Mishaps and other haps

One piece of advice from my mother that has been particularly pertinent lately is to be a person who asks questions. She says that as she passed through early adulthood, she lost most of her fear of “looking stupid” for asking seemingly simple questions in a class or at work. Other people often thanked her afterwards when it clarified something they themselves were wondering.

It pays to listen to advice and ask questions. It can at least save time (and money) spent learning from mistakes.

I recently applied for a management position at my workplace although I have no experience in management. I made some assumptions about what the hiring manager would be looking for in filling the position. I have several years of experience with the company and know a bit about the area and the people I would have been managing in that position. The key information I did not know was that the hiring manager was looking for specific industry-related coursework that I have not been pursuing.

I found out what he was looking for because I talked to him about the position after I was turned down for it. He asked to speak with me because he was impressed with my resume and he wanted to give me some advice. I spent twenty minutes listening. Now I know what I need to do to be more successful applying for certain jobs AND I have someone who is familiar with my credentials watching for openings in his area (and elsewhere in the company) that might be relevant for the kinds of things I want to do.

This is not a bad thing.

The people who really appear naive or foolish are those who make assumptions and have too much pride or arrogance to ask questions or consider friendly advice from seasoned players when it involves something they don’t know much about.

From the position of the advisor, how would you interact with someone who assumes they know more than you do? At best, they come across as arrogant. If they don’t have your insight or experience, it makes them look foolish as well. If a person is set on being a fool, what can you do besides sit back, stop advising, and watch the show?

::shrug::

This morning we slept in for quite a while and have finally turned our attention to coffee and computers. Today it feels like the holiday season and it is time to use the red and white snowman mugs that Althea and Bryan gave us last year. We also have some yummy apricot and pecan coffeecake for breakfast, courtesy of Terry’s neighbor, Connie, and the Women’s Athletic Club of Chicago.

We’ve had quite an eventful couple of days. Thanksgiving dinner turned out very well, thanks to Althea and her helpers. People seemed delighted with the addition of spanakopita to the menu. We ate as much pie and whipped cream as we could bear and then ate an extra helping of everything a few hours later. There was so much stuffing that we have scheduled a second meal to finish eating stuffing and various other leftovers.

On Friday morning, eleven of us travelled to Chicago and had lunch at the Women’s Athletic Club of Chicago with Connie, who is a non-resident member. Her parents were very involved in the club and instrumental its success some years back. The club has a long, rich history and it sounds like younger adults with children are using its services quite a bit today.

We had a very nice lunch and tour of the club before we set out shopping on Michigan Avenue. I stuck with the guys throughout the afternooon and we hit the Apple Store briefly (we actually did a u-turn in the Apple store because it was so crowded) before joining up with people at Watertower Place. We met up with our friend Gruntac there (who joined us for dinner) and made a few stops in novelty stores, a card shop, and the game store before drifting back to the Women’s Club. I picked up Christmas cards (my sole Christmas-related shopping goal this weekend).

The Women’s Club was a great retreat from the crowds (several members of our party elected not to shop at all and stayed there until dinner). We left the Club a little after 5 and moved a few blocks down to Ron of Japan, where we had reservations for 5:30. Dinner was fabulous and we were all stuffed for hours afterwards. Somehow I managed to eat all of my fried rice and almost all of my chicken, with a couple of pieces of PhysOrg’s medium-rare filet thrown in for good measure. Yes, I had medium-rare beef last night. This is a first.

We arrived back in Madison around 9 and spent a couple of hours hanging out at Althea and Bryan’s, enjoying the company, chatting, and laughing. All in all, it was a very good day.

Plans for the rest of the weekend involve more sleeping, lunch with people today at Texas Roadhouse, lunch tomorrow to polish off leftovers, possibly shopping for a Christmas tree on Sunday, and I think I am scheduled to run Karazhan Sunday night.

We had snow yesterday evening and overnight, so there is a wet, sticky, furry coating on everything outside this morning.

I just took the spanakopita out of the oven, changed into the sweater I am wearing for dinner, and rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for cold medicine.  PhysOrg and Onlyunjeu have been captivated by the computer and Guitar Hero on the Wiii, respectively, and are just starting to move toward showering and dressing.

Thanksgiving is going to be a different occasion this year, with the loss of Margot in August and the recent passing of Kim’s father.  Althea assumed the cooking of the traditional fare and we ordered a smoked turkey this year, rather than cooking our own.  Grandmothers have been invited to town and friends and family are still gathering at Terry’s condo as per many a Thanksgiving before.

Must go check on cooling spanakopita …

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you this coming week!

I’m heading out this morning to do a little shopping (or maybe quite a bit of shopping) with Althea for next week’s feast and PhysOrg is going to babysit his favorite nephew.

It’s a very short work week for me, too!  I work my normal schedule on Monday, have a class all day on Tuesday, and am taking off at 2 on Wednesday.

::hugs::

Sunday afternoon we had our regular gaming crew over, but we haven’t actually kicked off our new Sunday game yet.  We have people missing the next week or two and some of us aren’t done creating characters.  Stephani pulled Puerto Rico out of her car and we learned to play that instead.  I liked it and may pick up a copy at some point.

Afterwards, we ran Karazhan for five hours Sunday evening.  We purposefully skipped the Maiden and one-shotted everything through the Prince.  We’ve recently started taking most of Kara in one night so that we have more time to spend on the last two (harder) bosses, Nightbane and Netherspite … and because Zul’Aman is opening with the game patch this week.

