The Busy-ness

So I'm trying not to let blogging become like all my other hobbies and avocations, where I spend more time thinking about what I'd do if I had the time than I spend actually doing. But I've been exceedingly busy of late - or at the least exceedingly occupied. My company has now passed through the transitional period and has officially taken over control of its part of the contract, so there's busy-ness there. On the first day, in the call center, nobody's phones or computers worked at 8:30 in the morning, so we kind of started out way behind the eight ball. As I cheerily said later in the day, though, "the screwups today were entirely the fault of GACWTP's IT department, so we're not to blame. We didn't even have the ability to screw up!" Today was better but there's still a lot of craziness as people are finally able to figure out what works, what doesn't, what the real deal might be on certain topics, and who didn't do enough preparation (which seems to be entirely unrelated to the six weeks of transitional meetings leading up to this point).

Also, due to the transition, my dad's around, which means I'm staying out even later - out the door at 7:30 in the morning, home around 11:30 at night - because I want to spend time with him. Also, if I hang around after hours, I get two tangible benefits aside from, eventually, an hour or so of alone time with my father: a free meal and the ability to hang out with my dad, his business partner, and sometimes my immediate boss. In these sessions (aside from good dining) the metaphorical ties get loosened and I'm privy to stuff that's usually a lot more interesting and often a lot more educational than what I actually did during the work day. I couldcome home when I'm officially done with my work, but aside from wanting to spend time with my dad I do enjoy listening to and occasionally taking part in these conversations, despite the fact that I get home and wish I had more time available. (I should note that afterhours "educational" is meant in a broader sense; I'm learning [a lot] during the day about the parameters and management of the relevant program, but it's the afterhours unwinding between my dad and his partner where I learn about the specific personalities, the quirks of their business, being a supervisor/manager, and various other glimpses into human nature. Plus gossip.)

At dinner today I offered my generic observation of a particular individual that tried to contextualize a specific problem my dad and his partner had: i.e., his current behavior is part of an observed pattern that he can't, for whatever reason, publicly admit to anything less than perfect calm and control and ideal functionality. Whatever the issues with his employees or his system are behind closed doors, he can't bring them out into the open, and as a result obfuscates or just plain lies to avoid admitting that he might have a problem. I also compared it to another associate of theirs with the pithy nod that everyone has their personal flaw which needs to be managed; the other person's, discussed the previous night, is the myopic pursuit of making sure everyone knows he's very smart and incredibly knowledgable (which he is), the pursuit of which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and led a few to wonder if he's a bigot (which he's not). My dad was immediately interested as to what I thought his flaw was, and at dinner I demurred.

Afterwards I pointed out that: (a) I still have much less exposure to him in a professional/business/managerial context than I have to his partner; (b) that I love him; (c) that I admire him and both consciously and unconcsiously he's a powerful model for me, and I'd therefore have difficulty feeling like I could pick out a "flaw" in this sense because I'd be less likely to view it as a flaw, since it's probably also a big part of my personality. I'm intensely self critical, but most of my self criticism is counterproductive and bullshit, and it avoids the truly salient aspects of my personality. A legitimate flaw is that (like many) I compensate for extreme insecurities by layering them with a confidence that borders on arrogance, but this same confidence/arrogance is going to keep me from perceiving elemental personality traits as flaws. Objectively, for example, I'm extremely confident in my intelligence, and more to the immediate point, my perceptiveness, intuition, ability to mentally cut to the core of an issue or a process, and get there faster and better than the people around me. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm probably wrong and ostensibly that overconfidence could become a problem, except I'm too confident to truly doubt my own self-perceptions. I'm running in circles right now, but that's the nature of self-analysis, I suppose, especially a self-analysis as involuted and repetitive and, frankly, hateful as I've been subjecting myself to for the past ten years. Anyway, to break out of the circularity, I also pointed out that some of the things I perceive as flaws in myself are things I criticize myself for because I think, compared to the example of my father, I fall considerably short.

For example, I become extremely contemptuous of people and their behaviors extremely quickly. Not any people, and not for just any reason, but there are particular personality traits that cut right to one of the things that most bothers me about other people, and my reaction to those I (rapidly) judge as petty, small-minded, vindictive, etc., is to build up a towering edifice of disdain that borders (depending on the nature and history of the petty vindictiveness) extremely close to hatred. By comparison, my dad projects the impression that he's pretty much above it all and it's water off his back; he points out that I'm 25 and, when he was my age, he got caught up in a lot of other people's pettiness as well, and even today he can still get amped up about some small person's bullshit, but he certainly handles it a lot better than I do. I assume this is all related to my self-nominated status as the official Grudge Holder in the family. It's, between the two of us, an attested fact that at some point I basically decided that (we're skimming over a lot of deep water here) it wasn't right for my mother (and, by extension, my father) to have forgiven her mother, my grandmother, for having been a pretty horrible person, and I was therefore going to pick up the slack by disliking her for everything my mother had moved past.

[Redacted due to extreme and irrational paranoia.]

So, you know, that's probably a personality flaw.

I was hoping to write an impressionistic preview of the NBA Finals before they actually started and contaminated the integrity of my thoughts, but I've only got one more night to do it in.