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azurelunatic: Blue koi, captioned "And the new day was a great big fish."  (great big fish)
So there's a work thing that my Overlady's had me helping out with, one that involves a conference call with a lot of external people, and Powerpoints. Thursday morning, bright and early, saw me at work, surprisingly perky for the hour. I arrived at the same time as Ponytail Manager, who is just about the first in from my team every day.

So there several of us were in one of the meeting rooms, with the first caller already on the line, and my Overlady catching up and making cheerful small talk with the caller. I'm sitting in place and buzzing, waiting for stuff to happen. My Overlady notices a smudge of something on the edge of her Mac's trackpad, and rubs at it a few times to make it go away.

The caller observes (and we observe on the projector) that the slides have jumped a few things ahead. My Overlady and the caller joke about this. I point out that she'd just been cleaning the trackpad, in a swiping motion, up and down along the right margin of the trackpad. That's the place that on many machines is able to be used as a scrollbar when swiped that way, which well might have caused the observed effects.

"It sounds like you have an engineer in the room," the caller says.

"No, I'm the secretary," I respond, and introduce myself. The conversation flows on, about how folks who aren't necessarily on the deepest technical end of the field can be the ones to understand some system or other inside and out, sometimes because they're the one who uses it, or instructs others in its use, or observes others making all the possible errors. I don't talk much. This is not my show. I notice how close my Overlady's coffee is to empty, and bring water.

I was happy, but a complicated sort of happy, that my first impression on this caller was that I was an engineer.

My actual job title involves "Administrative Assistant". The job title that I most often use in an informal environment is "minion". I'm not dissatisfied with either of those titles, but in the moment, "administrative assistant" was a mouthful, "admin" or "administrator" was ambiguous, and "minion", while completely accurate, was not at the level of professionalism that I wanted to show during this call. So a self-deprecating "secretary" it was.

Why did I feel the need to put myself down in addition to clarifying my role? Why did I feel that "secretary" was unnecessarily demeaning? Do I have somewhat of an inferiority complex because I have more of a technical background than the average person, and I'm working in a mostly non-technical role? I genuinely enjoy my job, and since part of the job description is anything the team decides it can offload onto me, it may well become more technical in the future. But clearly something about being assumed to have a more technical job than I actually have puts me on the defensive.
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
So of course this is half-baked shower thoughts, because that's how these things come out, and I'm trying to get to bed. Starting points: Snow Crash, that drawn-out conversation(s) I had with [livejournal.com profile] iroshi about mutual brain function and levels of conscious awareness, that video I watched of that woman trying to boil water, the fact that while I'm smart I only consider myself average because I hang out with a bunch of very very smart people, and also the fact that when I'm very very tired I will zombie around with little self-awareness and need to be forcibly put back on track unless I'm caught in a routine, and then the routine carries me through, and it's easier to go through it than break out of it if I'm that tired. (Literally, it's less effort to take a complete shower when going to bed than just go and undress in the bathroom.)

And it makes sense that someone who is aware of deeper levels of thought would have more trouble forming useful daily routines.

And someday maybe people will write and sell software for the human brain/body: how to make bread. How to shower. How to ride a horse. And if you can just install that package and trigger it, and it'll have to be fully error trapped oh god oh god oh god, that would be easier than having to remember all the steps, and learn it yourself.

And maybe some of it is a broken self-programming module? I have a pretty decent self-programming module. But I know when I'm tired I'm essentially a zombie, and I get sucked into deceptively complex and not easily broken routines. Like the check-email-check-lj-answer-anything-relevant-then-shower routine. I look fully conscious and awake. I'm not aware of time passing. Fun times.
azurelunatic: Azz and best friend grabbing each other's noses.  (best friends forever)
A ten-hour shift today. And on the walk home I called a certain best friend of mine. Geeking over the database, general geeking, and me having a few words to say about work...

It's one of those things. The electricity's starting to trickle back in. We need regular, steady contact. This time it was around 35 minutes.

His mother -- his mother -- sees him in a state of perpetual grouch. And as much as I describe him as being a perpetual grouch -- he's not a perpetual grouch to me.

It's so very nice to have someone there for Naomi, someone we all trust. I think that's a large part of how it's working so well now. I inherit from Shanna and Joan-prime. Marah has divided -- it's Naomi(Marah) and Dagger(Marah) now, and Joan-at-work built on a steady base of Marah, Marah, and more Marah.

I have a bizarre vision of a future, where -- this is the sort of thing that gets you tagged as crazy, but if it does work out, and Darkside does come to realize how very much he does care for the lot of us -- he matches very well with Naomi. We've known for a while that Naomi is heir to us all, and the way we do things, it's not a fading-out, it's a melting-into. There are divisions. There are always new divisions. And we're Loonie more than Azz on the inside anyway.

