Batfort

Style reveals substance

Category: About the Author (page 6 of 8)

Photo of the week: I hate dating edition

Today’s photo of the week is brought to you by Tinder.

Yes, Tinder, the app where horny boys and girls (and the occasional sane person) go to be picky and judgmental.

As a new person in a new town with no friends, I don’t have much to do in the evenings, so I’ve been on Tinder a bit more often than usual.

And sometimes, when I forget that I need to swipe left on 99.99999999% of guys, I get absolutely inundated with messages.

Basically the digital version of this:

Girl, just chilling in a big ol’ sweater, surrounded by guys who are all contemplating swooping in for the kill but who are juuuust beta enough to not do anything about it.

Jack further comments “she’s a hostage.”

Honestly, that’s how Tinder feels most of the time. You start a conversation with a guy thinking he might be interesting, but it turns out that all he wants to do is send you Ron Burgundy gifs and talk about how good you look in that outfit in your profile pic. But it’s not just one guy, it’s five or six or ten guys at a time.

Which, it’s Tinder, so what do you expect really.

The point is, it’s the online equivalent of being trapped talking to a drunk, handsy guy at a bar. There’s not a great way to extract yourself from the situation without “being a bitch,” yet the longer you stay, the more miserable you become.

This is why I don’t date much, why I’m still single, and why I mostly prefer my own company — I have yet to find a romantic high that is worth the slog.

Mostly I’m waiting for that red pill guy to come along, and the depressing reality is that the world is full of normies.

“Procrastination is symptomatic of a half lived life”

Funny that AJA Cortes posted a thread about procrastination tonight, because I’ve been putting off this post for hours because I don’t know what to write about.

At this point, even though next to nobody reads this blog, I feel that I should have polished presentations to give to you every day. This very rarely happens, but usually I can dream up a post about something that seems thoughtful and deliberate.

That’s always been a problem for me: not knowing what to write, so procrastinating, and instead of using all that procrastinated time to conceive and develop a good topic, I just wing it at the end.

Most of the time it works out okay for me, but sometimes it doesn’t.

When it’s just me, that’s totally fine. Shouting into the internet void with a blog, that’s okay. Not ideal, but okay.

The problem comes when people have expectations of me, or depend upon my performance in any way. Then it becomes much harder to put things off until the last minute. Other people don’t think or react that way, for one.

Or if you’re dealing with a lot of people, it’s impossible for the group to react quickly enough to matter. You can’t just wing it in the end.

Funny how procrastination ends where other people start.

 

I did it

No longer a resident of Portland am I.

Packed and cleaned and moved am I.

So grateful to my family am I.

And now I am ready to veg out with comfort food and the Twilight movie.

 

When you just dive in

There’s a benefit that comes from simply diving into the work.

(With a direction in mind, of course.)

When you don’t take time to assess, to pro and con and analyze the situation to death a million times over, when you just focus and start doing, one task at a time at a time at a time until it’s all finished, there’s a beautiful clarity of purpose and synergy.

This time tomorrow, I’ll be living in a new state. A new life.

I’ll also probably break down into exhausted tears,
but that’s to be expected.

For now, I’m just doing the work.

We move, and the world moves with us.

Socializing is good for you

Introverts: this is your (my) reminder that having a social life is important.

It may not be a skill that comes easily or naturally, but it is good to talk to other people.

Like-minded or not, it is good to brush up against opinions that aren’t yourself talking to yourself.

Net gain or loss, the energy flow is different and builds some antifragility into your life.

If it goes well, you take something positive from it.

If it goes badly, you learn.

However it turns out, you have more to show than when you started, and certainly more than staying home and staring into the void.

Go out. Talk to people.

#YoureWorthIt

That awkward moment when you recognize yourself

in a particularly unflattering passage about Gamma males in Vox Day’s new book.

Bear in mind that the socio-sexual hierarchy only describes men. I’m a woman. However, I know how this goes:

The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings, he will lose. This is why he is always creating the impression that something is off about him, because it is. Even more than with the social hierarchy, the Gamma is at war with himself and with his feelings. This is why they often appear to be living in a delusion bubble of their own creation, and why they so often idolize Spock and human reason. They like to think they are beyond all human emotions, because they find their own emotions to be painful for the reasons that were described above.

Vox also provides a path out of Gamma-ness: “Face your demons. Face your fears. Look into the mirror and admit the truth.”

I remember being in my late teens and wishing desperately that I could be a robot so that I would not have emotions to contend with. As I’ve grown (realizing that Spock is in fact a fictional character and emotions aren’t going anywhere) and gone through various types of emotionally-charged situations since then, I’ve also figured out that each time I encounter a new emotion, I have to 1) take the time to figure out what the emotion is, 2) pinpoint the cause of the emotion, 3) construct a mental model that will help me process the emotion, and then 4) do the processing.

