Write a two-paragraph thing for work? Takes forever to get over writer’s block.

Write a seven-paragraph email to a friend? Takes like 20 minutes.

So the lesson here is to write articles to my friends. Also that I maybe shouldn’t write seven-paragraph emails.

The really great thing about being emotionally needy is the near superpower ability to alienate close friends. It’s quite powerful. I should run a workshop at the local community college.

Step 1: Reveal all your woes and insecurities to a friend. Commiserate with shared experiences.
Step 2: Happy that he/she is supporting you. Reveal more woes and insecurities.
Step 3: Wonder why he/she isn’t responding to you as much. Wonder if it’s because you’ve said too much. Wonder if he/she is actually secretly annoyed at you. Wonder if you’re wondering too much.
Step 4: Write a thinly veiled email to him/her explaining that he/she means a lot to you, and would he/she mind sharing a little more about him/herself.
Step 5. Panic that the above email was just a little too emotionally needy. React with more emails trying to cover up the fact that you’re emotionally needy. Eg. “Oh man, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to write that.”
Step 6. Send about five emails in a row, saying the same exact thing.
Step 7. Resign yourself to the fact that you don’t deserve to have friends.
Step 8. Sigh and have a beer.

I’m going to go to a birthday (my own!) party right now, so hopefully things will be better.

Tips for working from home

1. Change out of your pajamas.
2. Bathe.
3. When it’s the end of your shift, stop working. If you do continue working, it better be important deadline stuff.
4. Don’t goof off too much.
5. You can of course view NSFW material, but don’t be ridiculous. You’re supposed to be working, not wanking.
6. Remember to eat.
7. Similarly, remember to sleep.
8. Get out of the house occasionally. If not for human contact, at least for fresh air.
9. Remember to exercise. Even a brief walk will do.
10. Have a hobby that’s not work. It can be reading, knitting, etc. Just something that’s not work.

I’m not sure if I have depression. But I do suffer from the occasional lapse into melancholy and loneliness that is difficult to describe to most people. I get over it usually. It’s just one of those things, y’know, like an annoying itch or a temporary growth. The only issue seems to be how long it lasts.

This one has been around for a week or so. I hope for it to go away this week, as I have a birthday party this Saturday, which will probably help alleviate it. Right now I’m trying to drown out the negativity in my head with a lot of music and TV shows. It’s giving me a bit of insomnia, which has affected my work a little, so I’ll try going to bed a bit early this week to see if that’ll help.

Life goes on, etc.

Has anyone written a comedy sketch about Star Trek: Into the Darkness where the Darkness is a body orifice? Because I think I may have an idea for one, but it’s preeeeeeetty bad.

San Francisco Has an Evil Twin - The Bold Italic - San Francisco

So, I don’t exactly think SF is all roses either, but I do have an inexplicable love of it. Mostly because I don’t go out and I don’t socialize, so I enjoy the city based mostly on food, culture, and weather without the d-bags and hipsters cluttering my opinions.

Either way, the link above describes the city’s split identity. Which it certainly has; it sort of depends if you’re willing to change/tolerate the side you disagree with.

laughingsquid:

True Facts About the Introvert, A Parody of Ze Frank by Pleated-Jeans

Source: Laughing Squid

shanecyr:

priscillacscott:

Pretty amazing.

As a man and as a dad I’m pretty thoroughly ashamed and proud and embarrassed and sad and excited all at once, and gosh. That’s a lot of emotions to have about something that seems like it probably ought to be simple. But enough about me, this is an extraordinary piece of work.

THIS.

Source: priscillacscott

The Side Project 03: Ken’s Creamball Condom Mountain | The Side Project

We have an Important Strategy Meeting, talk tattoos, dissect Great Britain’s class system, reminisce about Barbie dolls, and jump into a mountain of condoms.

