Words are inadequate

Practicum complete. It hit me harder than expected at the end of last week. Plenty of possible reasons. Biggest, I think, was "this was supposed to be a pathway to a Real Job and it was instead a dead end," and there's not anything I can do about that. So that set off ... not really a full-blown depressive episode, I don't think. A sort of low-key moodiness. Days later I'm still sad that it couldn't work out but not overwhelmingly so.

On Friday I returned to Whistler for the fifth(!) and final round on my tattoo. I'm quite happy with it. It's larger and brighter than I'd expected it to be, but I'm okay with that. And it does look good. Red maple on the outside of the calf, aspen on the inside, both in full fall foliage, with a kudzu vine twining around the leg. This last session finished up the maple and a couple of last kudzu leaves. It hurt like hell for a couple of days; now it's just itchy. And a bit startling, whenever I look down.

After some thought I'm anxious about going to Niagara, but I'm not, for the most part, scared. I'm angry, and it's easy for that to sink into, well, depressive fatalism, because there's not anything I can do about it. I try to talk to folks who can keep my perspective grounded in reality. That seems to help somewhat.

I feel like the horrific ICE news stories are radicalizing me in a similar fashion to Abu Ghraib twenty-one years ago. I'm mostly okay with that. Just need to figure out a useful way to point it this time.

There's a bit in The Good Place where Chidi tells Eleanor about the idea that toddler-mentality is (I'm paraphrasing, probably badly) "me not you" and a more mature line of thought is "us not them". I feel like the great lefty/progressive project is to move beyond even that, to break down the divide of 'them'.

Six years ago a fellow named Frank Wilhoit coined a phrase that's been called Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This pithy expression wasn't the point of his comment; that was a later bit, that I've been thinking on a lot lately. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Tomorrow I wrap up a homework assignment, do a bunch of dishes, pack, and then head out for nearly two weeks. I'm gonna miss Mr Tuppert. He's been mostly friendly and affectionate the past couple of days.

Perhaps I'll have some answers when I come back.

Weird to think that I'm already halfway through my one course for the term. But the midterm went up on Friday, and I just wrapped it. Feeling reasonably good about it. No doubt there were a couple questions I missed, and a couple where I overthought the question and will have gotten "wrong." C'est la guerre.

Looking at the schedule, it looks like I'll have a couple of weeks between winter and spring term this year. Eh. I guess it'll be nice to have the course complete before the end of my practicum, and not have to worry about any coursework while I'm wrapping that up and putting together my presentation.

The practicum itself has been more frustrating than I'd hoped. The data I'm looking to read and update is stored in a Microsoft Power App, and I have yet to figure out if there's any API access so I can talk to it in ways other than "Excel import/export". So I may be spending the next month or so making something that looks pretty and is only incrementally better than the existing static PDF. Argh and oh well. Useful reminder of what working in real systems is like.

I'm doing ... okay? Remarkably okay, I think. I have things I want to do, and the ability to do some of them. I don't know what happens to me in six months and that's worrisome. I do know I run out of money in two months and will need to raid my retirement fund again, and that's more worrisome, but at least the money's there -to- raid. For now.

I'm personally unfamiliar with the word 'practicum' so I've been describing it as "an unpaid internship."

Noel just pointed out that it's actually worse than an unpaid internship: I'm paying for the privilege of providing unpaid labour. And since I'm not a wet-behind-the-ears college student, they'll be getting a decent amount of actual labour out of the process.

Sigh. At least there's the credential at the end of it.

(Starts Monday, with a week of actually-in-office.)

COWORKER R: So what did you do before?

ME: I was a tech writer for a bunch of software companies.

R: Oh, like documentation? Isn't that really boring?

ME: I mean, that's part of why I'm not doing it anymore.

R: Yeah, it's part knowing the tech, which is a real skill, and the rest is just admin work.

ME: Okay, I disagree pretty strongly with that.

R: I'm a program manager at a tech company, and we replaced three of our four writers with ChatGPT. The last writer just has to proofread it.

ME: This conversation is over.

---

I saw the writing on the wall a year and a half ago, and I have no regrets about getting out.