It often feels like I have 3 more steps to attend to, where more emotionally mature people intuitively know steps 1 – 3 and can skip directly to step 4 without much strum und drang. Meanwhile, there’s me over in the corner, sobbing, trying to put a name to what I’m feeling because I have no earthly clue what it is. I have to approach it from the side, using logic to examine my own actions and compare myself against others who have gone through similar circumstances (or fictional examples, which is perhaps more problematic but easier to pinpoint due to the stylized nature of most fiction writing).

Eventually I figure it out, and process out the emotions, and all returns to equilibrium.

As I’ve grown into adulthood, processing emotions has become slightly easier, and I expect that it will become still easier over time now that I have a few heuristics built up. I still have problems identifying how I feel about certain things, especially new experiences, because I have no prior emotional framework for that sort of thing. I’ve learned to not war with the fact that I have feelings. I try to acknowledge my feelings — but I do often have a very difficult time admitting those feelings to others.

So I don’t lose by having feelings, just by showing them in public.

Does that make me a Gamma? No.

Is it a little bit embarrassing? Yes.

Not gonna lie, it’s a little bit disconcerting to see one of my biggest personality struggles pinpointed so directly in a description of men who are the most odious to deal with in real life. That association is not flattering to my ego. (LOL)

Personality metrics have been helpful in understand the origin of my inadequacies in processing emotions. Now, I know that the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is often derided as being unscientific, but I find that it is incredibly useful as a heuristic, both to understand other people (why they act differently) and myself.

Every time I take the test, my results indicate INTP, as do more of the internet population as would seem likely since INTPs are allegedly a mere 3% of the population (although the INxx types tend to self-select into the online world). I suspect that a high percentage of internet Gammas would also test this way. The one(s) I knew in college certainly did.

Following the theory laid out by Isabel Briggs Meyers, each function can be laid out in an “order of operations” of sorts, like so:

  • Dominant Introverted Thinking
  • Auxiliary Extraverted Intuition
  • Tertiary Introverted Perceiving
  • Shadow Extraverted Feeling

Poor little feeling down there at the end. The theory comes with a warning that often, when someone is forced to react based on a “shadow” function, their actions will come across as crude and childish — not up to that person’s normal standards of thinking or behavior. I certainly see evidence of that in my own naive approach to emotions.

Briggs goes on to remark specifically on feeling in certain personality types:

The least-developed process of the introverted thinkers inevitably is extraverted feeling. They are not apt to know, unless told, what matters emotionally to another person, but they can and should act on the principle that people do care about having their merits appreciated and their point of view respectfully considered. Both the working life and the personal life of the introverted thinkers will go better if they take the trouble to do two simple things: say an appreciative word when praise is honestly due, and mention the points on which they agree with another person before they bring up the points on which they disagree.

I had the great fortune of being raised by an ENFJ mother, for whom feelings are a big part of life, and have worked quite a few jobs doing customer service, which has forced me to empathize with others and consider that other points of view include feelings.

For those introverted thinkers who have not spent time in an environment that invited (or forced) them to consider life outside their own heads, this may be a big reason why they are inadequate at dealing with — and therefore dismissive of — feelings.

Ugh, Internet Service Providers

True life: I once lived without home internet for three years because I hated my ISP options (and also couldn’t afford it). The library and the unlimited data plan on my phone got me through that period of my life.

Now I’m in a position to set up internet service again, and this time I don’t have the luxury of an unlimited data plan. I’m with Republic Wireless, which is dirt cheap but runs on wifi most of the time — so half of my phone data is tied to wifi.

I’ve also committed myself to posting on this blog every day, so internet is a necessity.

Since I point-blank refuse to contract with Comcast and my new landlord will not allow a dish on the building, my choices are Century Link or Frontier.

Frontier sounded promising (in theory).

Storytime:

  • I called Frontier because I heard they had just rolled out in my neighborhood. I was moving into a new place and needed Internet, and this was when Comcast/Verizon opposition to Net Neutrality was really starting to peak.
  • Fronter had great pricing and options, but couldn’t get a technician to do the setup for 2 weeks. Also, they wanted over $100 for the setup fee. I said thanks, but no thanks, my job depends on me having Internet access to tend to emergencies that could pop up in the middle of the night, so 2 weeks with no connectivity is a showstopper. We hang up the call and I never signed up, agreed to, authorized, whatever — I at no point during this brief phone call elected to be a Frontier customer.
  • Frontier processes me as a new customer. They send me a modem in the mail, and then a past due notice, saying I’m 60 days past due on my setup fees.
  • I called Frontier and asked them “what the fuck.” They proceed to promise me that it was just a mistake. The rep instructed me that ‘I didn’t need to return the modem, I could just throw it away (wtf) and that this would all get cleared up when the next “cycle” ran or whatever.’ (I got all of this in writing)
  • 30 days later, I got a notice from Frontier notifying me that they were turning my account over to third-party collections. I freak the fuck out on customer service and on Twitter until I got a senior manager in their support org speaking with me directly on the phone. She finally cleared things up, and I got all of the outcomes in writing from her directly.

