Hi, friends!
How do you change your mind? Or your behaviors? Are you more of a piece by piece small steps person, or do you tend to shift quickly? We joke in my family that our tendency on things is to hit the “fuck it, I’m done” phase and then it’s the point of no return. So like a bad job? It’s not burnout necessarily, but rather you’ve hit fuck it, I’m done. I will say I actually appreciate when I tip over into that mental state because it’s much lower stress than when I’m still trying.
Anyways, smaller things in life. Was there something you read or saw or tried that made you go, hmmm, I need to do that, instead?
I bought a cantaloupe at the farmers market this week. I don’t buy them at grocery stores. The foodborne illness risk is too high and you can’t effectively wash that lacelike skin they have. I don’t know where they’re grown for the bins in the stores, and if there’s livestock nearby there’s animal shit nearby there’s also all those bacteria and viruses from that.
Similarly, I don’t buy bagged salads anymore. Too many recalls with listeria. Too many people sick from listeria and other things. Again, it’s the ease of cross-contamination of animal shit. Too many pieces mixed from too many sources with all that potential cross-contamination. If I want lettuce, I’ll buy whole head romaine. It helps that I also grow salad greens in spring and fall, and usually I’m rather sick of salads by the end of the seasons.
Now, by no means am I 100% firm on these rules. If I’m travelling, I’ll eat cantaloupe or lettuce blends. If I’m at another person’s house, I won’t decline a salad. But you know… I do feel like it’s smart to reduce my chances of getting food poisoning.
When my first kid was born about 20ish years ago I quit swearing (at least 99%). I knew there was no way I’d be able to pick and choose depending on circumstances and when he was around, and the only way to avoid awkward conversations with daycare providers was to just quit. I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it up.
Depends. A sister once screamed at me that I was just like dad. That pretty much froze me because I didn’t want to be him/couldn’t be like him… at least his worst aspects. It got me thinking… a lot.
I can’t escape the good or bad parts of their behaviors/personality as they are as much a part of me despite what I thought. In the end I had to accept the worst parts of me. Partially, through that initial acceptance I have managed to mitigate the worst of my personality (and stop blaming it on my parents.)
On the other hand, sometimes on small things I’m so stubborn I’m a petulant shit.
When I was a kid, my friend across the street and I would say something like “well ok (my dad’s name)” when one of us was being a dick to the other. Way more effective than most other insults since my dad was often a dick.
fuck suckabee!!!
i’m opinionated and always right. i always have been…so, fuck it all anyway!
having a stepchild keeps you humble.
how does having a stepdaughter change my mind? it doesn’t. i’m still opinionated and right. however, now i’m willing to fight for what i know is right, instead of being complacent with a “fuck it” attitude.
i’ll die fighting this losing battle if it makes her life even slightly better…or not just to tell her how right i am, but to show her.
you’re not my dad!
we had this argument precisely once
im a volunteer…fuck you…and you want to think very very carefully about what you say next
It’s usually an epiphany type of situation, that just rings true like a tuning fork. Example: exchanging pleasantries with a coworker, ” how ya doing?”. “can’t complain, no one wants to hear it anyway”. That one hit me like a brick wall.
We recently had a massive corporate-wide project go live and one of the bosses I work with was downright noncommunicative to the PMO team that was wrangling it all. Enough that they would come to me on the side and I long ago learned to not answer for other teams, so I didn’t say shit. Snitches get stitches and all that.
That boss said to me the other day basically “you can’t coach or manage how other teams share your updates, so I just try not give any updates about project launches when we’re working on issues.”
That was one of those lightbulb moments for me too, because in my immediate teams we over-communicate but also like… “we need to ask a vendor for assistance with xyz, I don’t know which vendor” (because it’s not your role to liaise with them) becomes “Yellowbird’s team does not know which vendor will fix issue” on a slide to a vice president somewhere.
Been burned a few times like that when someone decides to use some nugget of info that maybe one shouldn’t have shared into an excuse.
I’ve put them a list. “Fools too stupid/too shitty to trust”
As much as I want to pay them back, I just find it’s better to ignore them… your boss isn’t wrong.
You always want to answer the question they ask, not the question you think they should ask.
If they ask what a due date is, you tell them just the date. Although if you have a good reason you might encourage them to ask more questions about whether that date has any connection to reality….
I tend to learn by example — and it can be particularly helpful when the example’s bad.
Thirty years ago I got fed up with being a drug-addicted mess. It’s a decision I had made many times before but for some reason this time it stuck. Good thing too, because my daughter was born the following year and somehow I ended up being an OK person. Mostly.
sometimes the re enactment is a little too real
bunch of parachutists needed to be rescued from trees at the market garden memorial…
Ever seen the movie A Bridge Too Far? Or even better, read the book by that name by Cornelius Ryan? Great stuff about the perils of groupthink and the guts of people trying to overcome it. I’m guessing there’s even more over there on that subject, though.
seent and read yup
now that pretty much all the survivors are dead tho….i wonder how much longer the memorials live
I took the train once from Germany up to Amsterdam and crossed a bunch of those rivers. It’s striking how short the distance was, but of course nothing goes fast when you have to get through machine guns and artillery and blown up bridges.
Or when protecting one man’s ego (Monty) is more important than dealing with reality.