Maybe in another five years whatever parts of "the tech industry" care about documentation will realize that no, actually they do need real writers. I'm not optimistic.

Survived my first day at work in seventeen months, despite being woken up at four AM by the enterphone ringing and not really being able to get back to sleep. Helped that it was just orientation and online HR training. I go back on Friday, and I guess I'll find out more of my schedule then. I think it'll be alright.

In other news, after I noped out of Prison Break with the Nine Deadly Words ("I do not care what happens to these people," and I made it about halfway through season 4 which was at least ten episodes more than it deserved) I finally picked back up on Person Of Interest. I'd been watching with Erin and we stalled out almost exactly halfway through, on the resolution of the police-corruption storyline.

That turns out to be an interesting place to pick back up. Season 3 is best understood as two separate half-seasons. The second half introduces another supersurveillance AI, who becomes the primary antagonist for the rest of the series. In retrospect I suspect this is also the point that sartorias referred to when she said she stopped watching "when the delight, wit, and mystery went out of it, so to speak, in favor of more big bads and violence." It does feel like a different show in the last two seasons, and I think one I don't like quite so much.

It's still compelling, I'd still rewatch it in company and possibly on my own. But: the writers feel the need to overmelodramatize anyone they're planning on killing off, which was obnoxious with [SPOILER] midway through season 3 and has become merely eye-rolling now. Quiet human relationships, they're really good at: Reese and Finch, Reese and Fusco. They even managed to make me not hate Root sometime in season 4, which is a neat trick considering how much I wanted to throw things at the screen every time she appeared in the first half. But it's like they don't trust the simple raising of stakes to suffice for the emotional heights. Don't trust that we've grown to care about these reserved characters, and they don't need to monologue or Develop Huge Feelings for their perils and deaths to be meaningful.

On the other hand, sometimes they make it work. I've just finished S5E10 (three more to go). Near the end there's a scene where Finch the programmer has been captured and imprisoned, and he's talking with an FBI agent. Calling it a 'scene' is stretching it a bit, maybe, it's really two monologues. First, the FBI agent describes how Finch is just not present in their data: "We’ve got records of records of you going back nearly forty years... but no actual records." It's a bit wry and very much the kind of dialogue that PoI excels at.

And then Michael Emerson, for what is I believe the first time in the series, demonstrates why he picked up a couple of Emmy nods and one actual award for his work on Lost. Finch sums up his ethical dilemma of the previous nine episodes, and the season and a half before, and arguably the whole show, and admits that he may have been wrong to not give the Machine the tools it needed to defend itself / to go on the offensive.

Less than five minutes later, in a new scene, a payphone next to him rings, and the melodrama pays off. I confess I gasped at the for once perfectly clear, sweet tones of "Can you hear me?".

I'm genuinely curious as to where the next three episodes are going.

I also do not like my inability to retain focus, my tendency to get rattled by something even vaguely difficult or tricky coming up, something that might be as simple as "this problem's done, move on to the next one." ... I want my resilience back.

One of the hardest things about my previous job, for me, was the way I would log in to work in the morning and immediately have to absorb a wave of new information. Everyone else on my team worked while I slept (mostly India time, with one in Ukraine). They had a workday of talking to each other, seeing how things were falling out, and generally absorbing everything over the course of eight (or twelve) hours. From my perspective, I'd check my email every day and there'd be three new things demanding my attention, at least one of which superseded or outright contradicted something from last week.

I can roll with changes for a good long while, but it turns out that really isn't good for me as a permanent structure.

The other thing I noticed about working at BMC is that I'd developed an aversion to ... to Learning/Doing New Things. For several months I was meant to be putting together a video, and I just ... couldn't. Brain bounced off it. Couldn't get started, couldn't keep going when I broke it down into smaller tasks.

This is carrying over into classwork to some extent. It's not as strong, thankfully. But I'm noticing my reluctance to dig into certain homework assignments, even when I know they'll be pretty straightforward, just because they're not something I've done before.

Learning how to do new things used to excite me. I miss that.

My ADHD screen is in two and a half hours. I'm back to being nervous about how it will go.

