Pressure, Passing and Peons

The word of the week is euphemism. Accept no substitutes. 

Nov 28 - Karma, again??? 

At last: I handed over my second branch to another manager today. It went smoothly and I felt a sense of relief for no longer being responsible for two busy main branches in the region. Just one, and the best of the bunch really. 

Edit: That feeling lasted just until the next day, when I was told the new manager had injured her hand and was going to be off for two weeks, at the least. 

This is what my life seems to be: moments of balance between chaos and craziness. When I close one door, two windows and a skylight open to dump things on me. Which is strange, since I ALWAYS try to see the positive in things and not get upset when this happens, as it does on a regular basis. 

What I can say is that this is definitely leading me to be cautious, TOO cautious, about really enjoying things. My experience these last twenty years has been that the enjoyment will quickly end, and never by MY own choice. 

I hate that realization; I WANT to enjoy things, to smile and laugh and not have something waiting around EVERY corner to trip me and steal my smile. Which means I have to walk that balance all the harder, to keep from falling. 

Nov 29 - Bright Lights passing 

Two distinctly bright cultural lights passed this month that I want to mention here, for their definite and different influences on me. The passing of my uncle earlier this month as well reminds me that we are all here too briefly. 

Ann McCaffrey was the author of the Pern series of books whose world is of far-off colonists whose world is shared with dragons. I admired the strong female protagonists that filled all of Anne's stories, whose influence has helped me develop my own distinct characters of the opposite sex that are a far cry from cardboard cutouts I have seen in too many stories. Anne's works taught me that there is equality in all things, that strengths and weaknesses are common to both sexes in all measures. Lovely works. 

John Neville was an actor of the stage and screen, whose presence and distinctive voice indelibly stick in your mind. His role as the titular Baron in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen from 1988 still brings me delight when I watch the film; I never tire of it. He was in many other films, another of which was The Fifth Element( again a fave of mine )with a small role. Also being tall, elegant and Very English helped his career along rather well, wouldn't you say? 

Nov 30 - End of the world, eh? 

Only a year and a few weeks to go before the world is supposed to end on Dec 21, 2012. THAT should be an interesting holiday shopping season, eh? 

NASA has put up a page on 2012, specifically to address concerns about the likelihood of any particular disaster happening, like an asteroid strike. It's a tickle to see how they relate it to Y2K back in 2000, when the world was supposed to end when everything computerized crashed due to the date errors caused by having only 2 digits for the year, instead of 4. As we're all still here, it was quite a bust - it's not QUITE that simple, but it's a good start to debunking End Of The World hysteria. 

Or, we could have a future world where only robots survive: 

Looks pretty sweet, even for an on-rails shooter. Love the apocalypse art style!

Dec 1 - Waiting Game

I've sent off a half-dozen promising job applications in the last month, to places I'd be pleased to work at. So far, a few of them have got back to me with the standard 'We have received your application' message, but that's it. 

Now I wait and hope for the callback that means I can give my notice sooner than I anticipated. Right now there is NO replacement for me in the wings, so I hope the timing is such for a new job that I can give more than the standard two weeks notice to allow my DM time to find and train someone. Who will be a decent manager in my stead, but I know can never be a replacement - I'm very good at what I do, but it's not what the company wants. If it's not revenue, then it's WAY down on the priority list. So things like supporting co-workers when nobody else answers their phone, keeping the lights working, computers running, supplies stocked and answering the thousand questions that only experience can answer properly mean little. 

Stupid, right? But that's a corporation for you. Revenue is king; let the peons starve. 

Dec 2 - The Night Eye 

Tonight is what today's entry is about: specifically, the moon. 

Spectacular; the air was cold and clear and crisp. The quarter moon hung in the sky like a lidded eye, looking down upon a still, quiet Victoria all around. 

Which inspired me to write a small haiku, which flew from my fingers: 

The moon winked at me, 

"I have a secret," it said. 

"The sun shall rise soon." 

Now, I should say that ALL my haikus have layers of meaning and context, despite being simple word-forms. In this case, I was commenting on what I had seen tonight: the beauty and the simplicity of the moon. 

I was also commenting on the broader scope of my life, on the hope for positive change in the near future for me. Night turning to day, if you will. 

Also, the yin-yang of the sun and the moon, as represented by the picture above, speaks towards my desire to find someone special. Perhaps an opposite, perhaps not... but someone warm, to end my long night of years. 

And a lot of other things... but that's for you to discover when reading the words. They might fit your life too, make you smile, or just sink in for later. 

Dec 3 - I'm not the jealous type ... 

There are few things in this world that I am jealous of, money not being one of them. As those of you who have read some of my blog know, I don't look at others and see things I could have had... but see reflections of what I do have. Love, however, is one of the few things that I am still searching for and that I see so many others having, yet I do not. I'll not go into the many levels of that thought here, suffice to say that I still think it will happen... but I hope it won't be on a cruise ship when I'm in my seventies. That's too far, I think. 

So in the meantime, I'll add in a little of what a relationship should embody: scratching one's back. It's hard to do yourself, unless you happen to have a backscratcher. I really enjoyed a good back scratch when I was younger, but as I got older it sort of fell by the wayside... until recently, when I found in passing a simple bamboo backscratcher. It's funny, but I never realized the lack until I brought the thing home; it really does a great job. Yet I know it's a poor substitute for the touch of another... but I can't buy that, at any price. 

Dec 4 - Under pressure... from Nature?

The weather here for the last few days has been rather stagnant, with a high-pressure system sitting over Vancouver Island going nowhere. This hasn't been so bad as it's brought a fair bit iof sunshine, but the air pressure has been causing me headaches. It's like wearing tight hats all day long; eventually your brain starts to hurt and for me I can almost hear it rattle when I shake my head. Which also hurts.

I should say that it's nowhere NEAR as bad as when I was in ON, where the barometric pressure would swing wildly from day to day causing me major migraines with active weather systems. No, here in BC it's a gradual thing, which I can control with the occasional headache tablet. If you can imagine wearing a too-tight hat all day long, you might appreciate how I feel when that combines with stress, a busy day at work, and so forth. I can't say that I'll be glad to see some rain around here, but at least I know that the pressure will lessen when the skies do open up. After a long day working today, I'll be glad to rest on my day off tomorrow - I hope. 

Job news this week, I hope - I'm itching to give my notice, and by the middle of December I may just do so, albeit at the minimum two weeks in advance. I'd do it now, but if I give five weeks notice and THEN I get a job offer, I may be stuck explaining why I can't start until sometime in January. Ah, pressure...