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altarflame · 4 years

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Let me give you this real country music breakdown.

Keeping in mind that 2019 involved lots of gut wrenching transition, including divorce and selling my home of 11 years (the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere). Moving away from the tropics, to a place where the ocean is usually too far and my plants can’t live outside through the winter. I had a kid move out and away, for the first time. My oldest friend also died last August, after a scant 3 month long battle with cancer. It was a real plague upon my proverbial dog, wife, and pickup truck. And, of course, I’m living through a pandemic, and a long overdue but very emotional racial justice uprising, with the rest of you, now. Anyway. OTHER than those things, my 2020 has been like...My sister’s gradually, gut wrenchingly cut off all contact with me over the past couple of years, culminating in the last couple of months, whenst we no longer speaketh at all. I’ve fought hard for this to be different and it’s still very sharp. I don’t think I’ll ever give up hope, or stop making a fool of myself about it. A new friend I was starting to really care about hung herself in April. I’ve tried to be there for her husband and 5 year old daughter when and how I can, which is honestly not much. I’ve taken several people who were scared to go alone, to her grave. I felt forced to break up with the person I thought was my soul mate, these past 3 years, and wanted to be with forever, and I have grieved it hard over the last couple of months. I’m still processing this. I’m gonna be processing this for awhile. My threshold for being anywhere near him without overwhelming sobbing is apparently approximately 45 seconds. In the beginning we were scrambled together, mixed in a celestial bowl and hand fluffed with a feather. And the tears of bliss were not amiss - it was a good day. But the story nears the present time Of restlessness and wake up calls Wake up! Years have flown fast but then who's counting The wars have been won but there's few left standing between us And the shadows of Christmas past... Critically acclaimed but sadly underrated - Fortune definitely favored us, but no one celebrated. Our wits were splitting at their ends... We gazed upon the city lights We each laughed aloud one final time and agreed: This is one thing we'll miss... On his way out, he sabotaged my part time foster child’s mom’s tenuous, fragile relationship with me, so I no longer have the ability to connect with or help that child who he brought into my life. Who I love and wonder about and periodically hear horror stories about via mutual friends. I bent over backwards, I burned calories straining for that trust between the mom and myself.

