Are there just so many prototypes? November 20, 2007
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Gibberish, Life, Psyche, Science, Superfluous musings.2 comments
Living in cities that are populous enough that I see new faces every day, I’ve observed something interesting all my life. It’s probably a phenomenon others’ share as well. The experience is something like this: you notice that everyone around you – all the strangers – map quite well onto other people you know. I am talking about appearances only, here, not personality or anything deeper than that. But almost anyone I see and meet looks like someone else and has similar mannerisms… you can sort of see what “kind” of person you are resting your gaze upon. It’s rather odd. I’ve met my share of “doubles” – someone who looks exactly like your best friend but lives half a world around and doesn’t speak the same language. 
So, lately, I’ve been wondering if there are only a limited number of human prototypes, so to speak. And if everyone is essentially a print that belongs to a particular “kind” of person, then could you line up all the people in the world, according to similarities in features, body type and mannerisms? And if so, could you observe a continuance? And maybe you would see that people, all people, are alike because you’ll have an endless string of people who look similar to each other and the features gradually blend in with next string of prototypes and so on until all people around the world could be connected in a blend of sorts. I’m having a hard time explaining this. Let’s see… it’s like that Michael Jackson video (5:27). There.
Paranoia & distress November 20, 2007
Posted by midnightzimadreams in Psyche, Work.add a comment
I had a very stressful day at work. I’ve been working on a project for more than a week now that is very detail-demanding and it has been changing literally every day, sometimes multiple times a day, with many unknowns and a very respectable list of deliverables. I’ve been working on this with several colleagues, but I was to keep track of most details and do a lot of the e-mailing to clients. So, as detail-oriented as I am, all of the uncertainty and changes, drove me crazy. I’ve been commiserating with one colleague who’s been helping me tremendously with logistics and I felt really bad by this afternoon for how much I’d been hogging her time and “complaining” about every twist and turn.
But before I left for my day off and then Thanksgiving break (the project has a due date of Tuesday after the holiday), I got a message from my boss to leave my work laptop at work… just because. I was planning on taking it home to follow e-mail tomorrow once in a while and provide any documents that may be needed in my absence. That didn’t matter. SO, now I am paranoid about the reason for the request to leave behind my laptop. I’m feeling doubly guilty for being so stressed out and stressing out my colleagues along the way and now I’m composing all sort of scenarios where the leaving-the-laptop-behind is some sort of punishment-in-the-works. I can’t bear failure and I feel like one right now.
Most likely, it is all just in my head. But this kind of thing happens to me often. How to avoid it? How can I prevent this self-doubt, reading too much into coincidental happenings, and really preventing some of the trouble in the first place by not complaining (even if politely and always diplomatically) when I am under pressure. I think this is a flaw that is much more visible to outsiders but the question (as I’ve recognized it for a long time) is how to control it, how to start mending it? Any ideas?
