The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[403]

Good: I do not need surgery. The sports-doc estimates that I'll need the brace for another week, and crutches until two weeks from now. I'm due back in a month for follow-up X-rays, at which point I can hope to be pronounced 'recovered'. In the mean time, I have a renewed script for pain meds. Thank fuck.

Bad: Being poked at and having my knee wiggled out-of-plane to reach those conclusions left me hurting worse than yesterday. I already had problems with stress from out-of-plane bending on that knee, thanks.

Ugly: Opiate painkillers are effective and addictive in equal measure. I'm watching myself carefully because the animal part of my mind is smart enough to get us into trouble, but not enough to get us out of it.

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Ow. XvX (X-rays deserve X-eyes.)

I know what you mean in the previous post about being able to just kind of stay awake but not actually do anything more deeply and insistently useful. It's more worrisome to me just from justifiability—it gives people more openings to attack you for doing something other than the thing they wanted you to do, in theory.

[403]

...Attacking me for my chosen use of time (unless one's already paying for it) is something that only my immediate blood family has ever gotten away with. And since moving out, they can't either. Time is precious - nobody will ever get another moment just like this one. People who presume to dictate its use to me without exceptionally good reasons are jumping up and down on one of my incoherent rage buttons.

I get the impression that you do contract work, though, so maybe things are different in that world?

[premchaia_pre4]

It can be, though it's supposedly not supposed to happen as much in that realm (in practice, well…). More, I've seen it happen to people a lot in academia (particularly graduate school) and in “harder” single-source join-the-team employment (which intersects the “unless someone's already paying for it” a lot of times, but not always—salaried people get a lot of weird ambiguity re how much time they're “supposed” to be “at work”). It seems to be a common phenomenon. (But then, I can be kind of Spathi-like and overly fearful, so.)

If you're able to resist it—well, good. xvx

[403]

Ah, yeah. Academia actively selects for people with no boundaries as regards their work. The more I see of it, the more convinced I am that I don't belong there.

If you're doing the kind of hard-to-quantize work that gets salaried, taking downtime is totally necessary. That's when creativity happens. (Ideas bubble up into consciousness when they're good and ready... iff you don't have the pressure cooker lid on.) Organizations that don't know that tend to burn out their salaried employees with comparatively poor results. >_>
Not that anyone listens to me about such things. <_<

[premchaia_pre4]

Indeed. I've actually explained to customers at times (if they seem amenable to it, or at least likely to at worst take it as a joke) that since I'm a knowledge worker, in actuality, most of what they're paying for me to do is sleep, since my “inventory” consists mostly of mental energy and related states which get regenerated mostly via sleeping enough (and other related things, but it's a useful metonym). I get the impression large sectors of mainstream tech industry do have a way of burning everyone out whenever they can, and then just arranging everything so that hobbling along on the resultant fumes doesn't hurt anyone but the peons. It's kind of scary.

Oh well.