So, long story long, FUCK FRONTIER.

 

Looks like I’m stuck with Century Link.

Inside the Heart of Darkness

The other day I outed myself as working in higher ed.

Gasp! Shock! Horror!

It’s not like working in higher ed gives one leprosy or anything, but I often feel like I’m betraying my own inner convictions by working in this field. (Also, lepers get leprosy? Just when you think the English language harbours no more surprises….)

I still remember reading to Antifragile for the first time and coming across Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s turn of phrase “lecturing birds how to fly.” It is the perfect descriptor for much of what goes on in academia (the other would be an eternal debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin*).

The current incarnation of the ideal of the university has been corrupted by pseudo-market forces. There is an attempt to define, commodify, and quantify “learning,” but the overreach of the government into the educational system (via Federal financial aid, research funding, and other mechanisms) has created an utterly monstrous system that is divorced from any existing free marketplace of ideas.

It has taken way more time that it should have for the scales to fall from my eyes in regards to the corruption of academia, and yet inertia keeps me in academically related jobs. (The fact that academia is a funhouse-mirror parallel to business doesn’t help either–writing a resume that translates academicese into business-speak is a challenge that I’m only starting to get the hang of.)

All this is to preamble the fact that I’m in the running for yet another academic job, one that is farther inside the dense thicket of academic administration. Like, this one is basically the operations manager of the heart of darkness. It’s a job where no matter how many people would like me as a person, they’d all hate me because of my role.

This is one of those instances where doing a good job is supporting a lot of philosophies and social forces that I don’t believe in, and don’t believe are good for anyone. My unofficial motto right now is “data has no soul” and I would essentially be doing the opposite of that, in addition to materially supporting the life of the university system as we currently know it.

Realistically though, I’m actively doing those things now in my current position. I don’t actively practice what I believe — which makes me a hypocritical wagecuck and part of the reason that the self-help industry is still alive and well and aimed squarely at the alt-thinking crowd.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this situation, but I do know that other factors might make the decision for me. There are other things I can change to make my life better and more compatible with my beliefs that don’t involve changing my immediate industry.

In fact, I may even get a better view of just how jacked up the university system is. I’m trying to leverage my experience and observations in a way that will be helpful to others, so an additional angle of approach might be helpful. Deep undercover, me.

In the meantime, I’ll to continue to work at making myself antifragile. Despite the answer I give in interviews, I do not see myself in a management position in five years. I see myself living in a little house surrounded by a meadow, publishing books for a living.

 


* And yet, if you reference that phrase, people will not understand what you mean. Classical education, bah!

The Architecture of Chronic Illness

Sometimes I underestimate the amount of impact that chronic illness has had on my life.

Some people live their lives untethered, flitting from one activity to the other. Or, conversely but just as freely, they live driven toward a single goal. In both cases, nothing gets in their way. They aim themselves at what they want, and go for it.

I envy them, in a way.

My path has been much less clear. My river is full of snarls, backeddys and boulders — to navigate well, I must always have my eyes open. I scope out the river in front, the depth underneath, and feel the the wind’s speed and direction. In order to live my life, I have to plan ahead, outsmart my own guts, and make changes on the fly when my own body decides not to cooperate with me.

Does this always have to happen? No. I can go back on high-octane pharmaceuticals and live a relatively normal life for a while (that is, until the side effects catch up to me again). I’ve chosen this life, to live without drugs but with a treacherous body.

Sometimes I wonder if this envy is a byproduct of looking at other people’s lives from the outside in and missing all the hairy, awful details that a person chooses not to share with the world. There are certainly lots that I refrain from sharing. But I’ve also had conversations with people, and interacted with friends, where they talk about a lack of common ground with people like me who have to fight through chronic illness to get where we want to go.

I have a doctor friend, for instance, who doesn’t know how to work though sickness. To his credit, he’ll admit that he becomes a big baby when he’s ill. But because he’s always been so healthy, he has no framework for unhealth.

Dissimilarly, I made friends with a guy who was one of the bangers, who took advantage of his cool, clear river to swim from shore to shore, and explore every rock and branch that came along, as he took a passing fancy.

It was very difficult making plans with this person, because everything I do has to be planned out, but most everything that he does is spontaneous.

It’s in those moments, when the incompatibility between my life and another’s shines bright — so bright that it prevents us from connecting — when I feel my disease most keenly.

It’s not the physical discomfort that the problem — that’s easy to live through — but the utter disconnect with people whose bodies are the vehicles for their souls and nothing more.

My body shapes my life.

I’d rather be…

I don’t smoke, but I’d rather be doing this than what I’m doing today.

Love this drawing by Ginger Haze.

Normally I hate Lord of the Rings alternative universe reimaginings, but this one seems both faithful to the book and imaginative (rather than full of gratuitous fanservice).

Anyway, today is the day I get paid to pretend to be an extrovert for 24-hours straight.

I’m going to pretend that I’m Galadriel instead.

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