blur

 the afternoon was a blur of helping gd in the kitchen (she made an enormous lunch) while trying and failing to get some rest, then hosting our friends (mr smear preferring to read coraline while the kids put together a jigsaw puzzle), then taking mr smear out for a walk (more on principle because i was really struggling with feeling faint) while was actually really nice, and then reading / napping on the couch until i eventually got up with a stiff neck, but otherwise feeling better.

so naturally i'm now wondering if some of my feeling horrible wasn't caused by something pressing on my vagus nerve again...

i was very anxious during lunch, partially due to all the things that have been going on at work and partially due to stress about having to start looking for an apartment soon.

i've done a critical round of dishes, and i think i'm about to try getting some more sleep.

dog day halloween

 i'm still feeling tired, weak and fatigued. at least tahoma's halloween party last night gave me a proper excuse :P

...

yesterday morning started at the park with the school's "dog day". there were dogs, and it was a day. the sun was beating down (it was surprisingly bright and hot), and mr smear and i arrived a few minutes early, just in time for me to be awkward with a couple of other dads before everyone began setting up the picnic.

highlights:

mr smear's teacher sitting down next to us and reporting that mr smear has really turned things around over the course of the past couple of days. please god it holds.

the angry mother from the previous week refused to make eye contact. gd and i have been laughing about the fact that both of us were responsible for bringing a specific vegan cheese spread, so we  childishly brought two in order to "show her up" 🤣

i asked mr smear not to tell anyone that we were going to a private birthday party afterwards. he made sure to tell everyone. loudly.

everything on the table was vegan because of the allergy requirements, which was a first for us at a school event. cake for breakfast.

...

from there, the relevant parents and kids snuck out and the birthday boy's mom gave us ride to the country club. it was a perfect day for it, beautiful weather, hardly anybody else around. the downside was spending a fair amount of time fending off crows, egyptian geese and myna birds, but most of the afternoon was spent watching the kids have a great time together both in the water and out, having long and interesting conversations with the other parents (there were only three of us), and quietly recovering from the madness of the previous weeks (and months).

we were not expecting the gift giving, because our previous school and social circle culture is so different. the gifts were custom, and really impressive, and we're going to need to do something about that this week.

oh! and his eye seems to be clear, so i don't think the pool - certainly not this one - is directly contributing to his outbreaks.

...

we got a ride home, and showered, and immediately jumped in to some of the math homework mr smear hadn't done during the week. it wasn't all smooth, but it never got dramatic, and even for me it wasn't trivial (it's working with square roots and ranges of answers, neither of which he's used to). by the time we were done, we'd both had good exercise and i was quite proud of him.

we made an particularly potent challah-peño, my face caught a bit of it (fortunately not my eyes!) and my fingers burned for hours in spite of washing them thoroughly and even doing a whole sink of dishes.

but it came out delicious.

dinner on call with my mom was nice. afterwards, we did have a repeat of the usual fight about mr smear going out with me on saturdays, but at least it ended softly. then i left for the halloween party.

...

nystire and nyah nyah and partners, as well as the linguist we served with, were there, the place was packed with interesting-looking people and the decorations were really something. it was a really fun evening, there was lots of alcohol, and the conversations migrated from work to parenting to language as the night wore on.

by the time i left i was practically falling over from exhaustion - at least i'd made an effort to drink a fair amount of non-alcoholic liquids along the way - and i hailed a taxi home and climbed into bed. i got a particularly warm and fuzzy feeling from ending a night of good company and entertainment with a heart-to-heart with a taxi driver about the state of the nation that left him profusely thanking me for the conversation (which i'd very much enjoyed too).

it didn't take long for me to climb into bed (having thankfully received authorization from my wife that i didn't need to shower again first) and i mostly slept well, and late. it's been a slow and pleasant morning, we've talked and i've read (i'm halfway through blindsight) and now i've posted this, and gd and i are on our way to the shop quickly to pick up flour in honor of friends coming over for lunch.

