worryingly jolly batman

This is just some whining about my job

2011-12-12T09:24:33Z

Thing I just typed in an email and deleted:

Feel free to tell the Cult of Nice to suck it if you want. (Hm, is "suck it" a misogynist colloquialism, a homophobic one, both, or neither? Should I just have said "fuck off"?) <-- that parenthesis = my thought process constantly atm EXCEPT the moment in a meeting today where I said something incredibly ill-advised to both my bosses. And by ill-advised I don't mean coarse I mean will-really-cause drama. Sigh.

Yeah, I keep thinking that the problems at work are resolved, and they keep being absolutely dire and awful and my favourite co-worker is definitely going to quit and then I'm going to be all alone. Which is terrifying because - well, here's an example of how I feel about my workplace at the moment: I used the phrase "is he on her side?" seriously about workplace dynamics. Motherfucking ugh. I hate that kind of mindset. It's juvenile. It makes you (me) feel defensive constantly which makes you (me) over-read into everything. I don't want to bottle up and I feel like I HAVE to say something, but on the other hand, I don't know how to say anything in a professional mature way because I am so upset. Also, my workplace is ~unbureaucratic and ~egalitarian which translates into: there are no procedures for talking to people when you're unhappy with how work's going, especially when the people who are making you unhappy are your two bosses. Except one of them isn't technically your boss, but she's delegating all this stuff to you that used to be done by the person who she's supposedly replacing, except she's doing none of the shit he did (and this is not handover problems, she's been here for three months now) and it's. ugh.

It's now gotten to the point where it's affecting my life outside work. I owe sixth_light a beta and I'm way, WAY behind on Yuletide but I spent the weekend sitting on my sofa playing Build-a-Lot 6 and catching up on Leverage. Seriously, pretty much the entire weekend. My room needs cleaning and all my clothes are dirty. Plus, I feel useless all the time at work, and now I'm starting to feel useless outside work too. Small setbacks make me feel like bursting into tears - like the worst PMS, except it's all the damn time. I had such a moment on Wednesday night it was just, ugh. (Fortunately twitter was there for me. <3333)

I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. I want to return to my usual fandom-food-and-knitting blogging but, you guys, I'm warning you, I don't know if that's going to happen any time soon.

On the plus side, I'm getting better at making gifs.

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labellementeuse @ 2011-04-13T19:13:00

2011-04-13T08:08:08Z

I feel like such an absentee LJ-er at the moment. I'm barely commenting (but I am reading and I still love you guys, honest). I'm tweeting a lot of boring tweets, for those of you who might want to keep up with me in micro form, but the energy needed to do a LJ post - even a boring blah blah one - seems a little beyond me right now, and I also don't really have anything to talk about.

Except that's not really true, here are some things I've done in the past couple months:

- Got a job. Been in a job for a month.

- Started dating a lovely young woman. (ETA: Says it all:
).

- Read eleventy billion words of Inception fanfic. I have delicioused some of my favourites here, although I'm pretty crap at deliciousing so it's not comprehensive.

- Maybe, possibly, read a few H50 stories. I. YOU GUYS. IDK. I stand Morally Opposed to another freaking buddy cop show getting all the slash time. and I have loved some buddy cop show fandoms in my time!

- only read like three new books this year. TERRIBLE. I feel sick thinking about it. But today I got a bunch of new books out from the library - Kehua! by Fay Weldon, The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, Double Vision by Tricia Sullivan, Wildseed by Octavia Butler, Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (got to fit a re-read in there somewhere), and Natural History by Justina Robson. I'm pretty hopeful that I will be energised to read these ones, I'm excited.

I got the Justina Robson mostly because I saw it on the shelf and it's the next book to be discussed at Torque Control. After an extensive discussion of women in SF late last year, Torque Control has been doing a thing where they review and discuss the top ten SF books by women in the last decade. Anyway, I've only gotten a couple chapters in, but it's making me think a lot of things about disability, ablism, bodies, and, you know ... Anne McCaffrey's Ship series. (Also that post-Otherland short story Tad Williams wrote for Legends, "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World". That scene with Orlando's parents? Yeah.) So if anyone has any links for discussion about that I'd really love to hear them.

Anyway. I'm going to try to LJ/DW a bit more because I miss you guys. How are you all?

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labellementeuse @ 2011-02-28T18:39:00

2011-02-28T05:40:17Z

GUESS WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND A JOB?

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ffff

2010-11-22T08:44:23Z

1. So I haven't heard about the blasted coffee job that's been taking up all my time, which means I probably didn't get it, which is sort of thrilling.

2. Because there's nothing like imminent homelessness and/or moving back in with the APs to really get the adrenaline pumping.

3. To take my mind off things I'm re-reading Deathly Hallows. What chapter (ish) does the movie stop (ish) at? Feel free to give me a nice wide range so's not to be spoilered.

4. And who would like to come see it with me tomorrow? 10 or 11 am at Reading. I feel like I may as well take advantage of being unemployed to see a movie in a nearly empty theatre so I can gasp and generally act the fangirl. Plus IIRC Tuesday is Cheapskate Day.

5. Sort of excited that I actually have HP icons this time around!

6. I find watching the stats for the blog absolutely fascinating (in the worst way). It's easy to see where some people are coming from, too: username.livejournal.com/friends is a bit of a giveaway.

7. I got my Yuletide assignment! It's a real challenge, but exciting, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

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are you friggin' serious?

