I had intended to get back into the whole “time management” thing today and had written out a schedule.
Getting up before nine and going out for a four-mile walk was a strong start, but once I got home and was in the unstructured “free time” I’d written in for myself I found it impossible to motivate myself to move on to the structured time.
In particular, I found myself still feeling a little woozy from a combination of the heat and humidity and yesterday morning’s activities, and so I ended up taking a two-hour nap.
My general malaise could have been the lingering effects from the Vicodin I took before going to bed last night.
My mouth isn’t especially sore today, so I’ve opted to forego the Vicodin, as I’m not sure I like the effect it has on me. It does serve to dull the pain, but it also makes me feel odd, sort of the way I would feel on those rare occasions when I would drink just to the point of starting to get drunk and then cut myself off, which is to say slightly light-headed and vaguely nauseous.
Of course, in fairness to the Vicodin, this feeling could just as easily have been attributed to the lack of sleep I’d had, the blood loss, and the overall trauma of having six teeth yanked out, but even so, given that I had no real need for an especially potent painkiller today it seemed prudent to simply not take it.
As mentioned, my mouth isn’t hurting too much, though it is still kind of tender, so I can’t do things like rest my chin on my hands, and as for chewing…well, not so much.
Mostly it’s just gross, what with bits of food falling into the empty spaces where the teeth used to be, so I’m sticking with a mostly liquid diet, surviving on protein shakes, soup, and applesauce.
I suppose I could supplement that with things like yogurt or pudding, but I don’t have those things, and don’t really feel like going anywhere to get them.
It’s my hope that, as I continue to walk (and sweat like crazy when I do so, thanks to the 90%+ humidity) and have a lower caloric intake, thanks to what, and how little, I’m “eating,” I’ll actually manage to ditch some of my body fat, allowing me to work more effectively towards building and toning my muscle mass.
I’m sure that won’t happen, though, and that somehow I’ll manage to gain ten pounds, but at least I’m hoping to lose weight.
Last week I took a class for work that, essentially, involved learning how to communicate with people.
The idea presented in the class is that there are four basic communication styles that people use. The class examined the attributes of each style, helped us (via a survey we sent out to people we know before the class) identify our own style, how to learn to identify the communication style other people use, and, finally, how to adapt our individual styles to most effectively communicate with them.
…
Apart from the specific terminology, there wasn’t much in the way of new concepts to me, and the communication styles roughly correlate to the kinds of personality types identified by other systems, such as Myers-Briggs.
So basically there were no real surprises for me.
Beyond that, though, while much of it seemed like common sense (basically you have to tailor your communications to your audience), there was, I thought, perhaps too much emphasis on accommodating other communication styles.
After all, not everyone is going to make the effort to communicate, and there are times that you need to be obstinate in response. For example, “Implementers” like to maintain control. So what? Does that mean you always have to give them control, or even the illusion of control in your communications with them? Hell no. Sometimes baby just doesn’t get his bottle, and if he doesn’t like it, tough.
Another issue I had was that, while the instructor did give lip-service to the notion, not enough emphasis was placed on the fact that a communication style is only one element of an individual’s personality.
I tried to point this out, but I don’t think anyone took it to heart.
Further, I saw some of the participants in the class finding themselves pigeonholed into a specific pattern of behavior based on the results of their communication profiles, and simply accepting it, while others found themselves lamenting the fact that they didn’t fit into communication styles that they saw as “better.”
One woman was very upset by the fact that she wasn’t an “Innovator,” as she took it to mean that not being one makes her completely incapable of creative thought.
One of the “Investigators,” which, by the way, is my preferred style of communication, when I pointed out that another “Investigator” might want some recognition during a role-play exercise, held up a laminated “cheat sheet” and said, “Well, according to this, we aren’t interested in recognition.”
WTF? You’re going to base your life on a little card that some guy you barely know gave you? Okay, so it’s laminated, but that doesn’t make it the equivalent of a stone tablet brought down from the mountain by Moses.
Of course we’re interested in getting recognition; we’re human beings, jackass.
Still, these complaints are largely directed at the participants in the class, not the presenter, who at least wasn’t an irritating jerk like the instructor of that one class Kathleen and I took a while back, or the material.
As something of an “ice-breaking” exercise, the details of which I won’t get into, at the beginning of the class we were all asked to draw a picture of a pig. The consensus seemed to be that mine was the best.
Of course, I had a lot of reference material to work with, as, with the exception of one cute Asian girl, this was not a pretty group.
Okay, that was kind of mean…but damn, this was an ugly group. It really made me long for my negotiation class, which had quite a few lookers in it.
Speaking of looks, some time ago, in a Threshold entry I don’t feel like tracking down, I made a reference to how in life I frequently see real people who look as though they could have been drawn by different comic book artists. For example, Jessica Simpson is a total Adam Hughes.
Pamela Anderson, meanwhile, who, thanks to the wonders of modern cosmetic surgery, is about as close as is possible to having an Image Comics female character come to life, looks like she could have been drawn by any number of Jim Lee imitators…
In any case, the other day when I was performing that most horrific of tasks (looking in the mirror) I realized that I’m something of a Dave Gibbons.
Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily…except that, specifically, I think that I look like some corpses that he drew in Watchmen…
Also on the topic of looks, there’s a woman who lives in my apartment complex whom I refer to as “Hot Mama.” Hot, because she’s always appeared to be attractive from what I’ve seen of her and Mama because she has a young son.
Sunday night when I came home from work I got a very good look at her, as she was wearing a bikini top and some sort of matching sarong.
She looked extremely hot.
The one problem, though, was where I saw her, which was on the balcony of the guy who lives downstairs and to the right of me.
This was bothersome to me because he’s a total creep.
He’s this old (he appears to be retired) bald guy who either sits out on his balcony smoking and staring at people, or else wanders around the parking lot in his tank top, too-short shorts, and flip flops.
It was, therefore, bothersome to me to see this old creep making time with Hot Mama, who, as mentioned, was looking especially hot, in particular because this wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the old creep making time with a hot chick.
Ah well.
In any case, that will do it for this entry. I may or may not be back later.
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