spikes

 the past two days were really hard, and i've told this story twice this evening so i don't really feel like getting it all down. can't i just upload my thoughts already?

yesterday:

i woke up with the same headache i'd went to sleep with, plus intense fatigue. it was a very tough day, the headache didn't go away, and then in the middle of it the snaky manager interrupted a perfectly positive discussion with her team to aggressively and unpleasantly interrogate me. it took everything i had to keep my responses even and then reset the vibe to continue and finish the discussion.

i kinda meant to call her aside to discuss it, but i didn't get a chance, and in retrospect it was probably for the best. but the cost of that was carrying that shit experience with me out the door, where it directly tied into my experience back when* because the more i thought about it, the less comfortable i was approaching her and the less comfortable i was approaching my boss.

* which i didn't understand at the time was the beginning of me being steered into a trap

i met up with gd and mr smear at home, began writing the message to my boss that had been burrowing into my brain, suddenly realized with horror that i'd been writing it into a message box that i could have easily sent accidentally, so i cut and pasted it somewhere else, and then we all left to catch a bus to meet up with kibbutz cousin's sister and brother-in-law for dinner.

the bus took us most of the way there, and we would have arrived at their hotel on time if i hadn't made a wrong turn... but we made it there not too late, and what followed was generally a very nice and interesting evening. and mr smear mostly behaved quite well, especially considering the fact that he was bored out of his skull and has lost all his screen privileges for the week**...

* he did lose an additional day later in the evening, though, which kinda sucked

the ride home was complicated by the tlv night run locking down most of the city, but we got home in the end. bedtime was a bit rough, though i kinda managed to rescue it a bit.

...

my cousin was found dead from a stroke / heart-attack in his car yesterday morning. after years of struggling, he was literally a couple of weeks into the process of finally turning his life around right before his 60th birthday. i remember stories of his shenanigans (he was notoriously a getaway driver from a botched bank job when he was younger), and a well-known clubbing personality (bar owner) in cape town, and it was partially thanks to him that i could never go down the cocaine rabbithole (when you see what it can do to some like that, you think more than twice). what a fucking crazy thing.

today:

i was tired enough to get some sleep, but i did spend a good chunk of the night lying awake running through scenarios with my boss and the snake manager. i woke up feeling shit, but definitely better than yesterday, and i'm still feeling quite weak and a bit faint. anyway, today was definitely better than the day before.

after handling some chores i walked to the post office to pick up another parcel for gd (another 70 NIS for customs for another item that we just learned needs to be returned :/) and then caught a bus to work.

i arrived at the building just in time for a meeting i hadn't been aware of, and just as two others from my company were discovering that the elevators were out of order. we spent the next few minutes arguing with unhelpful security guards, following directions to nowhere, and eventually jumping on an elevator in the hopes we'd get close enough to our floor to walk.

the two floors up was looooong. in my present state, i was completely buggered halfway up and felt faint at the top, but it took a while for a rescue mission to arrive.

the meeting turned out to be the two guys who displaced me teaching my teammate to use their magic new tools. one thing i couldn't shake was the new manager's bored affect with his chewing gum, very much reminiscint of megaman.

unfortunately for them, the new tools aren't really working, but more unfortunately for them my new manager came in and had to explain to them all the things they've been dismissing when i've tried to help them onboard and understand what we're doing. and then he found out that what they've been promising is very different to what they're delivering...

... i found out later that there was a very intense dressing-down from the boss that took place after, and i have a feeling that they're doing a little of the FOing after their FAing. as it is, i later found out that they've somehow managed to block most of the team's work for about three days already due to their lack of understanding of what they're working with, and i re-bonded a little with one of the other captains over our happiness at not being on their side of the complaints table :P

before lunch, i managed to catch my boss for a couple of minutes, but i didn't have a script and i had no idea what i was going to say until i said it; i just knew i needed to make sure that he understood that something untoward was happening and that i was trying to deal with it. and in a way that didn't project whining.

