Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-09-20 09:25 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-09-20 09:25 pm
I will probably reread this post once I've slept and go "wait, self, what?"
Tired, slightly baffled by this "having a job" business, chronically sleep-deprived due to inability to adjust to adult schedules, have been subjecting anyone in the physical/instant-message/tumblr vicinity to incoherent over-analytical outbursts of enthusiasm on a bizarre assortment of subjects. Unfortunately they are too fragmentary and generally incoherent to make it into a decent LJ post--I've tried multiple times over the course of the past week, got halfway through, and trailed off mid-sentence. So my mom has to deal with me attempting to explain my love for Jane Eyre at great length over the breakfast table or ambushing her as soon as she gets home with flailing about the Orion nebula and how space is so beautifully terribly vast and full of wonders, and tumblr gets an astonishing quantity of words about how awesome Martha Jones is, and I barrage sleepy friends on AIM with overenthusiastic meta about the last two episodes of Doctor Who or strange tangents about how Catholicism is hereditary. And none of it ever quite comes to anything.
Some part of my hindbrain is probably convinced that now that I'm in the pay of the corporate overlords, every geeky or eccentric or remotely interesting part of me is going to start dying a slow and ignominious death, and is lashing out with everything it's got. And there is a grain of truth in that--as soon as I'm aware that I have to self-censor to any extent I tend to err on the side of overdoing it and being absolutely, painfully bland. But I am hoping it's just a calibration problem: not quite knowing what is within the bounds of acceptably normal for work, thus sticking as close to the stock type as possible until I've figured out what levels the filters should be set at. I guess for some people this is an entirely unconscious process and the advice "just be yourself, only wearing business casual!" can be taken at face value, but I cannot actually remember a time when I wasn't terminally weird, so the setting-up of filters is an explicit process. The existential angst will probably subside as soon as I figure out how to wear business casual instead of having it wear me.
And I have wandered back into the place where the more I try to pin my thoughts down into words, the more the little fuckers squirm away, which is usually how I end up writing half a post and abandoning it. So I will quit while I'm ahead rather than mutter about performativity and how much more exhausting it is when you have to pretend you're not even acting.
Some part of my hindbrain is probably convinced that now that I'm in the pay of the corporate overlords, every geeky or eccentric or remotely interesting part of me is going to start dying a slow and ignominious death, and is lashing out with everything it's got. And there is a grain of truth in that--as soon as I'm aware that I have to self-censor to any extent I tend to err on the side of overdoing it and being absolutely, painfully bland. But I am hoping it's just a calibration problem: not quite knowing what is within the bounds of acceptably normal for work, thus sticking as close to the stock type as possible until I've figured out what levels the filters should be set at. I guess for some people this is an entirely unconscious process and the advice "just be yourself, only wearing business casual!" can be taken at face value, but I cannot actually remember a time when I wasn't terminally weird, so the setting-up of filters is an explicit process. The existential angst will probably subside as soon as I figure out how to wear business casual instead of having it wear me.
And I have wandered back into the place where the more I try to pin my thoughts down into words, the more the little fuckers squirm away, which is usually how I end up writing half a post and abandoning it. So I will quit while I'm ahead rather than mutter about performativity and how much more exhausting it is when you have to pretend you're not even acting.