I can get away with talking about the Collective to him in certain ways by saying "my inner geek" instead of "Naomi". He was made dreadfully skittish, once upon a time, and we don't wish to do that to him again. There's really no public perception of the multiple as benign. It's always a Crazy Reality Show House With Psychoes In!! rather than my quiet reality of a quartet of kind of wacky roommates with the same kind of roommate issues you always get when it's four girls together and who the hell was supposed to do laundry and wasn't that my attitude and you're wearing it today and weren't we going to vote on what color the carpets were supposed to be because who the hell got PINK?! There's a lot of giggling. There's always a lot of giggling. It's sort of like college dorms, except with less backstabbing and more RA.

He evades getting introduced to everybody formally, because names make him skittish, and make him feel like there are strangers he hasn't met, but one way or another, he's met everybody. It doesn't matter who's out usually, but we've noticed that he's a little nervous with Marah-who-was, stiff and formal like Dagger, by turns tired and excited and annoyed with me-Azz and Joan-at-work ... but oh, he opens up for Naomi.

So. For him. As we've done before. Except this time, to the observer, there probably won't be much change. Inside, it feels like a white rose bursting into bloom.
azurelunatic: Azz and best friend grabbing each other's noses.  (best friends forever)
[livejournal.com profile] onyxrising went through a rather extreme change or two by abandoning all the former trappings of personality and moving out of state. I did something reasonably similar, though perhaps not as extreme. (People who have known me since forever still recognize me. I've known him since 2000-ish, and there's a lot that's the same about him at the core, though the mannerisms may have jumped around a lot.)

[livejournal.com profile] pyrogenic, among others. This was the cue for some serious "Hello, it's adolescence!" personal changes, not the least of which involved my high school best friend That Idiot Shawn. My body chemistry was already a loaded gun: depression, nasty, had waved and said hello in 1994. After 1997, my personal timeline gets a lot vague, and it's a struggle to track down dates. But I graduated high school in May, 1998. I spent a carefree summer hanging out with Shawn. I went into college in the fall of 1998. Shawn met his eventual ex-wife that winter, and they were engaged in the early bits of 1999. To say that I went "ballistic" would be kind. Imagine an 18-year-old girl doing her best to emulate Aral Vorkosigan after his first wife's death, except without the alcohol. (Alcohol probably would have sedated me most effectively, which would have been a good thing.) In July of 1999, I got a job where BJ worked. In August of 1999, Shawn got married. I spent the fall and winter alternately playing fun and happy depressive-in-energetic-mode games and being relieved that I was done with the whole affair. I hung out with BJ a lot, and if I hadn't been so determined we weren't dating, we probably would have been dating. On March 15, 2000, I got together with BJ. We were engaged immediately, though we held off on announcing this until April 1st, 2001. In May of 2000, we moved in together. Shortly thereafter, BJ decided that he was going off to college in Arizona come fall. In September of 2000, I quit my job and we moved to Phoenix at the end of October 2000, just in time for the start of the Fall 2000 tri at DeVry. Hello, Sis. Hello, that shaggy guy who was reading Scott Cunningham's Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner far too early in the morning in the cafeteria.

By that timeline, prior to moving to Arizona, the last baseline instance of happy/healthy Lunatic was June-August 1995, at CTY. Summer 1997 was decent, the school year of 1997-1998 was decent but odd, and summer 1998 was decent but scary. I don't count those so much as healthy times because they were in the near-direct influence of Shawn, who is actively bad for me in large doses. (The best dose of Shawn for me is often nearly homeopathic in size.)

By the time I got to Arizona, I very much didn't like myself. I was unwarrantably cranky, hostile, violent, obnoxious, resentful, depressive, passive-aggressive, and agreed 100% with those nasty little "Husbands suck because ________" / "can't live with 'em, can't get away with shooting them" / "I hate men enough to be a lesbian if only I didn't like cock" forwarded e-mails. (People like [livejournal.com profile] tygerr were not hated because they were enough not like "men" to be practically honorary women. And River. And ... you see how these things work, yeah?)

My home life was not good. Smoking roommates are not good for the girl with lung problems and allergies. I felt that I was in a religiously hostile environment, because my then-fiance was a pontificating ass and the Elder Roommate was just plain clueless, and I wasn't in a position to attempt to educate someone ten years my senior who had a smarter-than-thou attitude to boot.

I was a mess.
Hello, Darkside.

In none-too-short order, I picked up the idea that this guy was a good friend to have. As we spent more time together, I discovered that above and beyond me chilling out and being happy around friends, I was pulling my usual stunt of turning chameleon: I was being a person he could be friends with while I was around him.

