2020.08.05
"it is what it is."
That's such a classic reality television show line! Maybe next he can be part of a montage and say "I didn't come here to make friends."
Oof, Beirut.
Two thoughts on WFH life:
1. Remember Sniglets? Words for phenomenon that many people encounter but don't have a single term for? I need one for when you get 3-4 notifications for the same damn event at the same time, button on different devices or from different programs. Like I have my Outlook calendar events mirrored in Apple Calendar, but then both fire alerts, along with maybe Microsoft Teams separately for the video call, the phone and maybe even an iPad I keep at hand. Same for phone calls! Phone, laptop, iPad... all suddenly clamoring to let me pick up an incoming call. Probably I could shut off some of these that are always redundant...
2. Thinking again about the challenge of staying focused during meetings, how it helps to think of it as a form of mindfulness. Same for dealing with coder angst during the workday, actually... (hopping up to get a drink of water or whatever... then realizing it's already chugged by the time I sit down again...) Social media's the most obvious ever present temptation, though I know always present Internet has been an all-too-easy escape hatch since my first job. I've learned to control it but still.
I think about what I was doing before always-there Internet... like in high school and college. I was a doodler, and many of my class notes are decorated with doodles or sometimes even back-and-forth margin notes conversations from those times - analog text messaging! So not being fully engaged has always been a challenge for me, probably some kind of shadow-ADD. (I suspect that so many syndromes might be spectrums - which shouldn't be a tool for people with rather mild presentations to excuse and not work on their bad traits. But still, I do wonder what my behavior and cognition with Adderall would be like.)
Watched Sam Jay's Netflix special "3 in the Morning" last night. Really good! For the recording she's sporting a shirt with a Roxbury Zip+4 number on it.