn it into a spreadsheet.
First I typed it up, leaving off the emails' domains, as they were all internal and all the same. This saved time and angst. Then I went through the employee directory, confirming the spelling of the name and email address. I was able to disambiguate a few folks, and get the canonical email address of some folks with aliases.
Because these sorts of things are inevitably followed up by other things, next I built the full email addresses (concatenation, copying the concatenated column, then pasting it special as values back in). Then I went to the meeting in question and copied out the list of invited addresses.
Pasting these in was a multi-step proposition. I put them in a separate sheet and imported my data as text to columns, using semicolon as the delimiter. Then I copied the area with the separate addresses, and pasted it special elsewhere, ticking the transpose box. Now I had a nice neat column with email addresses. I de-duplicated that, since occasionally some people lose their damnfool calendar invitations, and need re-inviting, and that makes duplicates on the organizers' end. Freakin' calendars. I fucking swear.
I fumbled around a bit next, but what I should have done was make sure to strip all the extraneous spaces out of all of these, the better to compare them with. I eventually did that. First I looked up the VLOOKUP syntax, and used that to see who in the "actually invited" column was present. Then (the VLOOKUP having exhausted my capacity for any new things) I copied the ones that weren't found, over into yet another sheet, as the folks who would need review from my grandmanager for formal inclusion upon the invitation list. Because I knew he'd take about five different requests to eventually get there, and I wanted to cut that right out, as I'd had a short night and there were hella things to do. I hope to improve my telepathy with said grandmanager so I can more reliably do these things.
In the department of telepathy, this morning I made coffee for my Overlady. I was nice, too, and she got the one without the espresso grounds all up in it. She wasn't quite awake enough to register whether the coffee was good or not, but since she did not recall it being bad, I'm counting that as a win. (I am tracking my department's preferences in these things, because if I can do things like manifest peppermint lattes when nobody's had enough sleep, I am doing my job right.)
My Overlady had not seen a Lego minifig in person before. (Rubber Chicken Guy is tentatively going to be a guest speaker at a thing; the only appropriate speaker gift for him is, of course, the Chicken Suit Guy minifig.)
I changed my nick in work IRC. I missed my erstwhile counterpart's last day (my erstwhile counterpart is to be congratulated on a new position; I feel bad for having missed any farewell ceremonies) and it didn't feel right being the only one.
no subject
no subject
I KNOW YOUR FEELS. It took me until I was almost 20 and had actually had a girlfriend or two (fairly innocent relationships) to recognize the whole thing for what it was. Mom and Dad, why didn't we go into sexuality beyond "there are gay people and there are straight people"? (World at large, why don't we go into that? It would have made my life simpler!)
no subject
And people say what we need is less sex education.
no subject
no subject
That said, I do seem to have ended up all the way over at the high end of the Kinsey scale, but my obsession with figuring out which side of a Massive Metaphorical Barrier I was on did not make my teen years simpler.
no subject
And there are also people who think they're one orientation until they try it out and realize there's not that spark there that they thought there was. (With my increased knowledge of terminology these days, I'd probably say I discovered I wasn't bi, I was heterosexual biromantic, so now I call myself straight.)
no subject
Even on days when my concentration delaminates four hours in, I still love my job.