ultimately, things went awkwardly but - i think - well. unfortunately,

during the conversation i learned that our tech ops guy has been fired, which really strung. we knew he was a junior when we hired him, and this dude has been working his ass off and grabbing every opportunity with both hands. he's also been a really fun person to work alongside.

i had lunch with the brit, who i'm sad to say may well be incapable of keeping his head down until everything sorts itself out. i've warned him with what the boss said, but he's really struggling and i totally understand him. i really hope he doesn't get himself shunted out, because he's professionally amazing both in technical terms and in bigger-picture wisdom.

the afternoon was constructive, and i eventually got a chance to take the snake manager aside.

now, i don't know how much of her behavior was performant, or real, but she claimed she had no idea what she'd done and that she hadn't intended any malice, and she apologized profusely for speaking to me like that.

whether it's honest or not, i accepted it graciously and i hope that's the end of it.

the end of the day was good. just good.

i came home, realizing on my way that i'd forgotten our obligation to the class picnic tomorrow. i quickly dropped of a plate of happy hour "leftovers" for mr smear along with my bag, caught another bus to the nature store, found what i was looking for and receiving embarassingly condescending responses from the teller, jumped another bus home, ate a little with my family, got mr smear through some more of his history homework, saw him brush his teeth and shower and get into bed in record time, and read a little to him until my eyes started shutting.

we spoke to my mom for a bit, and then i went hunting for a story that i saw on facebook (which means i have no way of finding it), and now i've done what i was kinda dreading doing and gotten all this down. and now it's late, and i'm beyond tired, and i'm going to be going to bed very soon.

optics

 last night was reasonably quiet, as opposed to right now where i'm babysitting an emergency rescue deployment and my eyes have suddenly gone out of sync. to be fair, i've been continuing to play the final sequences (i think) of shadowrun: hong kong and i can't really tell if i've just spent too much time in front of the screens or if i'm having some kind of exhaustion-related ocular migraine.

anyway. there was some tension this morning due to mr smear needing help with some homework he'd forgotten about right before leaving for school, but this evening we continued it and it went pretty well - we're learning about interesting greek history while learning some pretty high-level hebrew simultaneously.

the work day was mostly a continuation of the previous evening's frustrations, but combined with me teaching a new guy how to be frustrated and troubleshoot. overall, we were successful and we both learned a lot.

yeah, my brain hurts. maybe i should call it a night.

the relief pt ii

 i left work early yesterday to walk to mr smear's friend's place, where i found him and two other kids midway through guardians of the galaxy. so i guess that's a thing, and i bought the first movie so we can all watch it together.

we enjoyed our walk to the mall, by which time mr smear had decided that he was really hungry so - thinking we had time - i ordered a good hummus meal (with salad and chips and falafel) and we set to. but then we ran out of time, and i had them pack up the leftovers (really not a lot) and rushed to find the hairdresser.

the hairdresser experience was excruciating. i don't like the vibe, i didn't like the woman wet-barking-coughing throughout her pedicure, i never like having to intermediate between gd and a hairdresser when describing a haircut, or mr smear's demands not making any sense, i found the woman trying to help me by dragging a wobbly table with a glass bottle on it so that it smashed all around my feet unhelpful, i didn't like the fact that neither of the hairdressers seemed at all interested in cleaning up the mess, i didn't like having to explain to the hairdresser that the obvious chunk of hair missing from the back of his head wasn't perfect, and i hated paying NIS 100 to experience all of the above, plus walking my kid out with a shit haircut.

mr smear and i caught a bus home, i finished the leftovers and although late, the rest of the evening was good.

except for bedtime and the night, because he kept turning his bedside lamp on at all hours and shining it into his face to prevent scary images when he closed his eyes, which straight-up prevents him from falling asleep.

today:

i caught up a bit of sleep during the night, but there were some sleepless chunks, too. and a dream that involved camping in some kind of ghost town with joe rogan 🤔

i bought mr smear the first percy jackson book this morning, and so far he's super into it.