It’s so terrible sometimes. It hurts so bad. Jean-Paul. LAURA. *MILLS* . Coralye. FUCK. This post brought to you with plenty of hard crying, and no shortage of echoing painful music. I’m physically sick about this shit semi often. I don’t normally let go of anybody, guys. But certainly not my fucking nearest and dearest. I have a lot. I have SO MUCH. I know this. I feel good a lot of the time. I have all 5 of my kids under this roof while the pandemic rages on, and they’re all healthy and beautiful and they all love me and talk with me. It’s mostly all cake these days with them, Elise telling me where she is in her own solitary reading for pleasure, Ananda cracking me up, Jake biking to the grocery store for treats to share, Aaron showing me something amazing in the yard, Isaac washing dishes and giving me weirdly helpful and totally unanticipated advice. They’re almost no work now, it’s all return on investment and I have tons of privacy and I use the fuck out of it. I’m deeply in love with somebody these past 7 months. Being deeply in new love AND devastated-heartbroken about lost love at the same time is honestly dizzying, I spent a first destitute day thinking maybe I can’t do polyamory anymore, period. Maybe this is too fucking much and I’m gonna be alone and focus on my career and my goddamned plants. (<--not fucking really, obv I am not gonna let the pain win and go full hermit. Brief compelling temptation, though.) My career and my plants are great, btw, thanks for asking. I’ve got basically my dream job, it’s flexible and lackadaisical AND meaningful and challenging, it’s salaried with bonuses and hella benefits and amazing job security. It’s the whole thing, the culmination of 6 years in school and unpaid internships and volunteering. I even have a spare PRN position elsewhere that I mostly hang on to because it’s fun when they want me to come make $200 for a shift, to mix it up a little. And I have solo projects, writing and web and mental health, all in the works, and they’re good. I have seedlings sprouting. I have a yard that is pure magic, revealing new secrets each day. I’ve got some of my oldest people, like Jess. I’ve got some exciting new people, like Jill. The love, did I mention it? Holy shit. I’ve got Sterling, and that is a whole other story. That it’s been this good while things are this bad is pretty astounding. His own drama quotient has been off the charts, too. I almost can’t imagine how wonderful it would be if we weren’t constantly adrift in a sea of bullshit, though I also strongly suspect we both need a certain staggering minimum quota of bullshit. It’s no accident that we met mutually chasing along after the wake of the same madman’s chaos. We’re nursing some deep wounds in each other, waking up some old old hurts and soothing them back down smaller and smaller. Anytime we’re touching it’s either syrupy soma sweet, blazing inferno hot, or a staggering blend of the two - and then we pull apart to try to actually speak with whole brains, and inevitably take turns being baffled, just hilariously relieved, at how easy it is to communicate. We alternate coming at each other on tiptoe, braced, and then feeling confused and just.... amused? Skeptical? that the other is totally able to empathize with what was just said and is accepting it gently. We don’t have a ton of objective stuff in common, on paper. We’re both very wordy and linguistic, we’re analyzers, we draw unusual people who will feel safe telling us insane things. We’re both hypersexual perverts, chronic pickers, we both wear too much black. It doesn’t go a lot further than that at a glance. We both have PTSD and ironclad outward facing coping skills, nostalgia for the Florida Keys, scientific skepticism mixed with some faith in magic.... we were both brilliant children who felt pretty isolated. But I haven’t ever really felt like anyone is loving me the way I love people, before. I’ve never even felt like anyone else received my love, the same way I intended it, or at least not all of it. It’s like the intensity of what I’m conveying and meaning when I kiss somebody’s cheek, I dunno man, he experiences it. The goofy flowing sense I have, of holding hands, he comments on it all the time. I’m not just like.... alone, in my overwhelm with being touched, or my enthusiasm for sensations, and that is honestly pretty new to me. Sterling is not tolerating my affection for my sake, and I’m still gradually adapting to that with periodic backsliding into hesitance, and unneeded apologies. It’s like we’re totally fluent in the precise same love language, so nothing gets lost, and the feedback loop is instantaneous. He’s dark inside, but dark like Nine Inch Nail’s A Warm Place. Dark like the womb. So as I was saying. I have so much. Including a candle that’s about Mills, and is burning behind me, giving me this slipping sense that I need to blow it out, I need to reserve it, it’s gonna be gone soon. This one spans so many feelings, it’s been positive, some new candle would be what, voodoo? Meddling? I don’t know. This one’s been in a drawer, with our ring buried in it (my dragon). What will I do with that ring? What will I do with all this love? How can I contain so much, anyway? Why can’t anything ever replace anything else? It’s like infinite space, and the empty places just keep throbbing, and it’s like I sprout new spots for new fullness and the cavities pulse on. I’m deeply grateful for a certain self-completeness I’ve come to understand that I have, and that not everyone does. I am resiliant A-motherfucking-F (<--meta vulgar!). AND YET. OW OW OW. I’m sitting here trying to exposure therapy my way through my Mills playlist, as I write this, so Spotify can’t surprise me into sads anymore. I’ve gotten already to a place where sometimes i remember positive things purely positively, and laugh and tell a story and it’s ok. I’m bitter as all hell that I can’t even talk to my sister about this breakup, after she had so many stupid goddamned feelings about the relationship itself, about polyamory in general, about ever knowing him (which might have allowed her to help me grieve at all). Sigh. I love the internet, maybe feel free to send me a message if you’re still reading, whoever the fuck you are <3

#personal #long text posts #polyamory #Mills #loss #Sterling #motherhood #MSW

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mrsteveecook · 5 years

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coworkers are attacking people over grammar, responding to alumni networking requests, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Two coworkers are attacking people over grammar

At my company, we have a couple of grammar fanatics who go out of their way to correct people even when they’re not in the conversation. Sometimes this will even occur during important one-on-one meetings on projects that have tight deadlines. These two people will interject to say exactly what we said wrong, and how we should have said it. It annoys everyone, and we tried several times to get them to stop correcting everyone to no avail.

