The Mandelbear's Musings

It's been a weird week: I've Gotten Things Done. I seem to have gotten past some kind of huge roadblock, or in River terms perhaps caught a following wind instead of drifting.

I can attribute a lot of it to the "Avoid Avoiding" group I've been attending for the last couple of months, but probably not all of it. Somehow it's gotten a little easier to simply do things when I happen to think of them rather than postponing them.

Not always. I postponed a long-overdue phone call to my broker (about springing loose enough cash to pay off my credit cards), partly because I had just remembered that I had her number in my phone, but still had no idea what to say. And it took a (temporary, as it turned out) network outage to get me back to reconfiguring the Starport's main gateway. An impending deadline to get me back to coding at work, and another to get me back to practicing guitar at home. But there's progress.

Not huge progress, but it's real, and I think worth mentioning.

Hmm. A pretty good day, I guess. OK, a very good day in terms of things accomplished: I started on the FSA receipts (didn't get very far, but hopefully I have some momentum now), got a diagnosis for my very recent urological problems (enlarged prostate), got some lab-work done (everything looks good except the triglycerides, as usual) got a start on The Next Sub-Project at work, and had a couple of good insights. But it didn't really feel all that productive.

And I know that a single dose of something that takes at least 3 weeks to work isn't going to fix the problem all at once, but...

Hopefully the momentum will keep me going.

OK, the insights:

• You can make a set of base-64 digits that sort properly and can be used in URLs and filenames in two different ways:
  "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz~"
"0123456789-ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
• I avoid a lot of things because of excess caution. If I don't do anything, I can't screw it up. (I think I mentioned this a couple of days ago.) It's closely related to avoiding things because I'm not sure of what I'm doing.
• I avoid a lot of things because of depression, not anxiety. I'm not actually afraid of them, they're just depressing to think about, and depression makes me apathetic.

I'm getting better, but it's rather slow.

Lots of good, fun links up there in the notes.

A moderately productive day, mostly thanks to a meeting at work where a coworker who's moving to another group went over the software he's leaving us, in detail. It's all in well-documented Python, which will give me an opportunity to get more familiar with the language.

And a good insight, though I'm not entirely sure where it leads yet: I avoid different categories of things for different underlying reasons. I avoid financial stuff because it makes me uncomfortable to think about. I avoid social encounters because I'm uncomfortable when I don't know what to do or say. That's also part of why I don't learn languages. Some other things I just avoid because they're less fun or less interesting than, e.g., LJ.

So there's a clear distinction between things that make me uncomfortable (with at least two subcategories), and things that I just would rather not do. They'll probably have to be worked on in different ways. I'm not sure which will be harder: accepting a certain level of discomfort as I work my way up to the really scary stuff, or adjusting my priorities and managing my time so the disagreeable stuff gets done alongside the fun stuff. Donwannagrowup!

A fair number of links (see above in the raw notes); the most thought-provoking was this article in the New York Times about oxytocin:

In their new study, Dr. Rodrigues and Laura R. Saslow and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at how two variants in the genetic code for the receptor might influence a person's capacity for empathy, as measured by a standard empathy questionnaire ("I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel") and a behavioral task called "Reading the Mind in the Eyes." In it, participants looked at 36 black-and-white photographs of people's eyes and were asked to choose the word that best described each subject’s mood. Uneasy, defiant, contemplative, playful? In a related measure of oxytocin’s presumed calming effects, subjects were also tested for how strongly they reacted to the stress of hearing a series of loud noises.

Hmmm...