On the other hand I had an actual checkup yesterday with an actual doctor (well, NP, but an Actual Family Doctor), for the first time in five years, and that went remarkably well. We talked medical history & concerns for like half an hour, which in my experience is unheard of. He's running bloodwork again and making vague 'prediabetic' noises, and booked me in for mid-November to get a weird skin thing removed.

So maybe this will be alright too.

I've made it to Niagara, where I can attempt to regrow my brain, at least a little.

This was a rough travel. It didn't help that the night before I only got around three hours' sleep: woke up out of a weird Twin Peaks-ish nightmare before two AM, couldn't re-settle. Or that the Amtrak train from Toronto to Niagara NY was cancelled due to track maintenance, so I had to do the multi-transit hop, light-rail to bus to walk (or, in this case, taxi) to the border to the hotel. In the event I slept minimally on the plane due to a small child kicking my seat, ongoing conversations, and at least one person playing a video game without headphones.

It turns out that being able to hear other people's electronic devices really grinds my gears. Not just "annoys me" but renders me unable to concentrate on anything else. I ended up putting in my earphones and playing instrumental music just loud enough to drown them out. I couldn't sleep but at least I wasn't fuming.

But I did get to walk across Rainbow Bridge and see the Falls on a gorgeous sunny day, and that helped.

I've made a big grocery-run, including stocking up on cinnamon pop-tarts as usual, and I am very tired. Tomorrow I see Steph for the first time in a decade, more or less, for a second first date. I feel like I should be nervous, and maybe I will be tomorrow. Right now 'tired' is sort of overwhelming everything. Goal is to stay up until at least ten PM.

---

I've been mildly obsessing over work (well, ex-work), too. I figure this is partly because the end was so sudden and partly due to lack of sleep leading me to focus on bad things.

What I know:

• I got laid off.
  
• My grandboss talked about it as though there were a bunch of layoffs happening, as did my boss.
  
• Grandboss also mentioned that profitability was down this year, which goes against all the messaging we'd been getting but whatever.
  
• Everyone who's responded to my 'goodbye' email has sounded shocked.

My working theory at this point: there's a rumour that the company is planning an IPO in the nearish future. For that to go well they want to look Lean And Mean. Grandboss got told to cut staff, and I have been underperforming. Maybe the tech side didn't have cuts, or maybe mine just got announced early because my last day was slightly accelerated (would have been Friday but I'd already planned my vacation).

There's a part of me that wants to take it more personally, to focus in on the 'underperforming' bit. But I got some nice notes from people I've worked with that went above and beyond to let me know that they thought the work I was completing was good, so that helps with that.

I also appreciate that this didn't come down until after the end of the fiscal year. That ought to mean that in a month I'll still get my annual bonus. Assuming there is one, between "me underperforming" and "profitability is down," though honestly I can't imagine they'd zero the bonuses. They aren't my awful previous company, after all.

---

I'm kicking around the idea of getting out of tech writing. This has some appeal: among other things, it might free up the 'writing' part of my brain to do more fun writing, which is historically hard when I'm putting words in a different kind of order all day. Too, every tech writing job I've had (sample size of three), I've been annoyed and frustrated by the end of it, and that point has come quicker each time. Plus I doubt I'll be able to dodge video production forever, and I hate video.

Erin suggested GIS work (I am pretty sure she's suggested a few things but that was one that stuck). I did a little GIS in high school, and I enjoyed it. From the small amount of looking-into-it I've done it looks to be a combination of playing with maps and playing with databases, both of which could be fun?

There's a full-time program at BCIT (the local two-year college) that gets you a GIS "diploma" in nine months. With that I'd be eligible for ... well, for jobs. And (again, thank you Erin for pointing me to this) it turns out that I can take classes and still get EI payments. Probably. There's a process, but it certainly looks like I'd be eligible.

So that's something to consider. Classes start in September so I have at least a little time to make a decision.

Of course my brain also kicked up "what makes you think you'd be able to get a job in GIS, you have no experience and you're competing with younger fresh-outta-school folks." So that made for a fun part-of-evening last night. That one I attribute primarily to being very tired and thus having less defence against jerkbrain.

I dunno. There are options. It's kinda nice.