We have tried several things like stating that we don’t care if we are saying it wrong, throwing the logic out that if you understand what I am saying there is no need for correction, and some of us have even started changing our speaking habits so that we can stop being pestered over little mistakes. We have even found that sometimes they’re actually wrong on how they corrected us. When we confront them with this, they get extremely defensive, and more or less call all of us stupid for trying to look up something we clearly can’t understand.

I am at a loss of what to do here. At first I didn’t mind the occasional feedback, but they are starting to get more and more aggressive with their corrections and starting to blatantly call people under-educated, unprofessional, or just out right stupid. Half of me thinks its time to go to their manager (they have the same manager), but in the past when other coworkers would go to the manger over other issues with these two people, there would be a backlash from them. They would say that everyone is too “sensitive” and “can’t pull up their big boy/girl pants so they had to go to management.”

Is this something we should even bring up, or are we being too sensitive? Would just ignoring it be better to keep the relationship up with two people who I really don’t see leaving the company any time soon? (Seriously, several people have gone to their manager over similarly obnoxious things and nothing has come out of it.)

Normally would this would be something to address with their manager, because not only are they being annoying by weaponizing grammar like this, but they’re actually insulting people. Regularly, it sounds like.

But if your experience is that their manager won’t act, then you might be better off just ignoring them. They interject to correct something, and you just going right on talking as if you didn’t hear them. Or, when they correct you, you can say “I’m not interested in grammar corrections while I’m in casual conversation” — and repeat that as needed. There’s also, “It’s so weird that you think that’s appropriate” — but with the way you’ve described their hostility, I’d lean away from anything that might spur further engagement or attacks.

It’s also pretty messed up that their manager is allowing aggressively hostile behavior like insulting people, and you might consider whether there’s anyone else you could bring this to — ideally someone who’s senior to their manager and has a track record of being willing to take on problems. If you do, part of the message to that person needs to be that these two have a history of attacking anyone who complains about them, and so part of addressing the grammar weaponization has to include laying out clear prohibitions on that as well.

2. Information interview requests from fellow alumni

I’m wondering what you think of the career advice that tells current students or recent alumni of your university to reach out to you, as an alum, without ever having met you, asking to learn more about the work you do or where you work because they’re interested in doing the same thing. I find this happens mostly on LinkedIn because that’s where you can see where someone went to school (assuming it’s on their profile) and send them a message even if you’re not connected.

I had heard that advice before and thought it made sense — school pride and all. But now that I’m on the receiving end of these requests, it feels odd and I’m hesitant to agree. I’ve never met the person, and I have absolutely no connection with them beyond having gone to the same university (no mutual friend or anything). But then I also feel like a “bad” alum for not being willing to help out someone who’s in a position where I used to be.

What do you/your readers think? Is this good advice to give to current students (or recent alumni)? Do most people have a more positive reaction than me, and are more open to helping out?

A lot of people do feel a connection to people from their school and are more willing to help them. The thinking is that you’ve had a shared experience, to some extent have a shared frame of reference, and are part of the same network, and you may have benefitted from alumni’s willingness to help you (or might benefit from it in the future).

But some people don’t feel any particular connection to fellow alums. If you’re in the latter group, that’s perfectly okay; you’re not ever obligated to grant strangers’ requests for your time. (Although if you found that alums helped you when you were starting out, you really should pay it forward to keep that network going.)

But enough people do feel that connection and are wiling to help that it’s still worthwhile advice to give out.

3. My new manager accused me of timesheet fraud

I am stunned by an email I just received from my new manager. She has rejected my timesheet because she believes I padded my hours on last week’s timesheet. I work part-time in the field and assist sales reps doing customer visits, trainings, and sales presentations. She went through my timesheet line by line and explained how it wasn’t possible that I worked the hours that I had recorded.