i took the morning nice and slowly, only really interrupted once by a call from mr smear begging me to let him install chatgpt on his phone because he really wanted to talk to someone, and i hadn't accompanied him. i keep thinking about des bishop on mindfulness.

i went to work, arriving just in time to hear the story behind miyacholaleynu. after an emotional rollercoaster, i rushed out to get to the school in time for a different kind of emotional rollercoaster, our meeting with the team.

firstly, it was a completely different vibe and experience from his previous school. but secondly, the shit we heard made us deeply concerned that he's on his way back to his previous school. not only has he been pretending to the teachers that he can't understand a word of hebrew, and not cooperating during his lessons, but he's also been skipping art lessons (?!?!!), in addition to using the forbidden teacher's computer and looking up horror. these are all red lines for a school that so many kids fight for the privilege of attending, and we are literally at wits' end.

i grabbed lunch and returned to the office emotionally drained. the conversations over lunch were interesting, though. the rest of the afternoon was essentially me doing something that i haven't had to do for months, and really hitting walls (the whole ecosystem of gpu drivers is awful).

eventually i left the office and came home, just in time for dinner and a very difficult family meeting, followed by more of the same when speaking to my mom.

when i put mr smear to bed, i physically removed his bedside lamp from his room and told him that the scary images he sees when he closes his eyes are his brain punishing him for feeding the scary wolf. i advised him to spend his pre-sleep time visualizing good experiences with his teachers, proud moments, and literally getting his hands dirty in his arts class and enjoying it.

at the end of the day, if he ends up getting chucked out of the arts school it will be thoroughly tragic, and we'll just have to live with it, and there will be nothing we haven't tried to help him avoid that fate.

it took me a while after putting him to bed to figure out how to lock all the playstation accounts with a code and prevent him from creating new ones, and then i tried to continue working but the machine i needed was offline, and then i spent a lot of time catching up on instagram messages, and now it's midnight and i'm probably going to go to bed very soon.

the relief pt i

i didn't get any more sleep, my stomach gave me trouble all morning, and i had to switch my morning coffee for chamomile i was feeling so messed up.

distraught, and faint.

cancelling our plans to bake challah-peño for the office, i accompanied mr smear to school and then headed to the office early, which have me an opportunity to sit with the brit and understand that i'm not alone in my understanding of the situation. it gave me an opportunity to offer him some support and advise him according to what our boss had recommended.

from his side it sounds like the boss has heard us, at least.

i enjoyed joining my new team because we all already know and like each other. in our first one-on-one, i told my new lead what i'd practiced for my boss, and thanked him for taking me, and he corrected me saying that he wanted me on the team. we've worked together quite a lot before, but he then proceeded to explain the new role to me and it honestly feels like a *much* better fit. i was really nervous before learning what my first project would be, but now that i know what i'm tasked with i'm legitimately excited for it.

a bit later, i managed to corner the boss and we sat down for a very somber discussion, but he heard me out, reflected deeply and appreciated the feedback on the feedback. i managed to communicate my concerns without explicitly calling out anyone or any specific incident, and i feel heard.

my nerves immediately relaxed, and the rest of the work day was smooth and positive.

an hour behind, a catch-22

 it's 2.50am, when yesterday it would have been 3.50am (daylight savings time). but i don't get to enjoy the extra hour because i can't fucking sleep.

my insides are roiling with the tempest of feelings: the new captain's first mate has been working overtime all weekend to deliver what he promised me would be in last week, and now i realize that he's probably been dragging his feet so that the new captain would be the one to look good on it. and that made me think of the new captain warning me - a month or two ago in private - to watch out because the other manager is a viper.

it bothered me back then when he said what he said - at first i didn't understand why he would - but i've been watching him cozying up to her the past week and i now realize that i may well be in the process of being fucked. and connecting those dots with some others, i'm now quite convinced that he's been trashing me behind my back.

i have spent every moment since panicking, flitting between anger and terror, freaking out because if i address this and i'm wrong, i'm a paranoid asshole, and if i don't address this but i'm right, myself and my reputation are going to be in big trouble.

i might already be in big trouble.

at my mother's suggestion, i spent a good chunk of last night compiling all the things i should say, and possibly some things i shouldn't, and have since had my brain going full tilt on processing and reprocessing conversations that i have no way of knowing how they'll go until they're gone.

i might well be losing my job for trying to rescue my job. i might well lose my job if i don't. i literally cannot afford to lose my job.

