The Gift of Giving
More than a month! I should really begin making this a more habitual thing. Even a sentence or two a day - but that would make this more like Twitter or Tumblr than what it is, with the benefit of course of having a somewhat better and more consistent record of the days of my life.
A quick gloss over the last month: shortly after the last post, there was a great falling-out between my then-manager and the GM, which ended in the then-manager leaving his post with immediate effect. This had a few effects; for one, my responsibilities immediately expanded to cover whatever he left behind, and for another, the command structure of the department shivered a bit and settled down into its current form - though, of course, at the moment it's changing a bit to accommodate the new manager. For some time during the in-between period I had a houseguest three days out of seven; the CEO has a son who was waiting to be drafted into the Singaporean National Service and so was drafted into the company in the meantime, and to save him the trouble of daily commuting, he was placed in my care.
Not that it was a great burden - I quite enjoyed having him around; for all he said that he was an introvert, he talked quite a bit and enjoyed physical contact enough that I could punch him in the back and expect friendly retaliation. We spent a fair few nights towel-whipping each other, in fact.
At the moment there is a new manager, who is adapting to me (I think) about as much as I am adapting to her - which is to say, not very much. We're still, I think, in that phase of feeling each other out and observing and taking notes, though she has started trying to improve things. I think that's a good sign.
I have at this writing gone nearly a week without shampoo - just water on the head. It was an idea I got from an article on Cracked about how shampoo actually harms the hair more than it helps, which is why there is need for conditioner and hair products and suchlike. So far I haven't seen any reduction in dandruff, but my hair is beginning to clump together in a way that makes people ask if there is product in it. I have not answered any of them with complete honesty, because "sebum" is a strange word to say out loud.
I have a house-guest who has been my house-guest for nearly two weeks now. He is - well, he introduces himself as "Fred" from "Persia", and was introduced to me through a friend of a friend of my parents'; he's currently waiting for the Singaporean government to process some paperwork that will allow him to begin working there and so we always shrug at people who ask how long he'll be around. He's a good cook (if a little fixated on mint and lemon), likes to keep things clean, and is extroverted enough to like hanging out with people into the wee hours - and, like me, he's very much a night person. He also likes getting out of the house and going shopping, with the result being that last month I only managed to save about RM300.
On the other hand, I've been forced over the past few months to begin evaluating myself to wonder how I make the decisions I make - what makes me open the house to tenuously-connected guests, or to read the books I read, or to write this, and so on and so forth - in essence I'm wondering what drives me and what I prioritise over other things.
Certainly there's a great deal of a sense of duty in there; nothing makes me feel as terrible as feeling that I've shirked or forgotten something I promised to do. And I already know I place quite a premium on information and its dissemination, since that seems to be at the root of a lot of my frustrations - but I still lie and mislead people for my own entertainment, so clearly my desire to help and my inner schadenfreude-manufacturer are more or less equally strong, depending on the conditions. I also think of relaxation and stability as being more important than novelty or stimulation... well, after all, I am an I_TJ. (There is apparently a theory that whatever an I_TJ exhibits is the opposite of their actual self, since the dominant attribute is introverted and the auxiliary extroverted. I'm not sure how accurate it is.) But that already helps...
Sometimes I catch myself describing myself as if I were a character in a story, or more accurately sometimes I take little sentences from a story about characters I admire and I try to live up to them. Like this one from September, by Rosamunde Pilcher: "[She] is a giver. She is gold." And that may explain why I feel compelled to give of myself to other people - on the other hand, that I found this admirable may be an indication that I was always a generous soul - or, at least, a selectively generous soul - and was just looking for a way to acceptably let it out.
...self-analysis always is a difficult thing to do.
A quick gloss over the last month: shortly after the last post, there was a great falling-out between my then-manager and the GM, which ended in the then-manager leaving his post with immediate effect. This had a few effects; for one, my responsibilities immediately expanded to cover whatever he left behind, and for another, the command structure of the department shivered a bit and settled down into its current form - though, of course, at the moment it's changing a bit to accommodate the new manager. For some time during the in-between period I had a houseguest three days out of seven; the CEO has a son who was waiting to be drafted into the Singaporean National Service and so was drafted into the company in the meantime, and to save him the trouble of daily commuting, he was placed in my care.
Not that it was a great burden - I quite enjoyed having him around; for all he said that he was an introvert, he talked quite a bit and enjoyed physical contact enough that I could punch him in the back and expect friendly retaliation. We spent a fair few nights towel-whipping each other, in fact.
At the moment there is a new manager, who is adapting to me (I think) about as much as I am adapting to her - which is to say, not very much. We're still, I think, in that phase of feeling each other out and observing and taking notes, though she has started trying to improve things. I think that's a good sign.
I have at this writing gone nearly a week without shampoo - just water on the head. It was an idea I got from an article on Cracked about how shampoo actually harms the hair more than it helps, which is why there is need for conditioner and hair products and suchlike. So far I haven't seen any reduction in dandruff, but my hair is beginning to clump together in a way that makes people ask if there is product in it. I have not answered any of them with complete honesty, because "sebum" is a strange word to say out loud.
I have a house-guest who has been my house-guest for nearly two weeks now. He is - well, he introduces himself as "Fred" from "Persia", and was introduced to me through a friend of a friend of my parents'; he's currently waiting for the Singaporean government to process some paperwork that will allow him to begin working there and so we always shrug at people who ask how long he'll be around. He's a good cook (if a little fixated on mint and lemon), likes to keep things clean, and is extroverted enough to like hanging out with people into the wee hours - and, like me, he's very much a night person. He also likes getting out of the house and going shopping, with the result being that last month I only managed to save about RM300.
On the other hand, I've been forced over the past few months to begin evaluating myself to wonder how I make the decisions I make - what makes me open the house to tenuously-connected guests, or to read the books I read, or to write this, and so on and so forth - in essence I'm wondering what drives me and what I prioritise over other things.
Certainly there's a great deal of a sense of duty in there; nothing makes me feel as terrible as feeling that I've shirked or forgotten something I promised to do. And I already know I place quite a premium on information and its dissemination, since that seems to be at the root of a lot of my frustrations - but I still lie and mislead people for my own entertainment, so clearly my desire to help and my inner schadenfreude-manufacturer are more or less equally strong, depending on the conditions. I also think of relaxation and stability as being more important than novelty or stimulation... well, after all, I am an I_TJ. (There is apparently a theory that whatever an I_TJ exhibits is the opposite of their actual self, since the dominant attribute is introverted and the auxiliary extroverted. I'm not sure how accurate it is.) But that already helps...
Sometimes I catch myself describing myself as if I were a character in a story, or more accurately sometimes I take little sentences from a story about characters I admire and I try to live up to them. Like this one from September, by Rosamunde Pilcher: "[She] is a giver. She is gold." And that may explain why I feel compelled to give of myself to other people - on the other hand, that I found this admirable may be an indication that I was always a generous soul - or, at least, a selectively generous soul - and was just looking for a way to acceptably let it out.
...self-analysis always is a difficult thing to do.
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