She is mistaken. When recording hours, the system is not great and allows very limited room for notes or description. All hours are recorded on one of two timesheets, either customer-facing or non-customer-facing.

Last week at 7 am on Monday morning, I got a call from my manager and one of the reps requesting I extend the assignment I had that week from an overnight to a full five-day week. Many coworkers were unable to attend a conference due to extreme weather and despite record-breaking extreme weather. I agreed to help. I proceeded to field phone calls from the rep and my manager as the schedule was worked out and travel arrangements were made and I rearranged things to be gone for the week instead of overnight. I recorded this time (from 7 am until I left my house at 9:45 am) as non-customer-facing time. My manager emailed explaining it was impossible that I was driving at that time based on the time arrived, etc. I never said I was driving, I simply indicated that I was working and not customer-facing. This is one example of many she listed throughout the timesheet submitted.

I am blown away. I think I have been accused of committing timesheet fraud through an email and don’t even know how to respond.

It sounds like you need to more explicitly explain to her how you were using that time; she may not realize you were doing work tasks during that time. (It’s even possible she doesn’t consider those activities to be work time, although she should.) That of course doesn’t make it okay for her to accuse you of misreporting your hours; if she has questions, she should ask them, not make accusations.

The best way to respond is to indicate that you take that kind of accusation really seriously. Say something like this: “I take the accuracy of my timesheets seriously. Misreporting my time would be a serious violation, and I’m taken aback to hear you’re worried I would do that intentionally. I’m attaching a detailed account of how my time was spent on the days in question. As you can see, all the time I reported was for work activities. Can you please confirm that this clears this up, and that there aren’t questions about my integrity?”

4. Are my hands keeping me from getting jobs?

I’ve been out of the full-time-employment game for a little over six months now but have been doing freelance work and applying for jobs every single day. I’m doing phone or in-person interviews almost every weekday which is good and promising, but nothing has stuck. I’ve had a litany of different circumstances lead to me not getting a job (positions losing funding, employer ghosting, interviewers finding a better candidate, etc.) but lately I’ve only been getting one in-person interview before I get the dreaded “thanks but no thanks” email.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out just what could be going wrong so I can find a reasonable solution. I’m preparing for interviews the best I can, I’m dressing professionally (though on some days, my non-offensive forearm tattoos are visible — but if they can’t deal with that I don’t want to work there). I worry it may be the state of my hands.

I gesture a lot when I speak as well as take hand-written notes in interviews to help keep me on track and lessen my anxiety. I am a chronic nail-biter and cuticle picker and the stress of job hunting has made it almost worse than ever. My hands, particularly my thumbs, look a little worse-for-wear these days. Do prospective employers actually care about stuff like that or am I being a little paranoid?

It is very, very unlikely that having hands in rough shape is preventing you from getting hired. I mean, maybe if they looked like they had gangrene, in which case some unconscious bias might creep in, but bitten nails and picked-at cuticles are not likely to be a big deal. Most people won’t even notice. (To be clear, there are some hiring managers who have nitpicky things they hold against people — the the person who scrutinizes candidates’ shoes or how clean their car is or so forth, but those people are outliers, not the norm. They’re also bad at hiring.)

The exception to this is if you’re applying for jobs that expect an unusually high degree of polish — like some types of fundraising, pharmaceutical rep, hand model, etc. But otherwise, your hands are probably fine.

5. Leaving a thank-you note immediately after your interview.

Is it okay to leave a thank-you card with the interviewers immediately afterwards?

Don’t do it! If you arrive with pre-written thank-you notes, you lose out on the whole benefit of sending a post-interview note. The point of the note is supposed to be to indicate that you reflected on the interview and are still interested in the job, and to build on the conversation you had. You can’t do either of those things if you wrote them beforehand.

Plus, it makes the note look entirely perfunctory — like “I heard I’m supposed to send these, so here, I’m checking that off my list.”