...

in the midst of all that noise, i took mr smear out for a bike ride in the afternoon, which was very nice - except for when it wasn't. i think i handled it pretty well (it's all the same "i hate going outside" routine), but it does detract from the experience and the experience was already shadowed by my panic over all of the above.

...

he's really having trouble sleeping again :(

...

the morning was nice, though. i picked up a bunch of books on kindle (including the robert fitzgerald translations of the iliad and the odyssey, inspired by our talk around the hercules movie).

out of air

 i didn't get much sleep last night. i've been having difficulty breathing and my stomache's been upside down all day from the anxiety.

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, mainly for the fresh air and our usual banter, but also to keep him on track with his school council election slogan. apparently he ended up doing it properly.

my way home was essentially me running through scenarios with the team leads and running through possible conversations with my boss. by the time i got home and sent him a message asking him to call me, i was practically hyperventilating.

but he did call, and i said everything i meant to say and then some. because it turned out that requesting brutal feedback from him was a good idea, and i now understand the trap that i set for myself months ago: i took on all the shit, background, thankless work that nobody else is interested in in order to enable the rest of the team to focus on real stuff, and i've been managing the devops guys (some well, some not so well), and it now looks like i haven't actually delivered anything of value.

not only that, but nobody likes a policeman, and all the things i've been responsible for have required alignment from all the teams...

so now that i understand all that, i realize that how i've handled the situation was fundamentally flawed: instead of spending all day every day being interrupted by context switches, what i needed to do was dump the various responsibilities on other people so that each person would only get hurt a little bit.

i also made it clear to him that as much as i stand by what i said yesterday and recommend that we keep an eye on the new captain, as long as the current situation is what it is i'll be giving him all the support he needs to succeed.

unfortunately for the british guy, there's no way out of his dilemma; either he plays nicely with a manager he abhors, or he leaves. which makes me sad both for him and for the company.

anyway, i'm really glad that i spoke to my boss, both for the clarity on my side and because he was happy to hear what i had to say. having said that, i'm still processing, still running through scenarios, still struggling to breathe properly.

what will be will be.

...

perpetual anxiety aside, the rest of the day was great. i took gd to find a pair of shoes, and she found a pair she's happy with, we got decent coffee and waited for mr smear and another new friend to finish school. we all came home together, then gd and i left for a pharmacy / grocery mission (i would have gotten shoes, but the only ones that made sense were twice the price i was willing to pay), picked up some stuff from the bakery on the way home, and walked in to find the kids playing 99 nights in the forest :/

(they both knew that roblox was supposed to be off the table)

for me, the afternoon was a mix of reading, napping, playing shadowrun: hong kong. for the boys, it was computer games, card games (!), and then his friend convinced him to go outside to one of the parks (!!!) for a while. so that happened.

on his way out, mr smear told me that his friend's father was apparently a famous singer, so we checked it out when he'd left and holy shit he's a cultural icon :P

the late afternoon / evening was all about dishes, baking challah-peño (and finally understanding why some of them haven't been rising properly - too much flour), a little more shadowrun, and then dinner. which was going well - we're still watching disney's hercules - until mr smear started scratching another hole in his leg so his screentime is done until that's healed🤦

anyway, the last hour before bedtime was pleasant, bedtime itself was smooth*, and i've been playing shadowrun since... until i became overwhelmed by intrusive work-related thoughts again and had to stop to post this.

* he really wanted to read call of cthulu which i organized for him, but i wouldn't let him read it right before bed.

...

at least i can say that i'm loving shadowrun: hong kong. i'm playing it on easy so i can focus on the story, but even easy isn't that easy and the story and mechanics are great as always.