Friday Blues: Not Too Unusual

Salvete qui legentes êstis -

Sometimes Friday is graced, not with Venus or Friya or Frigg, but with the proximity of freedom.  Not true freedom, for that is rare and has to do more with ability and virtue than with a lack of fetters, but the relative freedom of the coming weekend, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, closing in a kind of eclipse on Sunday evening. 

But sometimes Friday is simply Fatigue-Day, Down-Day, Out-of-It-Day.  So today for me.  I am in a down cycle, emotionally, and trying to find fresh sources of oxygen (as it were).  What is to hand? 

First - Only what is "up to me", what I can do and control or affect.  This includes my mood, but not all of it, not my body or my neurology or my complement of good sleep.  Those things I can affect, but not command.  Even my state of mind, available to suggestion and even command from the "ruling faculty", can be an obstacle and a pitfall. 

But here memory is important, and an internal vigilance: 

1. To recall that your emotions and mood are susceptible to your Reason, that Reason is our gift from the Gods or from the Creation, that Great Source of Turmoil, with which to deal with its debris on earth. 
2. I can keep a mental eye open for the self-defeating, the undeservedly-self-castigating, the either-or-despairing, and other fallacious tricks of the mind that -- quite automatically, in my case -- cripple my little self and urge it to self-destruction. 
3. I can patch up what I can in the outside world -- whether at work, with my co-workers, with my family, with my friends and acquaintances, with problems financial -- patch things up with whatever I have of good humor and sensitivity and diligence.
4. I can above all watch out for Fear, for the Habit of Dread that infects me and my family, and recognize its imprimatur on my thoughts, on my disposition, on my judgments, and pull myself back when I lean too far into it, or reverse my opinion when I see its fell influence on an opinion.
5. I can look to the 'Engine Room' -- fuel supply, body status, metabolism -- and, quite literally, feed myself with an eye to decent fueling, decent material and nutritional input.  I can even improve the 'Guest Quarters' upstairs with a bit of fun food or a glass of wine, some luxury for the weary fool. 
6. And, in terms of what's up to me, I can cut myself a little slack, remember that I'm just a beastie trying to emulate the Gods, a mortal, "only human" as Robocop once said, a multicelled macro-animal gifted with Reason, and that the world is -- above all -- IM-perfect, not made okay, not made safe or good or complete or glorious, but rather dirty and dangerous, uncaring and paltry: as a termite with some Divinity in him, I can rebel against defeat and decline and dismay. 

There!  I'm better already!  Improved thanks to Lore, Thought, Reason, thyroxine, caffeine, Ensure© and some sandwich from Subway©, and neither should I forget the affable conversation and amusement afforded us by my boss.  Now to the rest of the day, and on to the weekend. 

Omnibus, valete bene.

(When I was 58 ...)

[An old draft entry that I just checked for errors and then inadvertently published for the very first time.  58 would make this ca. 2013 or so.  So view it as something 'historical'.]

Salvete, qui legunt -

I am 58 years old at this point. Compared to many, I've never had a life - but that's to be judged from which point of view? My default (or automatic) point of view is that I've had a simply defective life; that others have had the laurels, the striving, the "bling" of it all. Why do I even reflect on that? I am not the others; I am not "normal". If I am polite, it comes of fear - the need to manage people to avoid negative face - blame, shame and anger. If I read, it is because I search for some Bling of Knowledge that will validate what I am and save me the expense of hardship and self-discipline. Or I read for pleasure, to escape work, work, work....

From a more reflective point of view, I've simply had MY life - personal, inconsiderable, and more or less unique.  In these later years, I'm still trying to come to terms with my own ignorance, and with my own tendency (seen above) to wallow in facile self-criticism. 

Valete.

Salvete, qui legunt -

At present I find myself with three blogs, in effect - this one on Blogger here, http://iohannkn.blogspot.com/;   my Wordpress one http://iohannkn.wordpress.com/  (a left-over from Microsoft's personal pages days);   and now a shared one, the Redwood Stoa site at http://redwoodstoa.wordpress.com/, where I can post as "the Redwood Stoa" along with my co-Stoics.  I'm wondering if I can link all three - the software side of all this, even the user interface side, I usually find somewhat baffling (interface and utility expectations frustrated), so I'll have to poke around a bit.  The alternative is to dump one of the two personal ones. 

When next I post, I want to look at my son's personal Deus ex Machina, "The Four Agreements" of Don Miguel Ruiz, a self-help book with a lot of Stoic parallels. 

Vale valeteque.

Sharing a Blogger’s Resentment, Worry and Despair – and My Comments (Which I Think are Worthwhile)

I just finished posting a long, long comment on a fellow blogger’s site (his site is well-named as “Help, They Want Me to Socialize!”).