2010-02-10T02:27:36Z

So I usually submit a physical timesheet and invoice on Tuesdays, and then get paid on Thursdays. This Tuesday we got an email saying to send our invoices and timesheets electronically to our various supervisors. I did so, late in the evening (my instructions for timesheets had been 'by Wednesday midday' so I figured I was fine). Then on Wednesday there was a tangi (funeral) which most of the staff attended, so people weren't in the office for most of the day. Thursday, I don't get paid, my supervisor comes past to get me to sign my timesheet, I figure, hey, there was a tangi, everyone was away for a day, I'll be paid tomorrow. Friday: I'm not paid. I talk to my supervisor indicating that while I quite like my job, I don't do it because inactivity bores me. (That's what the Internet is for.) He calls around, says things are messed around because of the tangi (no kidding) and I should be paid early this week.

Today is Wednesday, I still haven't been paid, I consider it no longer early in the week. I write to my supervisor, he comes over and talks to me, says, oh, this has happened and that has happened and I really don't know where everything went but maybe if we get everything together now I'll be paid - but probably not tomorrow: Maybe Friday, or next week, but when this other staff member gets back in the office he'll be able to tell me for sure.

I mean, for fuck's sake. Being paid fortnightly is enough of a drag as it is. Being paid approximately once a month (and let me point out that I've been here nearly two months and have only ONCE been paid on anything resembling a regular schedule)? SUCKS.

On the plus side, maybe, having no trouble staying focused at work today, because every time I drift into staring out the window i get re-energised with a burst of intense fury.

This wasn't even what my angry post today was going to be about. (It was going to be about - what else? - John Key and his special, special ideas. 2010: Year of John Key's Really Dumb, Not Consulted Upon, Blatantly Obviously Bad Ideas That He Rams Through Anyway.I admit it's not a catchy title.) But that's been pushed to tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-journal, your daily moment of seethe-inducing ridic from the government. (I actually work for the government, sort of, so this is even more apropos.)

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labellementeuse @ 2009-12-14T21:24:00

2009-12-14T08:25:02Z

Today I read Meg Rosoff's book How I Live Now. I have been warned of this already because karenhealey blogged about it, but the blurb is some of the most misleading copy I have ever read in my life. It was terrific, I really loved it.

Lately I have also been obsessively reading the Millenium trilogy, which are the Stieg Larsson books that took the world by storm (starts with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) They're great reading, thrillers that make you feel a little bit cosmopolitcan, although the third one is bogging down a bit into the kind of political intrigue that I like least in any kind of fiction. Also, there was one phrase which I now can't remember but it was really stupidly translated - it was clearly a direct translation of a Swedish colloquialism, like in English we'd say bunny boiler or something, and the thing that got me was there was an equivalent colloquial English phrase that would say the same thing. Oh well, I think I'm getting pickier in my old age (also, right now the job I'm in is rewarding pickiness, which is like they're indulging me in my worst habit. There are only two things I'm picky about: food and apostrophes.)

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And we think we underfund Treaty claims!

2009-12-07T09:52:05Z

paintmarks sent me snowflakes! Thanks hon :)

So today I started my new job, reference checker & proofreader at the Waitangi Tribunal. Because they planned for me to start actually doing my job on Wednesday, and before that basically had a bunch of style guides and one or two articles for me to read, by 1pm today I was like "doo doo doo... nothing to do!" (I mean, really.) So my boss got me started on reading this book on the Waitangi Tribunal called, um, The Waitangi Tribunal: Te Roopu Whakamana i te Tiriti o Waitangi. (Ed. J Hayward and N Wheen for anyone who wants to go look this up, which I don't know why you would want to do, but whatever.) It's basically a bunch of chapters on a bunch of different aspects of the Tribunal - history, procedure, etc. A couple of chapters compare it to other nations' methods of dealing with indigenous peoples' land rights, and one chapter was on Canada. Want to hear something really, really horrifying?

So British Columbia has been pretty slack on acknowledging that First Peoples have any land rights at all. They finally got around to it a while ago, like maybe 15 years or so, and established the BCTC - BC Treaty Commission, which is a tiny bit like the Waitangi Tribunal in, like, a few ways. Not very many. But you want to hear the best difference, and by best, I mean worst? So the BCTC is funded 8% by the federal gvt of Canada, 12% by BC itself, and 80% by... a loan to the First Peoples of BC. In fact these various tribes etc now owe CDN$177 MILLION, over about 50 claims, and NONE of the claims have been resolved - only one of them is CLOSE to being finished. The BCTC is only authorised to give out CDN$7 million per claim. Do you see what's happening here? Hi, guys... we took your land and left you impoverished and for a couple of hundred years we refused to acknowledge that you might deserve or need any kind of compensation at all, and now, hey, you can have it! But any money that we give you you're going to have to give right back to pay off the costs of us admitting that we did something wrong! Neat, huh?

-- this is all current to when my book was written, about 2003-4, I think. But even if they've fixed it since then - and I note via Wiki that it's now the British Columbia Treaty Process, but other than that nothing particularly encouraging - how does that kind of thing even happen?

Also, because I feel like it, a meme via deutscheami (of whose hints I didn't get a single answer, but never mind.)
1. Put your iPod on shuffle
2. DO NOT write down the lyrics of the first 15-20 songs to come up.
3. Describe what the song is about. Be creative.
4. Cross out the songs when your friends guess them in the comments.
( away we go )

I have my interview for the publishing course at Whitireia tomorrow morning. Advice and well-wishes gratefully appreciated!

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