the pregnant lady sings

today did not go as smoothly as planned... it went really badly, in fact. but in a constructive way? time will tell. my toxic teammate (toxic crusader) rolled her eyes at me again this morning, and i asked our manager to ask her to see if he could get her to dislike me less visibly. instead, he put us in a room together and told us to work it out, and in retrospect i think it would have been better if he'd hung around to hear what we had to say.

it's hard to hear someone tell you you're no good, even when you already know that's what they think of you. but she did admit that she felt that i'd improved a bit, and she said some things that tied in with what i'd been hearing from other sources but which came across more clearly. i felt like shit for a while after we talked, even contemplated some of my other options, but then i realized that this is an organization that i have a lot to learn from - in particular in terms of how i approach my work - and some of the things that have been getting under my skin are opportunities for me to bring value.

the way we frame things matters, and by the end of the day i realized that the work i'd been doing since yesterday morning was actually above and beyond what my original task mandated, and that the task i'd been stuck on for weeks was actually a long series of tasks the scope of which i'd naively assumed the creator had understood from the get-go. what comes next is not going to be easy, it's way out of my comfort zone, and in my little world of ideals it shouldn't be necessary, but here we are and here i need to adapt.

i also realized that the main reason my last two days have been unsuccessful is that toxic crusader screwed up months ago, removing a critical component of our project and replacing it with a hack, and now the original design no longer fits back in. it's satisfyingly disappointing :P

i came home, giving gd such a fright (she didn't hear me come in) that her response hurt her :(
my mom picked mr smear and me up and we went grocery shopping, came home for kiddush and dinner (delicious vegan dumplings bought from a coworker's wife's business), i read mr smear some alice in wonderland to sleep (it's really cool witnessing the exact moment he drops off), and i've been tooling around (playing exapunk, waiting for the new tool album to be released) since my mom left and gd went to bed.