Ideality, Introversion and The Interview

The word of the week is transcendence.

Sept 29 - Serious Studying!

My mind was elsewhere for most of today.

Truly, it was stuck in my study notes, as it has been for the last few weeks. Today was the last day before my interview at work tomorrow, so all day long I had memorized phrases running through my head.
 

Ah, Paris... soon enough!

My stomach was also running around too, due to stress. After work, I went to a store to get a few small things on my way home, but I had to leave after five minutes or so without getting anything: the bright lights, combined with my nerves, made me feel suddenly nauseous and I felt it fade only slowly as I walked home. That sort of thing doesn't happen to me.

All the same, the rest of my evening went all right, as I made an intense( ironic, using that word )effort to calm myself, as I could feel my focus fraying and my nerves winding up far too tight. 

Fortunately, my sister is thoroughly familiar with stress-reductive techniques and recommended this 8-minute-long video, called Weightless by Marconi Union and billed as 'The Most Relaxing Song Of All Time - have a listen, but not as you're driving, please:

A few 20-ish-minute sessions of Weightless before and after dinner allowed me to find my equilibrium again, thankfully! It's a rare thing for me to feel so out of sorts, but as this is perhaps the most important interview I've had in my life, that thought's been rattling around in the back of my head for months now.

By the time I hit the hay around midnight, I felt far more confident in my preparations, having memorized keywords and phrases to use tomorrow. I fell asleep into a dreamless state almost immediately.

Sept 30 - Interview!

Today was the Big Day.

My interview for a permanent position was at 9:30am, nearly the same time I start most days, so it was an almost-normal morning routine for me. I wore a tie for the first time in years and fussed a little over my appearance, but by the time I was walking to work, I was in a state of almost zen-like calm. I was also tickled that so MANY people in the office wished me well this morning( and yesterday! )after learning today was my Big Day and that support went a long way towards balancing my head as 9:30am approached.

It kinda felt like this, from the other side.

The hour-long interview went very well, I think and I started out on the right foot with a smile.

I focused, not nervous as I answered 6 questions, in detail, using the phrases I'd memorized as well as the notes I'd jotted down at the beginning, immediately as I was seated. Drawing on my experience of the past twenty years at my various jobs, I focused my responses to ensure I gave as detailed and concise answers as possible. It was important that I hit as many of the expected keywords as possible as I spoke and I believe I did, as the three interviewers( all of whom I knew, which apparently is rare according to other people in the office )took copious notes, pages and pages, which made me rather happy despite the slight strain I noticed in my voice as I spoke.

I was finished in 45 minutes and felt I'd put in my best performance. I'd answered all the questions with detailed examples from my past work( and personal )experience, according to the guidelines I'd memorized and adding in little details as I went along when I felt I needed to emphasize a point. By the end, I actually felt there was little more I could add and the atmosphere in the room was, if not relaxed, far more comfortable than at the beginning.

Going back to my desk, I was feeling drained, but satisfied, and the rest of my day went along smoothly enough, with no residual stress lingering in my body by the time I left work.

Heading home wasn't in the cards though, as I'd promised myself a reward if I nailed the interview. I went over to the Brickyard for a beer and a pizza, which I enjoyed quite a lot:

A movie after my reward-dinner was also on the agenda, but unfortunately I'd been nursing a headache from mid-afternoon onwards and I decided on heading home. Besides, the only movie I would have felt like seeing was Guardians of the Galaxy, but as it'd have been the fifth time I'd have seen it, I passed - I'll pick it up on Blu-Ray in a few months anyway, with lots of special features to boot. 

No sense in overdoing it.

An evening of Just Relaxing, with a decent time picked to collapse into sleep and I'd call it a good day. According to office scuttlebutt, we may know as early as next week as to who won the five available positions.

Wish me luck!

Oct 1 - Time For Other Things!

Whew!

It's a new month and a new set of priorities for me.