He was worrying about his future, and so much of what he was rehearsing was exactly the kinds of things that I’ve had to cope with and only slowly learned to understand over 59 years of less-than-ideal life. In any event, I see my comment as a sort of manifesto or wake-up-call for people with depression, and am sharing it here.

You can follow this link to the site and my comments:

The Fudged Edges of Office Work Information

Petty rant: about Normal People, office management, and the craziness that mid-managers arrive at:

Long ago I learned that while it was a heinous sin at work to be inaccurate on your timesheet, it was even worse to be accurate. "Oh, my God!" the accounting poeple used to say - "I don't care if you were in at 8:01 or at 7:56! Just put 8 am, for God's sake! We can't handle your fractions!" So a timesheet it turned out was NOT a record of time spent at work, but rather a fiction of a sort useful as paper justification for a payroll system.

And, well, I just had another such moment - some 38 years or so later - but about a "Travel Schedule Notice" system. It's the automated way my company keeps track of whether employees and domini are in their prime offices or not. But - once again - I have been operating under a misapprehension, thinking that the Notices were relevant to our whereabouts and out-of-office status. Nope, that's not it, apparently. I just confounded my poor supervisor, leaving him flummoxed and at a loss, because I posted - in simple honesty - that I'd PROBABLY be out tomorrow at Jury Duty.
He told me that that was wrong; I was out of line. He couldn't believe that I would actually say I was going to be out if I thought - merely expected - to be out. Keeping people informed did not extend to actually telling about something.

Once again, here was a system with some ulterior purpose that I had thwarted. And I'm not exactly sure what it was. Apparently, if there's ANY conditionality to the absence-to-be (in this case, the condition was if, after checking the night before as to whether my Group will in fact be called to the Hall of Justice, they will have said yea or nay, something I have no control over but will certainly keep me away from work in the case of a "yea") then we have to treat it as a non-possibility until the actual day of Jury Duty, when we'll treat it either as nothing (I go to work, I'm not needed for Duty) or as a sudden case of an illness (I planned to come to work - even though I knew I might well not - but I can't come to work, I'm out with a case of Jury Duty). Despite that fact that I've been forewarned AND WAS REQUIRED to forewarn my company that I had a Jury Duty date coming up.

I will commit this caveat to my work-notes on Jury Duty (notes already needed because of the whole confusing and explicitly conditional business of Jury Duty):

JURY DUTY REMAINS A NON-EVENT DESPITE FOREKNOWLEDGE UNTIL YOU ARE DEFINITELY CALLED - AT THAT POINT YOU MUST INFORM YOUR SUPERIOR THAT YOU HAVE A BAD CASE OF THE "JURY DUTY" AND CAN'T COME TO WORK ON TIME THE NEXT DAY.

Sheesh. Apparently, the Notices we send using this system do not amount to notices of information, but amount to official declarations of intent that have the weight of fact, despite being merely predictions or plans. Phew.

Not a big deal, but it's more of that "You had better do this!!!" followed, once you've done your bit, by unexpected bursts of "Don't do that!!!" Such as: "Work hard all the time, don't steal time from your employer!" followed by "My God, don't overwork yourself!" Or: "Take your vacation, it's yours, it's healthy - be sure to take it!" followed by "I don't know - you've been using a lot of vacation time lately; this is not going to look good on your record..."

In other words, any publishing of info on one's future work whereabouts is subject to a 95-percent-sure rule: If you're not 95% sure that X is happening, then ignore the indications that it is going to happen and treat the outcome as an unexpected case of food poisoning - sudden, pertinent, immutable, decisive. Conditional futures have no place in informing co-workers - at least, not in the formal systems.

Okay. We'll try that. And I expect that all organizations tend to be crazy, once organized - ideological party, church hierarchy, group of friends, modern business - it'll always be whacked and out of order.... And not a big deal, in any event.

OUTBURST

I know, I know. I'm relatively feeble; I'm too sensitive, and not too sharp.

AND - worst of all! - I'm spoiled; I've "had it too easy". That is all I ever hear from Right-wingers, Left-wingers, hot-shots, malcontents, as well as my OWN conscience.

"You're not extreme! You're not courageous!"

But I am near 60 years old and NOT likely to improve a whole lot in this area.

Besides, I'm one hundred percent MORE courageous and able to get by than I was at age 16 or 20. That counts, even if it doesn't make me into a war hero or a brilliant, hard-nosed academic.

Just needed to say that.

And also: Down with Hitler, up with Léon Blum! Atque etiam Carthago retinenda est....