The word of the week is reciprocation.
Nov 14 - On Haiku
For a good part of this year, I've been putting up haikus on my FBook page on Mondays. Since this is the first day of the week, I try to start it with something that will encompass my feelings, good or otherwise, for the week.
Haiku are hard work;
They are either hit or miss,
Working within rules.
... and so forth. I have taken a few haiku books out of the library and been randomly impressed with some of the work, but not with the majority. There are surprisingly few good non-scholarly haiku references online; Toyomasu.com has the most accessible. Since I like the short story format, it helps for me to think of haiku as the shortest stories one can tell. If you do it right, what you are trying to convey leaps out of the words and goes beyond the confines of the 5-7-5 format.
As should a good story transport the reader beyond the page before them.
Nov 15 - On Later Genius
For most of my life, ever since I can remember, I've been told that I'm a very smart guy. Not wise, not brilliant at one thing or a prodigy... but smart. I remember the day that I was tested way back in grade 1, when I was putting together block patterns and answering questions that the tester gave me - yes, I liked the challenge that much to recall it all these decades later.
However, does being told you're a genius does little else but stress future success? How soon should that success be? What form will it take? And how about if it comes later in life?
What if it doesn't?
These questions have plagued me all my life, whispering to me in the dark hours and the days when my failures seem numerous and successes few. Yet I've had to develop my own measure of my success: personal, professional and on other levels. I've overcome a fair number of challenges, remained true to myself and put the needs of others before my own many times, first off. So my success and my genius may not be as well-connected as I might have hoped, all those years ago when I was barreling towards puberty and wondering how big the spaceships I was designing would be when they were built in a few more years... but such is the delight of youth: you can see the future more broadly, and it shines far more brightly.
Nov 16 - On Losing Interest
Of late, I've been losing interest in a lot of things and concentrating on mere survival, mentally. I haven't sat down to read a book in almost 6 months, played more than a handful of the dozens of video games I own, or been able to do more at the end of the day than watch some TV before I'm too tired.
It's disheartening, as I want to do these things, but I lose interest.
Because there's so much else on my mind, a lot of it work-related, that I can't divest myself enough from work to really switch gears mentally and take a total break. My few weeks in August were amazing just for that, but I went from bliss to bedlam in the space of a few weeks in September and before that it was much of the same.
I want to pull a book from my shelf and read big chunks of it in a week. I want to enjoy a game for what it offers and not as a distraction. I want to feel like my life is waiting for me when I'm done work, and not the other way around. As it has been for years now, yet I don't have anything you could call a 'career' to put on my resume` ... just a day job that's mostly sucked.
I'm not exploring this line of thought any further until Jan 2012. If then.
Nov 17 - How Many Facebook Friends?
It's been mentioned before in my blog, but again a few people have unfriended me this month. Silently and without notice, several people have quietly removed themselves from my life. You can have a LOT of FBook friends, or a few; there's a good article from a few years ago that talks about friending on FBook. There was a GREAT quote I saw online in FBook that someone shared a few weeks ago... but darned if I can recall it now. I'll paraphrase it a bit, as it stuck in my mind at the time:
Some friends come into your life and make it better for staying.
Some friends come into your life and make it better for leaving.
So thank-you to those who have stayed with me,
And thanks to those who have left me, for the better of us both.
That about sums it up, really. I'm happy and blessed to have so MANY good friends in my life and thankful that those who did not make my life better have moved on to other places and other people... leaving me with my memories and lessons learned. Can't ask for more than that, can you?
Nov 18 - On Good Impressions
As of today, I still haven't heard back from several job applications, but I'm hoping that I will by the end of next week.
If not, I still have a plan for leaving MMart in January, prepared or not. This will give me the break I need to recover my mental balance and continue to look elsewhere for a job to sustain myself for the time being, if not a new career that is more in tune with what makes me happy. That being said, my family is fully supportive of my simply LEAVING MMart ASAP, even if I don't have a job by that point - they feel my mental and physical heath have both suffered for FAR too long and anything they can do to help me recover is OK.
I'm looking forward to some in-person interviews, where I can show off myself to potential employers. It's quite true that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, something I've observed a fair number of times in my life, especially as an employer looking over candidates.
Nov 19 - On Beaker
It's been a fairly normal week, all told - no emergency visits to the hospital, no chest pains, no insane events at work, no double-shifts( well, Monday, but that was expected )so I was waiting for the other shoe to drop today. It did, but I handled it rather well: a BIG error by a CSR yesterday could have resulted in a massive mess for the weekend, but as it turns out it didn't have much impact and the solution I came up with on the spot worked. Yay me!
Which just goes to show you the place is going to fall apart when I leave in January; my experience and training will walk out the door and not return.
Stupid, but there you have another reason why businesses fail: they get so lost in standards and policies that they drive their staff out the door in droves, seeking any other employment rather than be scrutinized like lab rats daily.
Hmmm... I wonder if being a lab rat pays a good wage? Have to check that. Or maybe I could ask Beaker...
Nov 20 - Personal Thoughts, Blogged On
It's been an interesting thing for me, pondering relationships today. We all have our family, most have friends, and too few people have solid partners that they can depend on more than anyone else in the world. I won't get into whether this is what everyone should have, but most of us do search for someone who can be the rock in the storm and to love us for who we are.
Myself, I've never had that; nobody outside my family has ever looked me in the eye and told me they loved me for who I am. Which is disappointing( to say the least )given that I believe very strongly that I am worthy of such love. Yet not to find anything after twenty years of searching, is a bit hard to take. Still, as I've recently told a friend: Don't close the window because of a few cold breezes. In my own case, I've been trying to sit down with the lady I have strong feelings towards for a month now, with little success. I won't beg, but at this point I'm wondering about her levels of interest in me - I can't make her be interested in me if she isn't, but I'm trying hard to find out. At some point I'll just have to come out and tell her how I feel, regardless of the setting... which will likely work against me, but it's coming to that point fast. Things are going to change for me in the new year, and I want to have got past this with her by then. It's driving me to distraction some days, really.
That's all for now. We'll see what happens when I take the chance soon.
It's been a long week, but not as crazy-making as I thought it would be; more of a work grind, but that's nothing unusual. Apologies to all those of you reading the last few weeks; I've not had a lot of exciting or happy things to blog about. Just small victories in a long war to leave work.
