eddyfate

I originally debated just not talking about this, but I need to get my head wrapped around it, and I do that best when I write things down for other people to read (which explains why I'm a writer, I guess). I then debated being very casual and flip about it, but I'm not there yet. So I'm just going to lay it out straight.

( Cut for those who have no interest in my family's problems. )

This is something I've been meaning to write for a while (as in years). An article that I recently found reminded me, as well as how some people react to some of my status messages or the like.

( I am an introvert. )

Got back from SERE. The convention itself was actually fine, and I got a lot more work done than I anticipated. However, a lot of stuff happened to me outside that con (part Camarilla-related, part personal life) that has made me so anxious and upset that a couple of times I just shut down. Being around friends and co-workers (old and new) as well as actually seeing snow for the first time in a year helped, and being able to repair another old friendship helped as well.

All in all, it's been an emotional roller coaster, and when that happens, I get what I call an "emotional hangover."

I don't know if other people get this. After a rocky time, I get headaches, it's hard for me to eat, and people are just louder and more irritating to me -- much like an alcohol hangover. I joke that drama is a poison, just like alcohol. Really, though, I think it's my body chemicals charged up for action and going nowhere, as much as my hind brain really wants to just scream and yell and bite and claw. Usually (like any practiced drunk) I can handle my hangover, but this was the emotional equivalent of a bender -- just when I'd get over it, the binge started again, so I've come down a few times in a row, crashing harder each time.

So, like most detoxing, I'm going to put away the drinks situations for a while. There's really nothing I can do in either situation anyhow except for stare at it, so I might as well just lock them up and focus on something else for a while. If I don't want to talk or I'm being particularly short, it's not personal -- I just need to drink water focus on other things for a while.

Edit: I had thought I set this to disabled comments. Anyhow, I'm fine (far better than I was this weekend), and I appreciate the sympathy and concern. This was more an opportunity to let people know why I'm being a bit prickly, and to see if others have the same psychosomatic reactions I do.

And no, I don't want to vent or talk about it, thanks.

Earlier this morning I posted a long rant. Then I filtered it. Then I deleted it. The reason for the rant is secondary -- it was about ignorant people saying ignorant things about me from the safety and comfort of the rumor mill, but I starting thinking about why I reacted so strongly to it. One thing I've noticed about myself is that some of these things I can just laugh at, but some of them really bother me, and I couldn't really figure out what the difference was.

For a while, I thought I was thin-skinned, and I needed to grow hardier to criticisms. But over time (especially over the past year), I've found that I can have quite vigorous conversations with someone about something I feel passionately about, and not get upset afterward. I thought it might have been the idea of not being able to defend my opinions, but that's also not true -- I've intentionally bowed out of conversations that I knew were not going to go anywhere meaningful or argued myself blue for hours to no effect, and I've been pretty blase about random rumors and anonymous Internet comments. So the need to "know my accuser," as it were, doesn't seem to be the issue.

Then something that David has said repeatedly clicked in my head this morning. He talks about four kinds of conversations: child to child, adult to child, child to adult and adult to adult. (I admit I'm fuzzy on the details of where this theory came from, and I might be getting it wrong -- bear with me here.) The general gist is that conversations start from one of the four stances and can migrate between them. Child to child is, basically, schoolyard taunting: "You're an asshole!" "No, YOU'RE an asshole!" Adult to child is admonishing: "You need to do things this way." Child to adult is petulant: "I don't want to do things this way!" Adult to adult is productive: "I think we need to discuss why this is a concern and come to some resolutions." In thinking about my own reactions in these terms, it hit me:

I approach conversations as if speaking to an adult, and I hate it when people force me into the child role.

Assuming I'm not completely mangling the theory here, I think this can be done in absentia: to wit, the "child" is perceived to have misbehaved, and is either shunned (child to child) or talked about in quiet, disapproving tones behind their back (adult to child). My frustration comes from not only being forced into a conversational stance that I don't prefer, but also when I have no opportunity to try to migrate the conversation to adult to adult. What's worse, it causes me to lash out, and my first reaction is to move to a child stance, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. The age-old advice of "don't give the bully what he wants" is true even in the adult world, and some days I still find myself walking away but wanting to just hold the opponent down and beat them until they stop talking -- hardly an adult reaction.

