{"id":16862,"date":"2015-06-18T16:59:11","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T20:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=16862"},"modified":"2016-06-18T15:08:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-18T19:08:37","slug":"potpourri-june-18th-2015-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/potpourri-june-18th-2015-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Potpourri, June 18th (2015 edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This year’s Potpourri, I reckon, will be shorter than its predecessors. I’ve got just as much I <\/em>could post about, and of course today’s the only day I <\/em>can post a Potpourri entry, but The World Is Too Much With Me this time around. So I’ll just write, off and on, and hit the WordPress Publish button when the clock runs out.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Apropos of nothing:<\/strong> I am\u00a0really<\/em> feeling anti-technology at the moment. Practically every program I need to use every day seems to be broken, and — at least on my work PC — some mysterious force prevents me from making the changes I need to make in order to get some of them running smoothly. Symptom: the error message which pops up informing me that I need permission from [username]<\/em> to make the change (a simple file rename). Why is this a problem? Because I am signed in as <\/em>[username].<\/p>\n

If my PC here were trying to serve me donuts right now, I’d be walking away from the counter in disgust, shaking my head.<\/p>\n

On the other hand:<\/strong> My recent adventures in site redesign have reminded me of both (a) the pleasure of getting my hands into the guts of a technical problem, and (b) the satisfaction of knowing that I (alone among the people I know really well, at least in real life) can solve said problem.<\/p>\n

Oh, no no no — I’m not even close to\u00a0done<\/em> with this yet. Still, it’s good to feel (rightly or wrongly) that I can still do what I have been trained and have learned to do.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"'Stalker<\/a>Some people have enemies. I just have nemeses.<\/strong> Long-time friends of Running After My Hat<\/em> will recall, probably, my adventures with the co-worker dubbed the Bathroom Talker. (His saga was first reported within a few months of RAMH<\/em>‘s launch<\/a>, and updated almost three years later<\/a>.)\u00a0That gentleman has not worked here for a few years now, for which I continue to sigh in relief.<\/p>\n

No, I have a new nemesis: a woman. She doesn’t in\u00a0any<\/em> way resemble the Stalker Girl character depicted at the right: she is not blonde, not young, not very thin, not a girl any longer (hasn’t been for as long as I’ve known her), and not obsessed with boys — or, really, with\u00a0this<\/em> boy. Still, for convenience\u00a0I shall refer to her as Stalker Girl, or simply SG.<\/p>\n

And yet, and yet…<\/p>\n

I\u00a0first encountered\u00a0SG maybe 15-20 years ago. She was a temp worker then, assigned to my division’s front desk; I really don’t interact with people in my division generally, and did not with her.<\/p>\n

Until she found out that I was a writer.<\/p>\n

Other writers in the same situation may be familiar with the variety of ways in which people handle that information. SG’s response was to come into my office, sit down, and lay it on the line: She wrote poetry, she explained. She wanted it published — preferably with the help of an agent.<\/p>\n

And I? I was a writer, and thus\u00a0in a position to mentor her.<\/p>\n

I tried to explain. I wasn’t a poet, I said. I had very little experience with the poetry marketplace at all, except for an extended stint as webmaster for a poetry press. She needed to consult reference books X, Y, and Z, which would explain the process of querying and would help her select some journals and\/or publishers\u00a0best suited for her. My half of the conversation, in short, consisted of a lot of frantic, get-this-flypaper-off-my-hands disavowal.<\/p>\n

The upshot: she accepted that I wouldn’t be able to help, at all…\u00a0but<\/em> she insisted that I had been very kind, VERY kind, oh she appreciated my kindness so much (etc.). When she was hired as a permanent employee shortly thereafter, and transferred to another division, she made a point of emailing me to let me know she would remember my kindness forever…<\/p>\n

The experience rather creeped me out — not because I disliked being thought of as kind, but because—<\/p>\n

Look, I’ll be blunt, and I’ll admit that this is shallow and, well, ugly<\/em> of me. SG is not at all pleasant in appearance. She’s poorly groomed, rather unattractive in general, weirdly over-the-top religious… and\u00a0always, relentlessly pleasant<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That’s the issue, see. I’m not uncomfortable so much with SG; I’m uncomfortable with — I loathe<\/em> — my own response to her.<\/p>\n

She corrals me at the coffee machine or in the hallway to regale me with details of the junior-college classes she’s taking: she shares the wonderful things she’s learning, and did I know that some numbers are\u00a0imaginary<\/em>?, and that every element\u00a0vibrates at its own atomic frequency<\/em>?, and that\u00a0there are\u00a0many separate but overlapping universes<\/em>? (Early on, she formed the notion that as a computer programmer I must have majored in mathematics and\/or physics and\/or chemistry. Nothing I’ve done or said has apparently convinced her otherwise.) As a rule, in fact, I\u00a0do<\/em> know the things she’s encountering for the first time. I know I ought to be delighted for her. I ought to congratulate her on being able to somehow reconcile\u00a0recent scientific discoveries and theories with her long-time beliefs in a god-centered and -created universe. I need to respond to people as\u00a0she<\/em> does, in short, to their inner beauties rather than their outward grotesqueries.<\/p>\n

But I’ve had none of those flowers-and-butterflies reactions. And I hate myself for it.<\/p>\n

And on that sour note…\u00a0<\/strong>I’m afraid I’m going to have to wrap this up. I’d planned to close with an upbeat song or video — something like that — but will have to put off until some uncertain tomorrow what today cannot deliver.<\/p>\n

Thanks, as always, for visiting!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This year’s Potpourri, I reckon, will be shorter than its predecessors. I’ve got just as much I could post about, and of course today’s the only day I can post a Potpourri entry, but The World Is Too Much With Me this time around. So I’ll just write, off and on, and hit the WordPress […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38,4335,37],"tags":[4136,807,2335,4070,4071],"class_list":{"0":"post-16862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-potpourri","9":"category-onlineworld","10":"tag-04_technology","11":"tag-men-and-women","12":"tag-birthdays","13":"tag-web-comics","14":"tag-self-loathing","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4nY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16862"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16870,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16862\/revisions\/16870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}