Now that my Big Day is past( except for the waiting, that is )there's time now for me to do other things that have stagnated a while. Obviously, the first thing on my agenda is to get writing again on my second book, which has languished now for almost 2 months. I believe that I've recovered, for the most part, from the body-blow of feedback that I received from my friend a few weeks ago and that I'm ready to continue writing where I left off. The fourth draft of Book One will wait until early in the new year, when I hope to have finished the first draft of Book Two, as I've mentioned before here.

There's lots of other things on the burner: I'd like to take some steps towards voice acting, getting my business set up for my books as well as getting the full-blown website for those same novels started, and even perhaps completing my IT training online before the course expires in mid-2015.

Those are just the professional side of things; there's a ton of personal projects that I'd like to find time for and to be honest, I'll have to fit them in here and there when I can. I'll talk more about them as I get to them, as there's some interesting stuff( at least to me ) that I'll be fiddling with when I can.

For the rest of this year, I'll be focusing mainly on Book Two, if only because the characters have started to shout at me and I really just want to get them to lower their voices…

It's hard to write when I have a headache.

Speaking of which, I had the most concrete proof yet this week that the weather and my headaches are directly connected. this past Tuesday, around noon and though I managed to avoid getting a migraine, it threatened all the rest of the evening to degrade into such.

What I found the next day, checking my phone's barometric tracker, was that the air pressure in Victoria had peaked, then dropped, almost exactly at 1pm that day: 

See the spike / drop on the right, around 1pm? Ouch!

Again, I'll gain, I'll keep an eye on the weather, but I'm thankful that this sort of thing is much less common than it was for me in Ontario. I have enough other things pressuring me these days, though thankfully far fewer than in years past.

I love knowing that.

Oct 2 - Munchkin!

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes it gets you.

This week definitely turned into a bear-got-me time at work, with my productivity down due to a combo of interview-stress-then-decompress plus a special project to complete. All of which ate into my daily numbers, which I try to keep up as a personal goal to show myself I'm actually doing my job well.

Today was also complicated by an early doctor's appointment( just a regular checkup )as well as a hair appointment after work( my regular re-do of the do was due )so I was a little flagged by dinnertime and could have done with some relaxation, given how the week had begun.

So it's a good thing my evening was spent relaxing, playing a game of Munchkin!

A friend texted me in the afternoon that there'd be a game tonight, which hadn't happened for many a month( not since last spring, I believe ). A total of seven people showed up, one more than the usual maximum for the game, so we snuck a small statue of Bhudda into play, just because.

That's me in the lead, the green guy!

Three hours later, I'd gone from a promising early lead to fourth place, not helped in the least by not one, but two total defeats that had cost me all my cards. Wouldn't you know that my new cards were, one and all, totally useless, with my ending up with all THREE Cleric cards in the game:

The odds of this happening? The same as my losing tonight : pretty good. Dang!

Everyone had fun though, which was really the whole point. Win or lose, Munchkin is always a blast and I think the next time we play, I'll be much more into things than during a week with a Big Interview in it.

Oct 3 - I Have Fans!

Today I had a smile on my face all day long, due to art.

Fanart, to be exact, of MY novel! A friend of mine has just started reading the book and after only five chapters, she was interested enough to sketch three of the main characters and send the images to me. While I don't have permission( yet )to post them( and they're not totally done, either )I pored over them all day long day, alternately feeling serenely pleased and childishly giddy.

I mean, how often does an unpublished author get fanart made of their work?

Once I'm told the sketches are 'finished' I will upload them to my book's website, so you can take a look at them. I'm especially pleased with how the main character, Niishe, turned out: my friend really managed to capture her intriguing human-like qualities as well as her alienness in a way that really draws you in. I hope you'll like the picture as much as I do, as one reader's interpretation of my creation.

Also, in three weeks, I'll be in NYC! I just had to say that, as it's still somewhat surreal to me that I'm going. This will be only the second time that I've visited NYC, the first being a class trip in the late 1980's, which was a totally different world compared to now. The NYC I knew then was big, bustling and a lot cleaner than I'd expected, the parts of it I saw by myself - I did manage to get out on my own to visit, of all things, an Amiga convention that was coincidentally taking place at the same time as our school visit. 