(I should take a break here and point out that my last violent act done with malicious intent was eight years ago, and that was throwing a cell phone at a mirror. And honestly, the idea that I could cause any meaningful injury to anyone is about as unlikely as my pug dog winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

Could I improve my own tendencies and desire to slide to child stance? Absolutely, and I certainly am not trying to place my own inadequacies on others. But at the same time, I can't help but think that those who intentionally put me in such a place either don't know or don't care about my desire to have adult to adult conversation. Further, I have to really consider how often I allow myself to be placed in that situation, and how productive and useful it is for me as a person.

Nothing world-changing going on or anything -- it really all boils down to a bad morning, combined with a bit of self-realization. For those new to my blog, I post these bits of self-realization up partially to see if this holds together once I write it out, partially to reflect on as time goes by, and partially to hold myself accountable for when I fuck up. Comments are always appreciated, but I might not always be open for debates on my self-observations.

Edit: On rereading things, I noticed that I've talked about this before. "Soft" is adult to adult, "Loud" is child to child or child to adult, and "Firm" is adult to child.

Edit 2: krisnitori pointed out which book the theory's in. Coincidentally enough, it's Games People Play.

The past couple of days I've been dealing with a very emotional, complicated situation involving an unknown number of people (long story, not worth getting into). The long and the short of it is that it was a huge misunderstanding and it's well under way to being resolved, but it brought something about myself and my new home to my attention.

Most of my life has been lived in the Midwest. I had a decently complicated family, but the most meaningful influences in my life were families of Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans (and being disowned by Pennsylvania Dutch probably had some impact). My mom was an American growing up on an Air Force base in England. My wife grew up with hippies and Italians, and also in the Midwest. Now I've moved to the South. I've always heard about "Southern hospitality" and Southern culture, but I don't think I was really prepared for the culture shock when there's a serious problem until recently, and it caused me to examine how I approach conflicts.

All my life, I've struggled with two resolution methods that I've internally dubbed Soft and Loud. Soft is "let's sit down and talk about this, and try to find a resolution." It's diplomatic, it's passive (and can be passive-aggressive) and it's unemotional. Loud is "I'm fucking angry and will beat my frustration into you until you acknowledge it." It's emotional, it's ugly and it's powerful. Both Soft and Loud have their uses in certain situations.

(There's also Silent, but that's actually a lack of resolution method, so let's skip that.) [1]

Fuck, but I would love to say that I can use each in the best possible situation all of the time. In reality, there are times when I'm Soft where I should be Loud. (Getting dicked around by Verizon Wireless for two weeks because I was being too nice is an example.) There are times when I'm Loud where I should be Soft. (Calling a friend I don't know that well and chewing him out probably isn't the best way to handle things.) I certainly make mistakes, and there are times when I want to be Loud when I end up being Soft, and vice versa. (More Loud overpowering Soft, honestly -- Irish temper and all that.)

What's interesting is that most people see Soft, and assume that's all that's there. People who know me get to see Loud, and are usually surprised at first. That's because I can control Soft more than I can control Loud. When I'm Soft, I can speak eloquently, listen to people and think of solutions. That also means I can be more manipulative, and I have more chance of pushing a situation closer to what I want. When I'm Loud, it's all me. I'm right there, in your face, raw as hell. I can beat someone down with the sheer power of my passion, but that's the only trick I've got. Once you duck that punch, I'm totally open. That's why I try to reserve it for my friends and loved ones -- I know I can leave my side open and they won't stick a knife in it.

Honestly, Loud scares me at times. I've lost control a couple of times, but never to violence on people -- at most, I break stuff, and even that's only been once in the past decade. Maybe that's why I dig Vampire so much, because on a smaller level I viscerally get the idea of a Beast inside of you taking control and dictating your actions. I don't like being Loud.

