27.10.06

My blog is moving here....

http://wraygun.wordpress.com

I copied all of the posts over tonight, but none of the pictures came along, so... it will be a slowish transition... But new posts will go there, and comments (if any!) should probably go there, too...

It's better to be sober

... before going to this website or you might end up getting stuck there.

But, either way, you should go. And you should have your sound turned on first.

23.10.06

It's time for more shameless self-promotion!

Yup, it's that time again!

The first clean draft of Act 1 of A Diamond in Snow is complete! Anne, Mom, and now Sarah and I have been working through it over the last few months, and I think it's no great boast to say that it's the best thing I've ever written (and due in no small part to Anne, Mom, and Sarah's help)!

If you've been waiting for something substantial to dig into at the Coerablog, or you wanted to read Cheating Life, but were put off by all of the violence and sex, this is your big opportunity. (Okay, there's still some violence and sex, but in this first act, it's still PG-13 rated).

If you'd like to read it, it's here

If you don't feel like reading 76 pages online, email me and I can send you the Word Doc.

How goes the job?

It's a question people ask me often, because they're polite, and because my job is still relatively new, and because I don't do enough other interesting things to make smalltalk easy.

Usually I say that it's okay, or even good, and sometimes it really is. But for every good or okay day, there's another that's very frustrating. It's frustrating because there's so much to do, in so many different categories of projects, and everything's a high priority, even if it's not, because if it isn't it might not ever get done because there's so much other high-priority work. I thought at first that I'd probably reach an equilibrium point to work in and out sometime in the beginning of next year, but I'm starting to worry that I might never get caught up. I might just get further and further behind.

It's frustrating because I put in about 45 hours of work a week on average (that's solid work, not counting lunches or downtime or chatting with co-workers, of which there's little) and spend 12 or 13 driving to and fro, which means during the weekdays, I usually write or spend time with Kim, but not both. It's frustrating because I have arguments in my head with people at work where they criticise me for being 5 minutes late or getting a project done late and I come up with all of these sarcastic replies that make me a little bitter. Of course, the conversations never happen in real life.

It's frustrating because I realize that all of my complaints are just a subset of the standard American worker's complaints, and really I have it better than a lot of people with the same complaints (people who put in 60 hours a week or have bosses who really do yell at them), but that doesn't make me feel any better.

It's frustrating because the only outlet I feel I have is to talk about it (to be read as "complain"), but it violates my unachieved sense of masculine honor to complain about things that are not cruel or unusual, if even those. (Note that I do not mean to imply that not to complain is a trait that is masculine in nature, but only that one needs to possess that trait, in my opinion, to bear a sense of masculine honor.)

I am dismayed that I often spend my whole drive home (and often to work, as well) stewing over these things. I feel like I'm somehow being treated unfairly, though I can't put my finger on how. I don't think anyone else could get more done, and most people probably couldn't get done as much as I have, so what right do they have to ask me to do so much? The only possible outcome is that I fail to get everything done, or I fail to get it done at a sufficient level of quality. After all, my only really goal is to please them, so why don't they help to create an environment in which I can do that?


As I was mulling over these things on the way home today, trying not to mull them over but failing badly, I realized that to please other people is not my goal. My goal is to excel with as little effort as possible. When I say "excel", I don't mean to do a good job, but to do a better job than someone else, either a previous positionholder or some imagined possible replacement. The pride I seek isn't in a sense of quality, but a sense of superiority. I am looking for the satisfaction of seeing that I've done a better job than they could possibly imagine, but while being lazy about it.

What an asshole!

No wonder there's no empathetic click in other people when I describe my dilemma. They see or feel what I did not, because my expectation of satisfaction is fetishistic (in the sense that it seeks satisfaction from an action that is not naturally inclined to produce the desired results). It's true that I'm looking to other people for my own self worth, but not because I'm trying to please them (or not entirely - there is still good in me) - because I'm trying to elicit awe from them.

I think the thing of it is, I have to be satisfied with a B+ instead of an A+. Sometimes I have to be satisfied with a C, when it doesn't really matter. I know I'm long since out of school, but the analogy is apt, and particularly appropriate for me because school shaped this behaviour in me. (Or rather, I shaped this behaviour in my response to school).

I have to ask what I really want out of work. Is it a consistant paycheck? Really, yes. So if I feel like I can do so much better of a job than the average person who might have had my job, doesn't that mean I can relax on the self-pressure and still be something more than satisfactory?

