(no subject)
The strangest thing happened yesterday.
Mom presented to me a problem she was having with social politics at work, no doubt expecting me to commiserate. Instead, I considered the situation and offered her the only effective long-term solution I could envision--and she did not reject it. True, she said "I'll have to pray about it." But what surprises me is that she was actually willing to hear instruction and actually listen to it because it suited her purposes.
Briefly, the situation was this. Mary, the woman who hired my mom and her co-manager, has had a bad habit of subtly criticizing and unconsciously belittling mom in front of the secretaries. Mom theorized--with which I agreed--that Mary simply feels her authority and prestige is threatened by having another manager share her position, especially a well-liked and competent one. However, in addition to the insult, it is very damaging for persons in authority to appear divided, as all children of divorce well know. The problem was, how to cause Mary to cease the damaging behavior without making it into a confrontational argument, which would serve only to widen the rift in practice?
The solution I suggested was simply to assuage Mary's insecurity in a subtle way. In other words, in every public circumstance, appear graciously self-effacing; defer outwardly to Mary in all things, making clear to everyone (but never in a supercilious or condescending way) that Mary is, socially at least, superior. If handled properly this tactic would ease the other manager's fears, removing the need for her to belittle my mom, without hindering mom's effectiveness as a manager in any way.
Stupid Viz. Always searching out reasons not to give up hope in mom.
In other Viz At Work news, defrauding my employer by spending large amounts of time surfing the web every day is getting to be more and more of a balancing act. I try to spend enough time on Gaia every day to get some work done on denizen, do a smidge of modding (though I doubt it eases Em's workload much), and critique the occasional friend so that the deserving don't feel that I'm neglecting them. (Neglect of the deserving, however benign in motivation, is something I'm still trying to get over. It's a tough stain to scour, personalitywise.) And now added to that, I'm emailing Dave regularly about baseball.
Yep, it's official. Viz has added major league baseball to the short list of "things I know and care about enough to have a specific Hat." Which, functionally, is as simple and inarguable demonstration of the fact that I really, honestly do love Dave as a person can hope to have. Which makes me feel all warm and safe. Because I really, really don't trust myself, and it's good to know that, about this at least, I am for certain not deceiving myself. You can't make a Hat for something if you don't genuinely care about it. The effort involved in emotionally investing myself in something as alien to my life as professional sports is the sort of thing I could only do for the strongest of motivations--in this case, deriving pleasure from the vast amount of joy it brings to Dave. And now that I am emotionally invested in it, I can enjoy it directly (not vicariously) as well--which was another object of the excercise.
Caring about baseball has proven to have an enormous, unexpected side benefit. The fact is that professional sports serve many of the functions of religion in our society. This should be evident merely from the prejudicial treatment athletes receive in the criminal justice system, if not from the stupid, stupid things people do for sports teams. It's a ritual outlet for sublimating aggression--and as such is of incalculable value. The upshot of all this is, giving a shit about sports opens up vast new realms of communication for me. I can talk to people for hours (speculating on the likely trade moves the Yankees might make this winter or trying to pinpoint just what was the decisive factor in the Cubs' failure to reach the playoffs) who otherwise might never have given me the time of day. Marvelous.
In part to hang on to my sanity--as I spend several hours a day now with my mom in a one-on-one setting--and in part to refresh my memory as I start to make the third and final set of revisions to my application, I've started re-reading the Satanic Bible. Even though I do sometimes find myself muttering things under my breath like, "Shiva is a preserver and creator god, not merely a destroyer!" or "Fallacy of false alternative!", by and large I'm even more impressed with the thing now than when I first read it. Yes, LaVey learned perhaps too much of his rhetoric from Nietzsche, generalizes a little too quickly from his critique of Christianity to a critique of "all 'white-light' religions," and tends to indiscriminately describes the social mores of his time period as having existed in past eras where they, in fact, did not. But nonetheless, damn that's good social commentary, applied psychology, rational ethics and pragmatic psychopomp.
You know what my latest crazy ambition is? I want to be the St. Paul of the Satanic church--the smooth politician who settles the disputes of internal factions; the capable administrator who organizes the exchange of ideas, personnel, and resources between one far-flung outpost and another, and the savvy public-relations manager who exhorts members to behave in very specific ways that create, in the public eye, the precise image through which the church wishes to be perceived.
Still, I can't lose sight of my current shitty situation with my car, and the idiocy on my part that created it. I still need a lawyer--and that right soon. I've been bugging both my parents to look for one. And tomorrow when I go over to Dadoo's I'm'a ask the housemonkeys for the names of lawyers who've helped them and/or their friends with similar traffic and/or vehicle-related legal problems. I will need to make clear to my attorney that my ability to pay him in a timely fashion hinges on his ability to get me my driving privileges back--and that right soon.
On the flip side, I can't beat myself up about making stupid mistakes to the point where self-disgust neutralizes ambition--the base and acid of my emotional chemistry.