Seems schizophrenic, doesn't it? I guess on some level, it is. It reminds me of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself:"

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

One thing that balances it out is that I take responsibility for my actions, whether I accept them or regret them. When I make mistakes, I accept that I made a mistake. If I support my actions and it upsets someone, I accept that my actions have upset someone. In both cases, I shoulder those choices, good and ill. The part that seems to trip people up is that I expect the same from others. I've actually gotten more angry at people who I know disagree with me and cave to agree with me because they won't accept the responsibility of their disagreement than I have with people who just disagree with me. But I digress. The point is, I feel I have every right to celebrate my successes, as long as I also squarely face my mistakes, the same right as every other thinking person. That's actually part of the reason why I made this journal in the first place -- to make myself publicly accountable for my fuck-ups as much as for my slam dunks.

Let's make this more interactive. Do you, my loyal readers, have similar problems struggling with how you approach conflict, or have you mastered that admirable skill of being able to deal with problems in the best possible way each time?

---

Edit - Footnote 1: On reflection, I'm actually developing a third method -- Firm. Firm is kind of a balance between Soft and Loud, and it's only come up in purely professional situations. I thought maybe it's Soft, but really Soft is very "let's work this out, let's meet it the middle." Firm is "I understand and appreciate your concerns, but we're doing it this way." I can't say much about Firm, so I think the rest of the entry stands well as is, but it's something for me to pick at in the future.

I haven't been posting as much on here in the past year about my personal life, aside from some piped Twitter updates. Part of that is because much of my life is my job nowadays, and I'm not always comfortable talking about work details in a public forum (and while I use filters now and then, I've found that when I have to start locking things down, I just end up talking to people directly). Another part is that I don't often boot up my laptop at home anymore, when I have free time. However, talking to some podcasters at Dragon*Con about airing their personal lives (George Hran, Soccergirl, JC Hutchins and Evo Terra, specifically), I decided that I do want to get back in the habit of writing about my life. It's a stress relief that I enjoy, and it helps me to look back on my life and have some perspective. I've had this LJ for five-is years, and I still find it has utility.

One of the things that this blog has caused is a sense of quasi-celebrity that has only increased since I started work at WW. I've never quite gotten used to people coming up to me who now who I am and what I do without me knowing them at all. However, I realized that I am becoming more used to it: it's something I can anticipate and roll with easier than I could a year ago. I think my retreat from my LJ was a response to my initial disquiet, but it's time to get back on the horse.

Just something bouncing around in my head today as I sit at he sick today, playing with my iPhone and feeling disappointed and frustrated with people.

To all those who expressed concern, thank you. I'm doing fine now -- I was just a bit overwhelmed. Normally I just go talk to greebotrill when I have days like that, but while I talked to her over the phone quite a bit last night, it wasn't the same as having her there. But I had a couple of beers and watched the rest of Babylon 5 Season Four, and this morning I'm just a little tired from still trying to kick this damned not-quite-a-cold.

So over the past week I've been busy at work, working on things I can't talk about that all hit my desk at roughly the same nanosecond.

Last night I got some news that I can't talk about. It's not bad, but it's a big change in my life.

Today I got completely different news that I can't talk about that also isn't bad but changes a lot of my mid-term plans.

Over the course of the week I've been struggling to fight a cold and mostly winning, but it has been mentally and physically exhausting.

My family will be moving down after February 28th, which is fantastic, but now I'm in limbo between not-moved-yet and ready-to-move.

I still don't have the debit card I sent for, the manual or software for my new cell phone, or any word on whether I have to deal with jury duty in St. Louis. I would think that there's a problem with me getting mail at my work address, but I get unsolicited proposals just fine.

I was wondering why I've been a little fried and on edge the past 24 hours, and I think I finally identified it as stress. It's mostly for good reasons, but it's still a lot. So, while I had planned to catch up on old personal emails and maybe hack some more at that mountain of work, instead I think I'm going to have a few beers and watch DVDs until I fall unconscious.

