After a long summer break from class, I have once again returned to my “management interested course” and I am just as underwhelmed by it as usual. I’m still going to participate in it and put in an honest, good-faith effort since I want to one day do some kind of management stuff, but it is difficult not to look at the course I’m taking and the classes I’ve sit through with the jaded eye of someone who has watched management make mistake after mistake once the person who’d historically held the reigns passed away. Most of those mistakes were largely harmless and the rest are eased by the number of competent people involved who are able to negate–or at least reduce–any potential harm that might be done. Plus, they’re infrequent enough that the company I work for is still doing great. It’s really not a bad place to work most of the time, even as miserable as I can sometimes get when the stress piles on and I’m struggling to continue working at all, but it is undeniable that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias clouding the judgment of large swathes of the upper administration here, almost all of which becomes nakedly visible during these courses as one VP after another presents something they’re supposedly an expert in. That said, there are a few who clearly know what they’re talking about and while I might take issue with their presentations for other reasons, there’s no denying that the person presenting the current bastardization of the “7 habits of highly effective people” self-help/philosophy course knows his stuff.
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This Is About The Scott Pilgrim Graphic Novels And Definitely Not About Burnout
After last week’s post about the end of National Novel Writing Month and my goals for maintaining my writing habits going forward, I feel kinda bad writing about my continued deep and abiding exhaustion. Being at work has been draining, as it always is, and I’ve found myself frequently feeling spread too thin. Doing too much is kind of my defining character trait at this point, since I can’t really seem to figure out any other way to live my life and do the things I’d like to do. There’s just too much that I need (or desperately want) to do. So, I’m going to talk about the thing I bought myself as a treat for being a Responsible Adult (aka, doing all my DIY and cleaning projects before people showed up for Thanksgiving) and then read during my post-Thanksgiving recovery weekend. I finally decided to buy and read all of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. Specifically the large color ones. This has been on my to-read list for at least a decade at this point, but I usually just forgot about them (my reason for not buying them in the past five years) or didn’t have Graphic Novel Money when it came to buying books (you can get more book per buck with a paperback and I spent a lot of years needing to manage my entertainment budget very closely). I mean, I really enjoyed the movie and one of my closest friends loved the graphic novels, so it felt long overdue. Plus, I got a huge Black Friday discount on them despite ordering them over a week before Thanksgiving, so that helped. It also helped that there was a Netflix show that recently released and I figured I ought to read the graphic novels first.
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