I am doing better.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my previous post. The support was greatly appreciated.

This sense of breakdown and brainfog is strongly correlated with work, with being expected / expecting myself to be doing more and better and to be operating at a generally higher level. I've been tech writing for well over a decade and a half, and working pretty independently for much of that, and having some sort of high-level responsibility for medium-to-large projects for, oh, call it four years (not continuous). And now I'm struggling to keep up with basic tasks.

Some of it's certainly that the environment doesn't work for me: meetings every morning at seven (or 6:30) and minimum one night a week at 8:30 or 9, what seems like a neverending stream of new priorities, and in-my-experience-excessive shifts to release deadlines and release contents which make it difficult to know what to write about for a release. Some of it's struggling with wholly new things: I've never created a video before, or put together a pre-writing plan in this particular way. And some of it's complicated bureaucratic tracking and meetings and company policies and procedures that I just don't feel like I have a handle on after being there for almost a year.

And a lot of it's a difficulty in maintaining focus on the task at hand. Or in many cases directing it to the task at hand. "Okay, I'm gonna get started on this." *five minutes pass* "Okay, I'm really gonna get started on this." etc.

I am scared it might be a long-covid-type of thing. I am also scared that it's just my brain being broken, or that six years in an extremely slack job has worn down my ability to function at an appropriate level.

I talked about some of this with my boss on Thursday night, and she's sympathetic, and I (and I believe everyone) will be focusing on tasks-for-the-next-release for a couple of weeks and picking up random-misc-tasks after that. That should help. And I have done Not A Damn Thing this weekend, which seems to have been needed. (I slept poorly last night, short periods of wakefulness interspersed with an ongoing and stupid dream about talking or trying to talk to Emily.) So maybe things will improve? We shall see what the week brings, I guess.

But: again, thank you.

Edit: AHAHAHAHA no, we're all still expected to juggle as many items as possible, I'm just temporarily juggling one fewer. Dammit.

It turns out that when you're a grown-up you can just make yourself a coffeecake and a big mug of tea and rewatch She-Ra and feel sorry for yourself, and no one can stop you. It's pretty neat.

I did not make the coffeecake in the toaster oven, because I did not feel up to dealing with a failed coffeecake. Also coffeecake calls for 375F, which is a temperature that my toaster oven does not do. It does temperatures by button pushes, which is a little weird, and the temp settings are labeled in both C and F, which is a little weird... and they increment by 20C. So there's 180C / 355F, which is close enough to 350 that's fine, and then 200C/390F, and then 220C/425F which is at least a real number. "Quirky," the reviews said. I am inclined to agree.

A friend writes My goal since March 2020 has been "do not give anyone covid" and honestly same. Like, I guess my main goal was "don't get it myself" and then "don't get it again" but "don't give to anyone else" has been pretty high up there as well. So I continue to wear masks on transit and indoors in public places as much as I can, and I limit my going-out-to-things, etc etc. It feels futile at this point but not doing it would feel futile and defeatist, so I continue.

I've put in to adopt a senior cat from the New West animal shelter. There was also an article today in a local newssite about how the shelter is overcrowded, so I may have a cat by the weekend. He comes with the name "Tuppert" which is phonemically awkward and may need to be changed. Then again when Jonathan C-- adopted his latest cat Walter he reported "we were going to change it to something more in line with our other cats, something like Derp Gently... but it turns out he answers to Walter, so we're kind of stuck with it." Tuppert is a reasonably handsome twelve-year-old tuxedo-ish. We shall see what comes of it.

And now I have a workmeeting in ten minutes, to bookend the workmeeting at seven AM every morning. The joys of working with a team based in India. At least I'm still employed.

Current mood: tired of people who do not wish to do their jobs.

Previous employer: sent an incorrect final pay stub and check, payroll does not respond to email. (Have filed a BC Employment Standards complaint.)

2BurleyMen "moving" company: *gestures at empty apartment*

And now my previous landlord: "I'll submit the report on the state of your apartment next week, you should get your damage deposit back after that."

But the sun is shining and I just saw a hummingbird out the back window, so there's that. Soon this will all be just a deeply frustrating memory.