2007 turned out to be a completely different year than I anticipated. While I don't consider New Year's Resolutions to be a straight-jacket of things to conform to for twelve months, they do offer a good way to look at the previous year and the coming year. Plus, I was asked to come up with resolutions for work as well. So, I figured I would combine them all in one place. Here's my resolutions for 2007.

Last Year's Resolutions

Continue to Find Paying Writing Work. Considering I was hoping to get more freelance work and ended up making it a full-time career, I consider this a massive success.

Get Back Into Fitness. I've had some ups and downs with this, but while I haven't done as well as I would hope with this, it is still something I'm working on, and I've been doing good about getting over the hump of my illnesses. Mixed success.

Moderate My Free Time. I had done well with this, but now my free time is going into my job (and I'm okay with that). Mixed success.

Make More Efforts To Be Social. My entire social structure has changed, at least regarding people that I can reasonably hang out with. As such, I'm absolving myself of this resolution.

Advertise More, Reveal Less. The need for this has actually increased significantly. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure this was a good resolution to have in the first place. I'm still thinking it over, but it has been a success.

Total: Success.

This Year's Resolutions

Learn As Much As I Can. I've been thinking over what I can do to help my job for the coming year, but the barrier I kept running into was that I didn't know enough to predict what I'll need to resolve. Then I realized that was exactly what I should resolve to do -- learn as much as I can.

Improve My Current Writing and Design Skills. There's a wealth of experience around the office, and I would be a fool not to take advantage of it and learn as much as I can, while being careful to make sure that I'm actually learning and not just aping what I see others doing.

Become A Better Manager. Most of what I do is basically management -- managing projects, managing freelancers and managing development interns. While I have some ad hoc experience in managing people, I haven't been consistently a manager for some time, so it's something I should actively work on.

Get To Know The People I Work With. A lot of what I do is connected to a lot of different aspects of White Wolf Publishing, and a fair percentage of CCP North America overall. I should continue to expand my connections with others in the company, and learn about them as people as well as their strengths and weaknesses as co-workers.

Play More Stuff Just To Play It. I tend to get saddled with running RPGs, and I tend to play stuff I'm working on. While it's good to see how your stuff works, that's still work. I need to play other stuff, not only to broaden my horizons, but to continually remind myself that I play these games for fun, too.

Read More Stuff Just To Read It. Similar to above, it's very easy to spend most of my reading time just reading things that are important for work. I have a stack of books that have nothing (or very little) to do with work that would like some loving, too.

Improve My Health. This covers not only the age-old "lose weight" resolution, but also continue to make improvements to my health overall. I think the Georgia climate agrees with my inner ear, so that's certainly a start.

Some people have been posting these memes of "Things you didn't know about me." I decided to reach back into the past, pull up a very old and long meme I did back in 2004, revise it a bit, and put it up here. Here are ninety-seven things you probably didn't know about me.

( Oh hell yes I'm cutting this one. )

I've finally hit the end of an extremely surreal week. It's been up, it's been down, and sometimes it's been both at the same time. And during all of it, I've been grinding through a few long nights of working on various LARP materials. I think I'm going to be on mental cruise control until after GenCon with the amount of stuff I have to process and the various changes in my life. But it really has been a rollercoaster, and I've reached that kind of blank mental state you get at the end when you're half-surprised to still be alive.

Tonight, more writing. Maybe some more Transformers on my PS3 after, just something to let my brain cool down.

Something I've been struggling with the past few weeks is that writing has been tough for me. I realized that while I did a lot of design and development for MET Awakening, I haven't done regular, constant writing since 2005. I've been focusing more on game design than developing prose, so some of my difficulty has been painfully stretching very out-of-shape muscles (an analogy I've come to appreciate as I continue to get my workout routine back in gear). And of course, I haven't written anything substantial that I wasn't being paid for in nearly six months. Listening to writing podcasts and authors talking about their podcast novels made me realize that I had stopped writing for fun, writing for me.