Ordinarily, my chameleon abilities give me distinct pause. I don't always want to be the kind of person who should be friends with the kind of people I'm spending time with, if I'm spending time with shady or seedy people, witness the effects on me around Shawn. But. "The only way out is up." I ordinarily didn't like myself at all. I would have avoided myself if I'd ever met my exact clone with a duplicate of my personality. But I liked myself around Darkside. The feeling was novel. I embraced it. "Last time your heart broke, it didn't heal straight. So I'm breaking it again."

I couldn't be around him 24/7, as much as I would have wanted to. I decided that I had to start changing my personality, to consciously be that same person all the time, no matter what, instead of just in his company. So I commenced. Little by little, I changed. He helped me and guided me, pointed out when I was making changes that were damaging me, and observed with pleasure the process of me growing a mind of my own and the spine to go with it.

He could have guided me into becoming his shadow, as I'd become Shawn's, as I'd become BJ's. And he may well have. But what he desired in a shadow was a strong, independent woman. There are not many to whom I'd throw over all authority to make decisions for me. He's taken the authority over me that I gave to him, and handed it right back to me, to do with myself as I Will.
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
Meyers-Briggs

I tested (this time) as ISTJ. I recall that two of them, I came out as the other one depending on who I was when I tested. I think it was the S and the T that swap. So I'm always introverted and judge, but the rest is up to the chance of the moment...

http://www.xeromag.com/fun/personality.html

Read more... )
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (wild rose)
From a comment, and it bears repeating to the rest of you who've been worried because I've been sounding completely off my rocker:

I'm OK. And I'll be OK. I'm just wondering what shape my mind's going to be in. Not as in intact or splattered, but square, circle, heart, star, triangle... because it's being put through some interesting gymnastics to wrap itself around something it should have realized a long time ago.

I've been through this sort of universe-spin before. It's always something I should have been bright enough to pick up on when I first realized it, or taken a clue, but for whatever reason I didn't notice and I went along on my merry little way doing things according to my outdated view of the universe, so now I have several years of mental re-filing to do, and incoherent blibbering and a great deal of uncertainty as to what I'm going to do with the new universe-view.

This has happened several times recently. I suspect that quite a few of my ancient (and erroneous) merry little assumptions are going to be challenged, so you may see quite a bit of me sounding like this. Maybe I'll even get used to it.

It's not a particularly scary mental state for me to be in, as much as I may seem utterly unhinged to the outsider. It's not so much unhinged, it's just that the hinges have been moved and I'm just now realizing it...
azurelunatic: Seated baby in incubator shell with electrodes.  (Cyteen)
The intimacy isn't up to entire truths, yet. It's still at that point where I have to toss bits and scraps of the things that are important to me, so as not to overwhelm him with too much of me at once.

That was a big one, I think.

He's learned to patch around some of my worse sensitivities, and is courteous of those he knows. Today, he had an amusing mental image, and patched it so I could share in it; I've learned not to rip his patches off, as I trust he means for me to have the patched version, not the buggy raw stuff. He's learning the social skills to interact with me kindly, more kindly than he would were I a random unknown. But then, a random unknown wouldn't be so sensitive to him, not unless they were operating broken. He's never had to play Supervisor before, never had to patch an Alpha. But he's learning.

He's wary of me trusting him too much, of a sudden. It'll take time to rebuild, after I withdrew. And I did withdraw. Since summer, I did withdraw.

The thing that makes it work so well is that he knows me so well. When he doesn't know me, it fades. So to keep it there, I have to keep giving him bits of me, so he'll integrate them if he chooses to, so I'll recognize him. Constant emotional immune recognition. His puns dampen my immune responses. "So, find a girl named Dew." I already have too much of him; I need (for my sake as well as his) to return that with bits of me.

Stimulus, response.

I deconstruct us here. Maybe all of this angstwanking will be useful someday. Help some poor sap reconstruct their own mind, debug a relationship. Gods know I wouldn't make it public otherwise.

When our minds entwine, whose privacy is it? Here, we all know his nickname, not his common nickname, but a nickname he picked for a one-off joke. The logs of that are long dead, but the nickname endures because I say it shall. He has other names, that I shall not repeat here. There is his birthname; in the household, he has become, when I say it, 'the' [birthname]; he is the one who matters most to me, though I know others of that name. There is the name that I've spoken only to him. There's the name he calls himself. There is the name that others call him. Some of those names line up. Some of them don't. None of them are for this narrative.

When I internalize the bits he gives me, whose bits are they? Did he release them to me under a GPL of mind and soul? They're surely not rented, and I may make derivative works, but how much of the original source code may go public? Is there a percentage? Are there segments that are protected and segments that are not?

I'm seeing pixels in my field of vision, again. Photomanips in Paint -- love it. Ha! I'm the Queen. He's the King. We're of separate kingdoms -- bad timing, no time -- related but isolated.

Today he made room from his nap. *boggles* Um....

...this man has no time. By this I mean, he works full-time, he commutes, he's on a heavy job search. He has no time. And he made room for me.

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azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺

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