All in all, I have good memories of NYC and I'm really looking forward to seeing it again through older eyes.

Oct 4 - Rooting Around!

My project for today: fix my cell phone.

Most of you will know that my now 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy S3 has become a thorn in my side. In customizing it's software to meet my needs, the hardware has become sluggish, bogged down by all I ask it to( try to )do on a daily basis.

Yet the one BIG step I haven't taken to date is to ROOT my phone, mainly due to the complexity and risk.

Over the last few years, rooting has become the method of choice for anyone who wants full control of their phone - FULL control meaning you can customize it to your heart's content, including uninstalling ANY of the manufacturer's 'bloatware' apps that otherwise take up precious space and battery life.

Finally, I have control over my phone...

I at last rooted my phone today, after researching the best method for my particular model. To my surprise, despite my trepidations, it only took about fifteen minutes and a lot of fretting( needless, as it turns out )on my part. Until this year, really, there was a GOOD chance you would 'brick' your phone if you screwed up the rooting process, meaning there was almost no hope of recovering it back to usability.

It's a small but meaningful change and I made good use of it, spending a few hours of the rest of my day getting rid of all the bloatware that Samsung insisted on stuffing into my phone as it came from the factory. The biggest offender was an app named KNOX, a security app deeply embedded into the phone's OS to prevent unauthorized tampering. Hello root, goodbye KNOX and your power-sucking ways! After backing up my phone first( duh! )I happily zapped another dozen useless apps into oblivion while installing other root-only apps to customize my phone even more.

Soon enough, my phone will run this...

The end result, so far, is a phone that's behaving a lot better already. The next step is to completely replace the operating system with something like CyanogenMod, an open-source platform designed to perform as optimally as possible on Android phones.

That's a learning curve for another day, though. For now, I'll just make the best of my bloat-free phone, meaning I can perhaps put off getting a new unit until well into next year.

Oct 5 - Fun Scheduling!

Today was productive, but in other ways than working.

Relaxation is on the schedule, in large amounts. After yesterday's frustrations and successes both, I decided I just needed a total day off and today was the day.

After morning spent inside, puttering around under gray clouds, the sun rolled out and so did I. A lovely few hours at Moka House yielded this picture, with the sun blazing behind a flickering cool green wall of leaves:

My afternoon DID revolve around tea, really. And a croissant.

I happily spent a few hours sitting in the sunshine, tapping away at my blog, among other things and just observing the world now and then as I sip my tea. Again, I'm thankful that I have this form of refuge so close at hand, this third place that I can easily reach, to spend in social solitude on a patio with music and semi-silence thanks to my Parrot headphones - on the cheap, too, as tea doesn't cost much at all.

A friend dropped by and early evening saw me shifting patios, taking up a perch at Sam's in the corner seat on Government Street as the sun set, again behind a cooling set of trees that cut its brilliant glare into a gentle golden glow. It really was the perfect spot to sit and people watch for a while, seeing each person pass and noting in each face the gentle unspoken acknowledgment and wonder that a summer's day had come to visit again here in early October.

Simply stunning: Sunshine, sandwich and suds.

Writing the blog tonight, I feel rather more relaxed than recharged, and having spent the entire weekend as I wanted without any particular deadline hanging over my head. Doing what I wanted, when I wanted and in my own time was rather refreshing; I hope to be able to do to get soon, even with two more books to write among a host of other projects waiting to be started, or finished, or both.

There seems to be a lot of beer in the blog this week, for some reason. I'm not a stress-drinker by any means, but beer's seemed to slip into the picture more often this week than in past months. It might mean that I'm developing an association between suds and relaxation, which I'll have to watch; next thing you know, I'll be a chocoholic. Or something. Good thing I have nothing big planned this week, which should relax me greatly.