Zul’Aman is a new ten man dungeon.  Unfortunately, I think it’s going to be a struggle for our guild to try to coordinate weekly runs for both Karazhan and Zul’Aman.  Minni (my druid) still needs/wants three pieces of gear from Kara (tier 4 gloves, tier 4 helm, epic leather healing chest), but I am also excited about new content, so I am just going to be running whatever I can, whenever I feel up for it.  Come to think of it, I need to start making some gold so I can afford repair bills.

You can see how the game eats free time like candy.  This is why I can never play more than one MMO at a time.  Well, one reason.  My game selection is also limited by my computer being a Mac.

Monday night we spent a couple of hours trying to take Nightbane and we are definitely improving in our attempts, but no success so far.  We skipped Netherspite (harder fight) and took the Maiden.

It looks like we’re going to give Zul’Aman a shot on Thursday night, so I am excited about that.

This morning, I was dreaming that a bunch of my friends and I were in a key card secured area like an airport or a school. Suddenly, torrents of toxic waste started raining down everywhere, so we were all running around to avoid them. I ended up leaving the key card area (with my bag, which had my key card and my cat in it) to avoid the toxic waste.

However, it started raining toxic waste outside and a menacing guy appeared. He started chasing me around the room, but then he suddenly stopped and ran over to the secured door where everyone else had congregated. He managed to get through it and started threatening them. I decided I needed to get back to everybody else, so I ran over to the guy and poked him with my car key, the pokiest bit I had on me.

Then he looked at me and said, “Small Horse.”

Taken aback, I said “Whaaa? What did you say?”

“Small Horse.”

Then I grabbed the weapon/tracking device he had and vaporized him. Apparently he was an alien who had come to earth to take my cat back to his home planet. Since I had Small Horse in my bag, I had shown up as “Small Horse” on his tracking device, so that’s why he had stopped chasing me and addressed me as “Small Horse.”

This was completely hilarious to me at 6:15 AM and I had to share it with barely-awake PhysOrg.

Some aspects of psychology bug me. Others admittedly seem to be useful ways for understanding how people’s minds work. IQ testing and personality typing are both flawed, problematic systems for assessing what they each claim to assess. People may place a lot of faith in the specific data that these two forms of testing provide, when it seems that they are designed to provide people with more generalized data that should be most helpful in making their lives better, rather than a sticking point for who they are in life.

I think this was the thought the parents of a friend of mine had when they hid his IQ scores from him. He was obviously a very intelligent individual, tested into the Gifted program, etc. The number/range that he tested at was really unimportant because he could master any skill or body of knowledge he wanted. Yet that number itself became so important to him when he became an adult and found out what it was. After being in college and not seeing him for months, it was one of the first things he wanted to share with me.

Personality typing irritates me similarly because it seems to be another artificially-derived mechanic that can limit individuals’ perceptions of themselves if used as a form of self-definition. For example, introverted people can be very outgoing at times and an extraverted person may be deeply speculative, internally probing, and self-aware.

I know that psychology has always been regarded by some as a “soft” science for a number of reasons– its methodology being particularly different from natural science and perhaps there is more leeway for subjectivity in the results. I think people have been a little suspicious of it, too, because it attempts to explain something that we regard as particularly sacred and enigmatic. But every field that we regard as science has problematic methods and areas of study that are speculative. Every field strives to discover truth* behind something that was previously unknown or misunderstood.

If you can take away one thing that is helpful, it is a worthwhile endeavor. Particularly, I understand today why I need downtime sometimes and how my brain reacts if I do not have it. Explaining this simple thing has allowed others to have more understanding and sympathy and they ASK! They ASK if it would be good to have some downtime!

That being said, we had a great day yesterday. JoZEr and Gruntac have been staying with us this weekend and we had fun socializing with them, shopping, having meals and drinks together, and playing games. I picked up a copy of Ratatouille this week and Artie and I watched it and chatted Friday night.

We have people over this afternoon and I am signed up for five hours of Karazhan this evening. Then, another week of work. But the change-up is fun. Next weekend there will probably be some downtime and the following weekend is a holiday weekend that will be fairly social and busy. Sounds like a good way to navigate through the first part of the holiday season**.

* or better understanding- we could go on for a day and a half about what truth is or isn’t

** I can’t honestly deny that it’s this time of year anymore. I still think it is too early to put up Christmas decorations, but I did buy holiday roast coffee to share with people this weekend.

EDIT: And I know that the use of personality typing and IQ scores comes with stipulations and disclaimers like “this is an indicator” and “this doesn’t mean”– so I am not saying that the science behind those things claims to be unyielding or all-explaining.

I just saw this NY Times article on health risks from oral contraceptives. It’s interesting that they note that both estrogen and progestin are included in the birth control pills used in the study. The earliest versions of the Pill (in the sixties) were estrogen-only and were pulled from the market because of substantial health risks, but a lot of oral contraceptives now are apparently progestin-only. Interesting. I suppose those are being studied, too, but the jury is still out since they are newer.

A while back I took a course on sex hormones and decided that not enough studies had been completed on long term health effects of using oral contraceptives (plus the follow-up hormone replacement that many middle-aged women were routinely choosing at the time) and it wasn’t worth the health risks. I also discovered that my body did not respond well to the lower-dose (and supposedly safer) hormone options available.

Again, the best movie I have seen this year.

I hope this will be the last funeral I attend this year.  And for a few years to come.

::crosses fingers::