Mom presented to me a problem she was having with social politics at work, no doubt expecting me to commiserate. Instead, I considered the situation and offered her the only effective long-term solution I could envision--and she did not reject it. True, she said "I'll have to pray about it." But what surprises me is that she was actually willing to hear instruction and actually listen to it because it suited her purposes.
Briefly, the situation was this. Mary, the woman who hired my mom and her co-manager, has had a bad habit of subtly criticizing and unconsciously belittling mom in front of the secretaries. Mom theorized--with which I agreed--that Mary simply feels her authority and prestige is threatened by having another manager share her position, especially a well-liked and competent one. However, in addition to the insult, it is very damaging for persons in authority to appear divided, as all children of divorce well know. The problem was, how to cause Mary to cease the damaging behavior without making it into a confrontational argument, which would serve only to widen the rift in practice?
The solution I suggested was simply to assuage Mary's insecurity in a subtle way. In other words, in every public circumstance, appear graciously self-effacing; defer outwardly to Mary in all things, making clear to everyone (but never in a supercilious or condescending way) that Mary is, socially at least, superior. If handled properly this tactic would ease the other manager's fears, removing the need for her to belittle my mom, without hindering mom's effectiveness as a manager in any way.
Stupid Viz. Always searching out reasons not to give up hope in mom.
In other Viz At Work news, defrauding my employer by spending large amounts of time surfing the web every day is getting to be more and more of a balancing act. I try to spend enough time on Gaia every day to get some work done on denizen, do a smidge of modding (though I doubt it eases Em's workload much), and critique the occasional friend so that the deserving don't feel that I'm neglecting them. (Neglect of the deserving, however benign in motivation, is something I'm still trying to get over. It's a tough stain to scour, personalitywise.) And now added to that, I'm emailing Dave regularly about baseball.
Yep, it's official. Viz has added major league baseball to the short list of "things I know and care about enough to have a specific Hat." Which, functionally, is as simple and inarguable demonstration of the fact that I really, honestly do love Dave as a person can hope to have. Which makes me feel all warm and safe. Because I really, really don't trust myself, and it's good to know that, about this at least, I am for certain not deceiving myself. You can't make a Hat for something if you don't genuinely care about it. The effort involved in emotionally investing myself in something as alien to my life as professional sports is the sort of thing I could only do for the strongest of motivations--in this case, deriving pleasure from the vast amount of joy it brings to Dave. And now that I am emotionally invested in it, I can enjoy it directly (not vicariously) as well--which was another object of the excercise.
Caring about baseball has proven to have an enormous, unexpected side benefit. The fact is that professional sports serve many of the functions of religion in our society. This should be evident merely from the prejudicial treatment athletes receive in the criminal justice system, if not from the stupid, stupid things people do for sports teams. It's a ritual outlet for sublimating aggression--and as such is of incalculable value. The upshot of all this is, giving a shit about sports opens up vast new realms of communication for me. I can talk to people for hours (speculating on the likely trade moves the Yankees might make this winter or trying to pinpoint just what was the decisive factor in the Cubs' failure to reach the playoffs) who otherwise might never have given me the time of day. Marvelous.
In part to hang on to my sanity--as I spend several hours a day now with my mom in a one-on-one setting--and in part to refresh my memory as I start to make the third and final set of revisions to my application, I've started re-reading the Satanic Bible. Even though I do sometimes find myself muttering things under my breath like, "Shiva is a preserver and creator god, not merely a destroyer!" or "Fallacy of false alternative!", by and large I'm even more impressed with the thing now than when I first read it. Yes, LaVey learned perhaps too much of his rhetoric from Nietzsche, generalizes a little too quickly from his critique of Christianity to a critique of "all 'white-light' religions," and tends to indiscriminately describes the social mores of his time period as having existed in past eras where they, in fact, did not. But nonetheless, damn that's good social commentary, applied psychology, rational ethics and pragmatic psychopomp.
You know what my latest crazy ambition is? I want to be the St. Paul of the Satanic church--the smooth politician who settles the disputes of internal factions; the capable administrator who organizes the exchange of ideas, personnel, and resources between one far-flung outpost and another, and the savvy public-relations manager who exhorts members to behave in very specific ways that create, in the public eye, the precise image through which the church wishes to be perceived.
Still, I can't lose sight of my current shitty situation with my car, and the idiocy on my part that created it. I still need a lawyer--and that right soon. I've been bugging both my parents to look for one. And tomorrow when I go over to Dadoo's I'm'a ask the housemonkeys for the names of lawyers who've helped them and/or their friends with similar traffic and/or vehicle-related legal problems. I will need to make clear to my attorney that my ability to pay him in a timely fashion hinges on his ability to get me my driving privileges back--and that right soon.
On the flip side, I can't beat myself up about making stupid mistakes to the point where self-disgust neutralizes ambition--the base and acid of my emotional chemistry.