Not feeling my best lately.

I have been on a not-very-great headspace kick lately, and I think some of it has to do with things that are out of my control and that I cannot influence in any way to make the lives of the people around me better. Some of it is feeling foolish and unintelligent that the solutions to puzzles I am trying to work out don't immediately leap out at me and allow me to progress even further along, as other people are doing just fine.

And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."

This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.

( As usual, something happened at work that has roused this particular weasel, and now I'm probably overthinking it. )

My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.

I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)

Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)

Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)

Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)

(no subject)

Let's begin with the story of how the industrial musical creator gave a year off of her job to someone he believed had a good novel in her, and how very, very right he was.

The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.

A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.

The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.

( And more people who make bad choices, and cover for other bad choices, and otherwise try to legitimize those bad choices )