Part of this was because I had convinced myself that I didn't have time, that I couldn't detract from paying work to devote in entertaining myself. But just like I've always tried to play games so I didn't come to see game design as work, now I have to write for pleasure to keep my writing from becoming just a job. Once I realized that, I looked at my time schedule and made some tough decisions. I dropped my Camarilla position to free up some time. I have an hour lunch break that I currently use to read -- now I'll devote 15 minutes to writing each day that I can. I have half a moleskine journal still, so I set an arbitrary goal to fill it by January 1, 2008. Even if I spend fifteen minutes a day freewriting my grocery list, I have resolved to write whatever is on my mind.

I started this a few days ago, and already my muse is flowing with ideas again. She realizes that it's okay now to talk, and she's talking a lot. I had jokingly given myself permission to write even non-salable fiction like fanfiction and stories about my RPG characters, but in the shower last night several ideas that I have been kicking around for years clicked together. Somehow, my ten-year old cyberpunk RPG idea, my idea for a Midway City prequel, my notes for a Midway City novel (that, for various reasons, wouldn't see the light of day) and a fanfiction story idea suddenly gelled into... something. Something really interesting. It may go nowhere (as 90% of my ideas do), but it's something for my mind to focus on during those fifteen minute spurts.

So, there is a chance that you might see a return of fiction in this journal. I'm still going to give priority to paying work (because, well, duh), and there's a fair chance that some of the stuff I write for me might not even be good enough to post in my own journal, but after I enjoy creating something, there's also the joy of sharing it with others for their appreciation. Or utter disgust, natch.

I'm buzzing from a high of good entertainment.

Last night, I did my usual cardio and writing routine. I had a couple of hours left in my evening, so I watched "The Curse of Fenric", a story from Doctor Who's original last season that featured cryptography in World War II. A few days ago, I had started reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson which features, among other things... cryptography in World War II. "Fenric" was always one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, and the accidental collusion of the novel and the television show really resonated with me and helped to enjoy each a little more.

Then this morning, work has been proving to be slow. The office can get a little loud, and I've been told I can listen to my iPod at work (which is how I catch up on my podcasts), so I started listening to the podcast of Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword by Tee Morris. It's a story about a fantasy dwarf (axe, beard, gold, the whole bit) transported by accident to Chicago in 1929. After studying the world he finds himself in and realizing he can never go home, he decides to find a vocation... as a private detective. Again, it hits that sweet spot of jazz, radio drama, hard-boiled detective fiction, and dwarves (they are my preferred fantasy race in fiction, although I tend to play humans in fantasy games).

None of this is high art, sure. I get a very different high from reading moving, powerful work like Slaughterhouse-Five and Lolita. But there's a different kind of buzz from reading, watching, or listening to thoroughly enjoyable entertainment that's done well and hits my personal sweet spots in what I like.

What hits your sweet spot?

I have a strange habit: I walk when I talk on the phone.

I'm not sure when it started, but I've done it for years now. When I get on the phone with someone, I will pace back and forth, sometimes for hours. If I try to sit or lie down, within a few minutes I'm up and walking again.

I wondered if maybe it was only with phones, but talking with a headset over AIM ended up with me standing up and walking in a very small circle in front of my desk. What worse, when I'm not using one of my hands to hold the phone to my ear, I gesticulate. To people that aren't even there.

Thinking about it, this is a general trend. When I'm standing at a podium, I fidget. I rock back and forth, or sway from side to side. I lean on the podium, only to stand back a moment later. If I'm on a good rant (such as when I'm LARPing), I pace back and forth in front of my audience.

Ah well. Something to work on (along with my overly loud laugh).

Went to doctor to have stitches and packing removed (although doctor forgot about the stitches). Prognosis is best summarized as "looks good at the moment -- we'll see in three weeks, unless your ear oozes something it shouldn't." Long day at work today (and it's looking like I'll have a lot of those in future). Got into my home office about two hours later than usual. Going through the process of realigning my brain and learning some new habits. My ear is throbbing -- just took a pain pill.

