Just read this post on Julius’s blog, and it hit a little bit close to home for me.
Makes me think.
What people like us need is to develop what I shall now call the anus of emotion. We need to be able to digest all of these thoughts of self-doubt and such, then expel the resulting remnants once all the value from such thoughts are used up. They can then be flushed away, and we could move on with our lives.
(what…too graphic?)
Scorpio (Oct. 24 — Nov. 22)
Your possess a distorted looking-glass, which has created a negative view of yourself. The stars are endeavouring to correct this. Evidence will emerge of how respected you are in the eyes of others.
If it wasn’t for the fact that my 4 days of remaining vacation days would expire at the end of this month, I would not have taken time off. I had no plans to go anywhere significant. Why would I take time off?
Prior to this week, my friend and I were planning on heading to Chicago on one of those Chinese bus tours. I mean, the price was right. It would have cost around $150 for the three day trip, which included hotels. If you can get past the fact that you’d be on the bus for long periods, it’s a great deal, you know? Well, apparently it’s the off season for these tours because they called my friend to cancel the tour because of a lack of people who signed up. Bullshit! We found out last week on Wednesday, leaving us kind of wondering what the hell to do. We poked around all of the travel sites trying to find some sort of really cheap deal/ We were aiming to do something for under $200. In the end though, nothing really came out to the same price. Hotels alone would have put us over budget. So, that was that. At the very least, we did some cross-border shopping as mentioned in my last entry, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
Still, this week off has been uneventful. Oh, I did meet up with a friend on Tuesday though who’s in town for a week before returning back to the States. I’ve been spending my days catching up on sleep. During the afternoons, I find myself napping just because there’s nothing much to do.
See, this is something that bugs me. When I’m at work, I complain so much about not having time off and being all worn out. Now that I actually have a period of rest, I complain that I’m bored. I wonder, will I ever find some happy middle ground? If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Well, tomorrow is the last day of vacation, and I’ll be back at work in April. There’s just no winning.
Yesterday, a friend and I went to Niagara Falls, NY to do some shopping. Over in the parking lot of the outlet mall, I passed by a minivan with this plastered on the side of the window:
Wow. The imagery, combined with the fact that it’s been pasted on the side of a minivan, on the window…on what seems to be an 8×11.5 size sheet of paper…
There are just so many levels to this. Hahah.
This past Sunday, CBC aired the show Test The Nation: IQ. As the name suggests, it was basically a televised IQ test, with a bit of a data mining element attached to it. In studio, there were several groups of people (e.g. surgeons, tattoo artists) taking the test to see if one group would prevail over another. When I heard about this show, I really wanted to sit down and participate from home, but when the show rolled around, I suddenly chickened out.
Yeah, I was afraid to participate.
I mean, I have some idea of what my IQ is–or was. I’ve just been rather…intellectually inactive for a while now. I have to admit that I was afraid that I had dumbed down a bit. That’s why I didn’t want to take the test. Isn’t that silly? I mean, I know that IQ is just a number. It really makes no indication of what one might call “practical smarts,” know what I mean? More than anything though, my ego just didn’t want to take a beating.
That would have been the end of it, but the other day I saw my manager taking the test online. I wasn’t aware that they made it available online. In any case, he was pleased with his results. After seeing the test…I just couldn’t resist trying it out myself.
In the end of it all, nothing has changed–my results were what I expected them to be. It’s mildly disheartening that university seems to have done nothing to make me smarter. Hahah. 
Of course…IQ is just a number, nothing more.
Yesterday, on the way to the streetcar, I met a coworker who wanted to speak with me about some unprofessional things I’ve been doing.
Apparently:
I apologized.
So, the case has been made in the past that I have a bit of an issue with effectively filtering the words that come from my brain and travel to my mouth. Some might say that I speak with candor or forthrightness. Others would say that I’m just plain stupid. To tell you the truth, it’s probably a bit of both.
The other day, our team had its monthly meeting with the COO (chief operating officer). These meetings usually occur to inform us of new initiatives that are going on at the higher levels of administration to make things run more smoothly. They’re generally high level discussions that aren’t necessarily directly related to what the developers do. After the meeting, he went from team member to team member asking what they thought of the meetings. One by one, everyone gave answers that the meeting were indeed informative. When it came to my turn, I said that I agreed with everyone, however I was feeling torn. I said that as much as the information was good to know, it’s so far above what I need to know that he was risking making the meetings less relevant than they could be. He agreed saying that he would have started the meetings closer to our level and moved up, but that situations were causing the meetings to take a top-down approach.
This is when he asked the following: “Well, I hope that these meetings aren’t completely worthless and that they’re at least marginally useful.”
In my head, I was thinking: “Well….”
What came out of my mouth: “Well, they’re not wooooorthless.”
His reply: “Ok, so they’re marginally useful. Thanks!” He then proceeded to (pretend to?) write something down in his notebook.
All I could do was look embarrassed and I put my head in my hands thinking, “Oh fuck, I’m dead.” My colleagues weren’t much help either as they were either in shock or laughing at my stupidity.
I’ve gotten wind that the COO has been mentioning in meetings that have occurred after that someone has called his meetings marginally useful.
Weeeeell, I’m still here…
Maybe next meeting I’ll just come in with duct tape over my mouth.
Just some notes to myself here.
Two CD release dates that I’m keeping an eye on:
May 7: Björk – Volta
This one appears to be a hip-hop album. I’m generally not one to go rushing out for a hip-hop album, but for her I’m willing to make an exception.
(ETA: OK…so not hip-hop. I should have known better. Heh)
May 14?/15: Linkin Park – Minutes to Midnight
Eh, what can I say? It’s been a long time coming. Their sound is unique, but they risk producing something that we might have heard before on their previous two studio albums. We’ll see soon enough.
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