Do I want advancement? Definitely! But what do people get advanced for? For success in achieving individual goals, or for force of personality? I would suggest that the latter is much more likely - how many people do you know who plug away at their job, really doing bang-up work, but take the slow path into success? I know quite a few.


I think the key here is that this is not an excuse to be lazy, to slack off at work, or to accept poor quality. The key is that I can't expect my sense of other people's amazement at my abilities to be an indicator of my success, since it's really the disguise of a selfish and non-productive motivation, and it doesn't really lead to the desired results anyway.

Hmmm.

That has got to be the most boring and self-referential post I've produced so far. I hope it is. If you're still reading at this point, Thanks! Or... I'm sorry!

But... maybe just ask me in a few weeks if I'm happier in my job. I hope I will be!

22.10.06

Big News

Most people who even occasionally read this blog already know that Kim and I have been engaged for three and a half years. That's a pretty long engagement!

Well, Kim and I are finally getting married! We're eloping to Savannah in the first half of November for a weekend packed with an intimate ceremony, fabulous dinners, and several nights at a really snazzy hotel. So, there should be some pictures well before Thanksgiving!

6.10.06

You know you have a good tattoo artist when...

...he invites you back into the shop to touch up the tattoo, not because it really needs it, but because he thinks it could look better, and he likes doing work he's proud of. And he doesn't charge you for it.

1.10.06

Oh, Crap!

Torture Bill States Non-Allegiance To Bush Is Terrorism - includes (purported?) text from the bill.

17.9.06

A weekend of extremes

So I just finished watching all three Star Wars movies. Not the new ones - the originals. Not the new originals - the original originals. Kim talked me into buying another copy of Star Wars when we saw them reasonably priced at Costco - I had thought I might buy them again someday anyway, since the full-screen versions I had had not been panned-and-scanned very well at all. Since this latest iteration also included the original originals, it wasn't too hard for Kim to talk me into it.

So, now that I've watched all three original originals, I'm going backward through the new originals just for fun, just to pick out the changes. That's a lot of Star Wars.

We also bought one of those chicken pot pies at Costco - you know the ones that are literally a foot across? Well, I dared Kim to eat half of it in one sitting - I even had 10 dollars that said she couldn't. I figured I was the only one that silly. Well, she proved me wrong, although she let me know today that she hadn't felt much like breakfast, and wasn't too sure when she'd need to eat another meal.

Oh, and I finished Accelerando, so I shouldn't be having any more extremely strange dreams. But I did it by staying up until 5 am Saturday night (Sunday morning), and let me tell you, that's pretty late for me. (I fell asleep in the middle of Empire Strikes Back today.)

14.9.06

I had another dream...

...that I think came from reading Accelerando before bedtime. I'm especially sure about this one, because it featured a lobster!

And where the last dream might have seemed to have an interesting plot curve, this one actually had narration!

Of course, I don't remember the narration any more, but it was somewhere between the opening scences of a Twilight Zone episode, and the beginning of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (which would have been a really good film if the cinematographer had remembered to wipe the smudge marks off the lens). Anyway, the narrator began by describing and listing all of these brilliant scientists - inventors, award winners, crucial paradigm operators in their fields - who were invited to work on a secret government project. As the narrator said "invited" we were shown the last scientist, a doctor Muller with a German moustache and a labcoat, confronted by the silhouettes of two trenchcoated secret agent types. Silent beneath the voiceover, they presented the good doctor with an "offer he couldn't refuse". (You couldn't see if they were holding guns or any kind of weapon, but the fear in Doctor Muller's eyes and the furtive glances toward the silhouettes told it all.)

The next we saw the professor, he was helmetless in a spacesuit, looking out the viewport of a classic rocket as it accelerated out of Earth orbit and toward a secret goverment space station. He joined the 30-odd other scientists on the station working on "Murphy's Box". That name was said with a sinister dread, but we never saw over the scientist's back to what they were working on.

And then, it's explained. A giant blue-black lobster looms through deep space. Murphy's Box is just the body of any creature, but the term infers specifically to bodies pushed outside of their competence envelope along the squared-cubed rule curve. In microgravity, less strength (which is controlled by the Square - the area of the cross-section of a body's muscles) is needed to support mass (a factor of the Cube - that is, a three-dimensional body), so bodies can potentially be grown to enormous size. Lobsters, who don't feel pain and can theoretically continue growing as long as they live, were perfect test subjects.

The problems came when they adapted to empty space and started crawling around the outside of the space station.

I'm not too sure what the really dreadful scary part of it was, because once I saw that huge lobster, I high-tailed it out of there and woke up.