I'm going completely crazy at work right now, because I am in a situation I really hate, that of explaining something I find very simple to a coworker who should already fully grasp the things I am explaining. He (we will say it's a he, but I make no promises) just stares at me with wide eyes as I talk, and when I ask questions answers either with more staring or complete subject jumps. I ask, "Should we wait until the third member of our team is here?" and he stares. I ask him what I can do to help get the installation moving, and he stares, then says, "We can ask So-and-So to help." "Well," I say, "what do we need help with?". He stares blankly. I suggest that we ought to try to do this on our own before asking someone to help. He stares. After five or ten minutes of this I begin to whimper and crawl off to sit in my cube and concentrate on not screaming.

When I decided to quit being a sysadmin and start being a programmer, I was partially motivated by the belief that I had absolutely no patience for explaining things to people. As I'm writing this, though, I'm suddenly realising that's not true; I have a ton of patience with kids of many ages and with most of my friends. I seem to do fine explaining things to people who want to hear and understand what I'm saying. It's dealing with people who aren't interested in doing their half of the process, people who either can't or won't pay attention and participate that get to me. Unfortunately, as a sysadmin a large number of the people I had to explain things to deeply resented needing to know what I was saying. They didn't want to learn how to set a vacation message in their email or how to change their DNS records, they just wanted an end result double-quick. This drove me batty; you're a highly-placed person at a high-tech company and you're unwilling to understand the most minimal things about how the technology your company relies upon works? Good grief. Go do something you care about.

I seem to have acquired, somewhere in my life, a desire for excellence. This may or may not be the same thing which is driving me to organise and tidy my house so relentlessly... I suspect it is the same thing, though. I don't think of myself as someone with high standards, but I am, and I seem to take a lot of joy in making things Right (although the definition of 'Right' is very slippery when we move beyond such things as the organisation of my non-fiction books). I think this might be why I get so frustrated at people who don't care about doing things well. Never mind that I can't always meet my own standards; I want to work with people who have their own high standards they're trying to meet, who are energetic about their work and interested in learning new things. I want to do excellent work, and I want to work with people who feel the same way. The pursuit of excellence. Where did all of this come from? When did I quit being the intrinsically lazy person I still think of myself as? Will it really stretch beyond my house, into whatever new job I find?

I was really frustrated and rantful when I started writing this morning, so angry at my coworker and my job and life in general that I could barely see straight. Fortunately I had lunch with Trip, who patiently de-ranted me over Singaporean food, which is why the above is not mere frothing at the mouth but actually has some self-analysis in it. Wasn't I going to avoid self-analysis in this journal? Hah. Hah, I say.

Yesterday I spent an entire glorious day communing with my house. I threw much garbage away. I unpacked boxes and boxes of random stuff in the living room, putting the non-fiction on its shelves (in Dewey Decimal order, because I know that enough to intuit where things will be, even though as an objective cataloguing system it's pretty horribly US-centric and bad), putting the sf on the shelves Jim was building, throwing more stuff away, putting my long-lost mid-90's financial records into a position of honour in the computer room, putting art supplies in their cabinet, putting photographs and cards and notes from friends into my box of Personal Stuff to be Filed... it was utterly satisfying. Almost embarassing, to be this filled with contentment about such utterly mundane tasks as taking things out of boxes and putting them where they go, but it really was wonderful. I love my house, and I love sharing it with Jim. I'd pop in to the library where he was busily constructing bookshelves and smooch him and then pop out again and empty another box. Life was good.

The chocolate chocolate chunk cookies (yes, two chocolates on purpose) are staring at me. Before the great house-communing yesterday we went to OSH to buy empty pots (for the woolly betony and maybe for the mint) and dryer vent stuff, and then to the grocery store for 'just a few things'. This turned into a full shopping cart, and cookies were on sale, so now I have a box of chocolate chocolate chunk cookies staring at me. I stare back, thoughtfully. Do I want a cookie? I think I'm still stuffed from lunch, which included chocolate truffle cake for dessert. But oh, the cookies are looking at me. Doushiyou? ('What should I do?').

The weather has been strange, lately, or so it seems. First May was warm and sunny, then cold and gray with a lot of surprising rain, and then more warm and sunny, and now today it's pretty and bright and the sun is slanting down in long dusty beams through the fir trees outside my window... but there's enough wind that I get cold the moment I step outside, since I didn't bring my jacket even though I knew it was going to be non-warm today. Still, it's pretty. I'm just wishing for real warmth, so I can sit outside on the patio in shorts and a tank top and repot (not report) my plants while basking like my cats do in sunbeams.

My, it's amazing how fast a day goes when one has absolutely nothing to do & the phone systems are down so one can't even call one's insurance company and tell them that one has moved. I think I'll continue my great catching-up on Ceej's journal for a while, and then go home and commune with the house some more -- or maybe finish Might & Magic 8, or put recipes (I found my recipe notebook) into my recipe software. And pick up Jim at the train station and hug him a lot.