Robert Manners

Geuh...

Things at work are becoming unpleasant. There is Drama behind the scenes. Though it doesn't really have anything to do with me, it does affect my environment, and so I don't like it. I need to start tending to the hedges of my professional life to make sure that these things don't get through to my personal life, and that is sometimes very difficult. I have a hard time drawing boundaries in between the different portions of my life.



For example, I have to keep certain things in my life out of my conversations with Grandmother. I mean, I don't have to be dishonest or lie to her about things... it's just that, because of our cultural and ideological differences, I have to weigh things for content before I open my mouth with her. While I might like to be able to talk intimately with her about drag shows and romantic interests (and echoing lack thereof) and other such things that might occur to me, that just isn't possible. It's not the way she's built... when she doesn't understand, she judges; and when I'm judged (especially according to principles to which I myself don't subscribe), I become angry and indignant. So for the sake of peace and quiet in the home, I edit out certain parts of my life along with the rare and carefully used fucks and shits and damns that pepper my speech with other people.



There are other times when one has to remember which of one's friends don't like others of one's friends, and it is sometimes difficult to keep such people apart when one is entertaining or making plans or what-have-you. And I do a pretty good job of keeping my oil friends and my water friends in separate containers. But other than that, I do have a hard time sorting things out in my mind... my work and home and social lives overlap in so many ways and in so many places that I find it very difficult to be a different person At Work than I am At Home or Out Playing. When something is going wrong at work, my home life suffers, when something in my home life is wrong, my social life suffers, and when something is wrong in my social life, my work suffers. It's all of a piece.



And right now, things are wrong in my work life. It's going to take a lot of effort, a lot of patience, and a lot of help to keep that from tainting my home and social lives. But at any rate, I have at least announced to the general public that I am going to leave this place at the end of next semester. It's nice to have that out in the open. I still haven't told my boss, who wasn't at today's meeting where I told one person (my former boss) in the full hearing of all the others present. But I'll get to that in my own good time, closer to the time when we have to start looking for a replacement. And I flatly refuse to future-trip about that right now.



Instead, I am going to go home and play with my Sims! I've got the new neighborhood about half-filled... I have a Gothic castle for the Baron von Lichtemann and his "little brother," a big red-brick Georgian frat-house with five hunky shirtless men in it, a lovely French manor house for my eponymous Robert Manners Sim (whom I am going to recreate with my own face, I just learned how to do that), and a big silver-plated space-age villa for the Mad Scientist and his gold-sequined go-go-dancer mignon in the empty lots... so next I'll start playing around with the installed lots, expanding the Maxis-created structures rather than knocking them down and starting fresh. I think perhaps I will start a house with little people named after all of my least-favorite folk from my professional life, and torture them all systematically until they drop dead and are transmuted into cute little urns. It might be fun! And then I'll upload the new neighborhood in my webspace so you can see, too!



And in the meantime, here is something else, upon which to rest your little orbs (if you are so inclined, which I understand not everybody is):