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- I am, as usual, doing a lot of window shopping. This pink hat with black bats and moons calls to me, of course, but then I decided I could DIY something even more suited to me. Thanks to AliExpress, I have a pink hat with an even wider brim and a bunch of black lace bat appliques. This coming weekend will involve painting the hat with a darker pink alcohol dye, then attaching the appliques. And maybe wide ribbons (attached to the inside of the crown) so I can tie it on if I want.
- I'm also coveting this sterling silver choker with a giant quartz centerpiece, but it's out of my price range. But it's so pretty!
- I'm thinking of taking a day off from work and persuading the Stroppy One we should go to the zoo. The things that are giving me pause are 1) the Stroppy One is about to start deadline work, and 2) the local zoo is very hilly, and will be challenging for me. (There's a part of me that thinks making the trek to Seattle to go to Woodland Park may be a better idea, especially since I could go visit my beloved red pandas. Our local zoo doesn't have red pandas.)
- All in all, things are meh around here, but I'm trying to find things that make me happy. I hope you peeps are also finding things that bring you joy.
- Because of all of this last week, I ended up having a two and a half day seesawing panic attack, which I'm still recovering from. I couldn't do my usual way of recovering from such a thing, sleeping for an extended period, because I had social obligations. WHICH WERE AWESOME, but I'm still feeling the aftereffects of last week. In other words, I want to go be a sloth on the couch and then sleep in.
- I saw my big brother this weekend and got a tarot reading. Nothing like having the powers that be drop anvils on my head that I need to stop listening to the Brain Raccoons. Thanks. Yes, I constantly need the reminder, but DAMN.
What’s under assault right now isn’t jobs. A great many jobs are being extinguished, and each lost job is a measure of misery for many people. But the greater heartbreak is the loss of work—the separation from meaningful, changeful work, and from the impacts of that work, from the world that comes into being when our work is oriented towards the living. It’s telling that so many of the jobs currently under attack are those of technology people performing civil service: these are people who chose work that was less glamorous, and less remunerative, than the standard tech path, but also more purposeful, more likely to actually deliver on tech’s otherwise empty promise of a better world. The message is clear: you will work for the needs of capital, or you will work not at all.
Mandy Brown on .
As someone who spent their entire career in and around the public service, the reality is that, yeah. Most people are there because they’re true believers in the work. By which I mean “the ability of government to provide services to improve the lives of citizens.” This is especially true for anyone working in a specialist area — tech definitely, but also things like medicine, etc. — who could get a much higher-paid role in the private sector. This isn’t give a lot of airplay in the culture because, in general, public servants are trained not to really talk about their work or experiences; discretion is a key part of the job when that job is handling everything from sensitive policy proposals to the personal information of millions of citizens to, frankly, the personalities of some extremely high-profile people (i.e., politicians).
The bureaucracy as an entity is far from perfect, and like every workplace it has its fair share of people who are toxic or useless or both. But the texture and quality of it is notably different to private sector work, in a way that I think is hard to grasp if you haven’t experienced it. And that difference is, frankly, hated by anyone who’s gone ideologically all-in on ultra-capitalism, because it represents an entirely different model of work, of personal fulfilment, to “extract surplus value for profit.”
Hence, y’know. Chainsaw time.
So in my normal handwriting I write "E" as "Ξ" and "A" as "Λ" because . . . I think I saw it once in a book about the Sex Pistols as a kid? And I guess that was super formative.
But anyway yeah I have to remember not to do that here unless I want to get called "Llis."
(I also write "f" as "ʃ" but that’s less of an issue here, specifically.)
FRIEND WITH AN ANAPHYLACTIC NUT ALLERGY: I mean. There’s a lot of reasons I don’t want to be pregnant. But the cravings are definitely one of them.
FRIEND WITH AN ANAPHYLACTIC NUT ALLERGY: Like. What if I crave nuts???
Reblogging to celebrate finally being in a timezone where I actually see day-of-the-week memes on their intended days.