All in all, I think it's time to cash in some of my wordcount advance and fuck off tonight.

I've been having a pretty crappy day thus far. Nothing particularly bad, but a pretty constant buzz of annoyance from a variety of avenues all day. It has been capped off by the realization that I haven't heard any word about my replacement notebook dock from Dell, and after 15 minutes of digging around on the website and forcing it to speak to me, I discover that my service call order has been cancelled for some unknown reason. So, now I have to email Dell back and ask them WTFd00d?! And tonight looks to be a long night of Mage work, so the odds of my mood improving are not good. Maybe my cardio workout today will help me to blow off some steam.

So the past several days I've been missing important details and making stupid mistakes. I didn't notice it (which is always a bad sign), but enough little things have been happening that it caught my eye. My work is so detail-oriented, though, that it all slapped me in the face today. A quick (although slower than usual) calculation and a call to my doctor confirmed my suspicions:

The drug I'm on (Meclizine, basically a stronger version of Dramamine) is really slowing me down. As in "Do not operate heavy machinery" slowing me down.

So, I have a lot to do in the next week, and I have to do it much slower than usual to make sure I'm not making mistakes. If I say or do something that doesn't make sense or seems stupid, feel free to call me on it privately.

Apparently, he's a CGI artist.

As to everything else... eh. The past couple of days, I've left my brain largely unplugged, to process some changes in my local environment. I leave in something like 60 hours to Milwaukee and ICC chaos. Some I am looking forward to, and some I will be glad of when it's over.

So a common tendency many LJ users have (or at least through my observations of both myself and other LJ users) is to use their LiveJournals to vent. At first, typically anythings goes, but after the first couple of LJ flamewars, most users move to five general tactics [footnote 1]:

1) Cryptic LJ posts that still allow the frustration to be released without going into details.
2) Selective filtering of posts to increasingly smaller and smaller filters.
3) Moving the journal to "friends-only."
4) Not using their LiveJournals at all or for that purpose.
5) Some combination of the above.

Personally, over the past couple of years, I've moved to a combination of 1, 2 and 4, with an emphasis to try to reduce 1 in favor of 2 or 4 as much as possible (since for me it ultimately causes more problems than the brief period of stress relief it provides). When I do feel a need to post snark on some topic that is purely emotional of visceral and largely unhelpful to discuss in a purely public forum (i.e., an unfiltered LJ post), and I can't completely curb the instinct to avoid posting at all, I try to find a filter to post it to that will encompass people that I think will be supportive or appreciative of my quirks/personal failings without causing more stress than I'm already under.

However, over time I've noticed that this ends up in a particular cycle. First I get angry, and feel the need to write to get it out (1). Then, I start to consider which of my filters to post to (2). As my filters get tighter and tighter, I realize that the snark I intend to post is more and more inflammatory, and therefore less and less worthwhile to post to the Internet in any form. However, the more inflammatory the post, the more likely it is that the issue is one that I feel strongly enough about, rationally or otherwise, that I have to come to some sort of terms with it before I can comfortably proceed (thus usually requiring the combination of writing structure and friend head-check that such an LJ post provides). I then typically end up at 4 [footnote 2].

Ergo, the more likely it is that LiveJournal would be useful for my own purposes, the less likely it is that LiveJournal is the best forum for such purposes in the long run. Or to put it another way, the cost never quite meets the benefit.

I expect that most people have different experiences. However, given my mood recently, I've been more self-aware of personal strategies to deal with stress, and this one struck me as particularly eccentric.

Edit: jaka_merriman brought up a good tangential point, regarding LJ use in the context of free speech. I've summarized my opinions on that matter in a comment.

Footnote 1: Brave souls like naamaire excluded. This isn't a blanket statement, but a perception of trends.

Footnote 2: Although sometimes after having actually initiated 1 and/or 2, resulting in the "Where Did Your Post Go?" syndrome.