shanecyr: theadventuresofkatemarie: Cats are the best. <3 “Cats are the best,” she said, bewilderingly yet accurately. “<3”. I had a conversation with some colleagues a few days ago about the fascination humans have with cats, how our sense of affection for them not only forgives but gains traction from the fact that they spend 95% of their time engaging in behaviors we would consider unacceptable in friends or family. I’ve been thinking about this, for reasons that are probably apparent, for a fair chunk of the last 18 months or so. People love cats. And people hate cats. Not only do these seemingly opposite feelings manage to peacefully coexist, they in fact thrive together. A cat’s horrific social disabilities delight us to no end. So what is it? They are clearly not simply clowns to us, nor are they science projects. The human will to project reciprocal love onto cats is unstoppable. I’ve made this apparently controversial claim a couple of times before, and stand by it: cats do not experience love the way we do. I think it’s questionable whether they experience “love” at all. But I don’t think that’s of terrific significance—cats are tolerant of our projections to an extent because it works for them, and maybe for them that’s as good as what we call love. And if we take a serious look at why we make those projections in the first place, this should be obvious: we do the exact same thing. We write off how terrible they are because of what’s in it for us. We are two species who may be literally incapable of fully understanding one another. But we get something from them, and they get something from us, and what we give up for those things can often be considered an acceptably small sacrifice. The foundation of the relationship, then, is of course just that: each of us must shut down certain expectations of the other in order to survive. The cat must accept that we are imperfect service robots. We do their bidding a large part of the time, and we leave them alone a large part of the time. The remainder of the time we malfunction and do awful things like hug them and pet them for too long and oh, dear god, we kiss them. We put our mouths on them in a nonfunctional way, and for all we know, for them that’s like getting their cheeks squeezed too hard by gross Aunt June. Similarly for us, they keep to themselves most of the time, they look cute most of the time, they tolerate our advances some of the time, and on occasion they malfunction and destroy something that belongs to us, or barf all over our home, or steal the baby’s breath. Our assumption, the conceit that enables this precariously balanced mutual grace, is that they’re truly on board. That our projections, while not necessarily true, are indeed tolerated. Because the truth is we have no clue whatsoever. Cats’ modes of expression are utterly foreign, and so we hope. We hope that they hope. They’re odd and wonderful and we are essentially hopeless to understand them. We are not stupid. We are not gluttons for punishment. To be a “cat person” is to make a leap of faith. Bravo.

shanecyr:

theadventuresofkatemarie:

Cats are the best. <3

“Cats are the best,” she said, bewilderingly yet accurately. “<3”.

I had a conversation with some colleagues a few days ago about the fascination humans have with cats, how our sense of affection for them not only forgives but gains traction from the fact that they spend 95% of their time engaging in behaviors we would consider unacceptable in friends or family.

I’ve been thinking about this, for reasons that are probably apparent, for a fair chunk of the last 18 months or so. People love cats. And people hate cats. Not only do these seemingly opposite feelings manage to peacefully coexist, they in fact thrive together. A cat’s horrific social disabilities delight us to no end.

So what is it? They are clearly not simply clowns to us, nor are they science projects. The human will to project reciprocal love onto cats is unstoppable.

I’ve made this apparently controversial claim a couple of times before, and stand by it: cats do not experience love the way we do. I think it’s questionable whether they experience “love” at all. But I don’t think that’s of terrific significance—cats are tolerant of our projections to an extent because it works for them, and maybe for them that’s as good as what we call love. And if we take a serious look at why we make those projections in the first place, this should be obvious: we do the exact same thing. We write off how terrible they are because of what’s in it for us. We are two species who may be literally incapable of fully understanding one another. But we get something from them, and they get something from us, and what we give up for those things can often be considered an acceptably small sacrifice.

The foundation of the relationship, then, is of course just that: each of us must shut down certain expectations of the other in order to survive. The cat must accept that we are imperfect service robots. We do their bidding a large part of the time, and we leave them alone a large part of the time. The remainder of the time we malfunction and do awful things like hug them and pet them for too long and oh, dear god, we kiss them. We put our mouths on them in a nonfunctional way, and for all we know, for them that’s like getting their cheeks squeezed too hard by gross Aunt June. Similarly for us, they keep to themselves most of the time, they look cute most of the time, they tolerate our advances some of the time, and on occasion they malfunction and destroy something that belongs to us, or barf all over our home, or steal the baby’s breath.

Our assumption, the conceit that enables this precariously balanced mutual grace, is that they’re truly on board. That our projections, while not necessarily true, are indeed tolerated. Because the truth is we have no clue whatsoever. Cats’ modes of expression are utterly foreign, and so we hope. We hope that they hope. They’re odd and wonderful and we are essentially hopeless to understand them.

We are not stupid. We are not gluttons for punishment. To be a “cat person” is to make a leap of faith.

Bravo.

Source: pterodactylsftw