Latenight Overgo

So, today's March the 10th--it's practically a month since my last post. But being the person I am, there's very nearly nothing about my personal life that needs updating, because the car still needs repairs and I still do pretty much the same things every week.

I suppose it bears mentioning that I haven't gone back to the ancestral home since the last post... It's possible that I don't really feel terribly welcome there when every trip back seems to be an opportunity for them to ask me to please take away everything that I may have ever put there (and in their eagerness this has started including cousins' stuff that they forgot was theirs); and even when there there's very little to actually talk about... one of the results of a nomadic life is the complete inability to join in on in-jokes or stories about how somebody did something particularly amusing at some point in time, which was like the other time somebody else said or did something else different but similar. The other thing, of course, is that I've got used to having my Saturdays all to myself for my chores and swimming and more or less sitting around vegetating or doing whatever else needs doing.

Like income tax, I really should get around to doing that at some point.

So my personal life is perfectly bland, other than that my manager played fashion advisor to me a week or so ago and now I have a couple new shirts, a pair of new pants, and a pair of new glasses that I have mixed opinions about; I've also started having oatmeal for breakfast, the same way I used to way back in TARC when I was going for my A-Levels, except that this time I'm using more raisins and not letting them stew too long--I used to leave the stuff around until everything was just about to fall apart, which may explain why it took me four months to finally decide to open that tin of oats. Surprisingly it's been pretty good, and just as surprisingly I'm running out of oats faster than I'm running out of raisins and honey (I prefer the former, really) and may at some point even need to buy a jumbo can of oats so that the raisins and honey will run out at about the same time. I quite like it when I run out of a whole set of things at a time, it's so much more convenient that way; and I've been eyeing a tin of Nestum for some time.

Work, on the other hand... bleargh. I don't know if it's me or something, but the troubles just never end; of course a certain amount of it is my lingering communication troubles--Mandarin is not my first language and English is not the first language of anybody in my vicinity and this has caused a fair bit of trouble when people ask for me to generate reports and I come out with something completely useless--

--these days my theme song, as I told somebody the other day, is Jonathan Coulton's Big Bad World One, specifically the line

what if the best that I can be/ Just isn't good enough?

Isn't it better not to know?

juxtaposed against I'll Have Confidence from the Sound of Music:

So let them bring on all their troubles

I'll do better than my best

I have confidence they'll put me to the test

and they certainly have done so. I've lost count of all the things that have gone wrong, but not the ways they've done so; at least, I think I could quite comprehensively compile a list of mistakes I've made and how I've tried to fix them and how successful these efforts have been, but it doesn't look like I've had any stunning successes so far. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I don't think I am; if you ask me, I'm half-convinced that everybody else seems to overestimate me. But then that's probably also my personality--I'm more used to thinking of bad things as my fault than that of anybody else. At the moment I really haven't any idea how to fix the underlying fault--which really would be more useful than my current stopgap measures--but Googling "how to be better" is completely useless.

My GM said he doesn't think I'm forgetful, just absentminded because I still don't/can't focus fully on the things I'm doing, which I did a bit of thinking about and he does make sense. After all I approach my work as a series of tasks, each of which is composed of a series of steps, and very often when I'm doing one thing I'm also at the same time wondering what to do next, or alt-tabbing to MSN, or half-listening to nearby conversations, or mentally playing a song in my head, or trying to keep a To-Do reminder up as well, or waiting for something, or worrying about something else; I might not call myself a multi-tasker but it does look like that's what I am--and I remember reading somewhere that multi-tasking leads to shortened attention span, forgetfulness, etc (because we're not computers and can't mentally alt-tab without losing some data). And somebody else suggested recording everything, which is another thing to try out next. So I suppose this means I should try doing something and fully focusing on it and its implications while doing it and keeping that up for the next week or so and see how it turns out.

All the same, I have at least two difficult conversations coming up next week because of one overlooked email back in January and because of one miscommunication a couple weeks ago.

I wonder, though, sometimes, whether it's more important for the speaker to be clear or for the listener to pay full attention; probably both. The Geography of Thought says that different cultures tend to emphasise one or the other, but it's starting to look like the people in my vicinity emphasise convenience--speakers expect the hearers to put in the effort to understand them and so don't necessarily put much effort into their outgoing communications, while expecting speakers to put in effort to make things easy to digest and thus don't put too much time into incoming communications either. I don't know how many times I've heard people complain that they have no time to read emails, which makes me half-wonder what the point in sending them emails is--there's no point wanting to be kept informed if you can't absorb that information, is there?

Still, that's a new lesson learned--to save the loquacity for this blog, and to email people in point forms. It offends my sense of language greatly, of course, but it seems a necessary pain.