#life logging

[tokyohanna]

Saturday journaling and paper catch-up. Coffee is a Mokamericano.

[heavymithril]

Adopted this absolutely adorable kitty two days ago! His name is Genji!

[heavymithril]

Hurt my lower forearm (NOT my wrist!) with a fall on ice on March 6th. I kinda went dizzy for a moment then picked myself off the ice and left sobbing. It was exceedingly painful so I promptly went to urgent care that night, where they gave me a brace.

After 2 weeks of healing my wrist /forearm was still bothering me so I got it x-rayed on March 20. Got the results back on March 24th and it is indeed fractured. So the orthopedist said that a cast let alone surgery wasn’t necessary and told me to keep my arm in the brace for the next month and come back for x-rays then. 🤷🏼‍♀️ So I guess my wrist brace is my new favorite accessory!! 👩🏼‍🎤

Unfortunately it's my dominant side which is significantly complicating doing almost everything - typing, cooking, even wiping my bum. My partner is being an absolute saint. The timing on it cuts both ways: on one hand, I just stay at home all the time and barely have to get off my couch. On the other hand I have to go to medical facilities; I’ve been minimizing that risk by going to specialized clinics rather than a more generalized healthcare facility.

[heavymithril]

I got laid off

3 weeks ago I lost my job along with my manager and another engineer on my team. They kept only 1 of us. It was part of 10-15% cuts across the whole division, they’re trying to reorient in a direction that doesn’t rely on data now outlawed by GDPR.

How it went down:

My skip-level manager pinged me to call him for a quick video chat, but since he’s east coast and pinged me in the morning I got the message when I was catching up with overnight notifications. Once I responded to him at about 08:30 he told me my position had been reduced and that it wasn’t performance related. Since I was still at home Rozinanteish, my partner, was available for immediate hugs and comfort since I started crying.

Then I tried to call my manager to tell him the news and it went to voice mail. Rozinanteish and I figured he didn’t want me to sob to him or something. It turns out his phone was dead so I finally got in touch with him on instant messenger a bit before our team-wide morning meeting. He hadn’t known about it and said it should have been him to lay me off. That said, there aren’t many reasons that a manager wouldn’t know about their underlings being laid off.

My manager opened that meeting by announcing that I had something to tell the team, and I announced that I’d been let go and started crying again. The rest of the team asked what happened so I related the above to them and it turned out that the other 2 who got cut had the same deceptively-vague ominous message waiting for them.

So it turned out that in being the first to get back to our skip and receive the news early, I was the omen for the rest of the team about what was going to happen. Rather than proceed with the usual morning meeting agenda we decided to cancel since we figured we were almost all about to be let go. Once it was official we decided to come in together for one last lunch on the company credit card & to pack up our desks. As it was now apparent that it wasn’t just me getting cut, my mood improved somewhat.

Over the lunch we spent a lot of time complaining about the hand we’d just been dealt, how shitty our skip level manager had been, and such. My manager thanked me for the heads up & apologized that I’d taken the emotional brunt of it by being first.

[heavymithril]

Footpad (the primary partner’s alias on this blog) & I bought a house!!!

It closed on my birthday a little over a week ago!!

I’m super excited to be taking this next step with him. I’ve literally been saving for a house since I still had an allowance as a kid.

That said, moving is stressful. We’re taking apart a place that feels like home in order to reconstruct that home in a new place, but in the meanwhile neither location feels completely comfortable. We have so many stacks of boxes building up, and there’s a heap in a corner of stuff for charity. Moving day is this upcoming Friday.

In other news, @oodlesofcoodles gave me Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee for my birthday which I’ve been enjoying tremendously. Got a neat color shifting Sombra from Overwatch hat too from @willfulwizard.

[tomato-bird-art]

A bit nervous about school etc but also stoked to have some more structure in my life again!! Idk what this means for my current job (kind of fell off trying to uhh apply to some other jobs) and scared of the workload but the teachers seem much more organized than last semester and they already sent us syllabi and stuff so yee

[heavymithril]

I started my new job 3 weeks ago and subsequently have been quite tired. I miss you all!

[failedimitator]

On a recent planet money episode, Goodhart’s Law was mentioned -- a concept I knew about but didn’t know had a name -- and earlier today while struggling to get through Brett Easton Ellis’ The Informers, a book I picked up precisely because it’s short and wanted to finish quickly so as to hit my Goodreads challenge target, I wondered if there isn’t another law out there about taking a short cut that ends up being the longer way, or, at the very least, just the same. 

I suppose I am into tracking my life more than the average person. At some points in my life, I was tracking my sleep, exercise, how I spent my time by the hour, my mood at random points in the day, and the people I spent my time with. The idea, of course, is to use that data to design a better life. Or nudge myself into doing... something. 

Getting off Instagram was one of the by-products of that. I was shocked at how many hours I spent on Instagram, Youtube, and Tinder (I already wasn’t using Facebook for more than Events).

Instagram was relatively easy to get rid off. And I can tell you without a doubt that I’m happier and more productive without Tinder. (not just in a capitalistic sense, but also in a social sense -- quality time with friends). Youtube is the one I’m still struggling with, although I’m not sure the word “struggle” is appropriate. I’m on Youtube every day, but there content I consume on there, for the most part, is stuff that’s useful. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. And if I had to use the word “struggle”, it would be in relation to Tinder, an app that I delete and reinstall at least once every month. I was off for about two weeks; now we’re on again*. 

I enjoy tracking myself, and that alone is its own reward, but I also knowledge the shadow side of it, so to speak. Like how I sometimes meditate for two minutes just to check the “meditate” box. Or how I was genuinely very sad after a 10K run when I realised Stava wasn’t running. Or how I’m picking these short books that I don’t very much enjoy just so I can get the numbers, while refusing to read old favourites because Goodreads doesn’t let me log a book more than once. 

Why, Goodreads? Why? Come on, learn a thing or two from Letterboxd.

*long story