Feedback session

[j4]

The Away Day was surprisingly fun. Lots of chances to talk to people and find out what they actually do, which of course means useful ideas to feed back to the web team for how to proactively improve our service to the different divisions of the university, rather than just reactively responding to short-term requests ...

... I said "proactively", didn't I? Without irony. Oops.

I have, however, discovered that I really enjoy getting people to discuss things. It's fascinating watching people develop ideas & think out loud, and it's great trying to draw people into the discussion when they don't think they have anything to contribute. And even more so when they obviously think it's all boring, but before they know it they're looking interested.

To be fair, at the beginning I thought it was going to be all boring. But then I realised that I was actually getting really excited about Making Things Work Better, and especially Making People Think More. The only problem is I talk too much; I need to get better at making other people talk more.

Also, there were a lot of "why does/doesn't your department do [whatever]" kind of questions, and as the only representative of the web team there (the other people from MISD work in totally different bits of the department) I spent a lot of time defending, explaining, and justifying the work we do. For all that I whinge about it while I'm doing it I do actually think it's worthwhile, and I really enjoyed being able to try to explain why. I don't think I did it as well as I could have done, but at least I tried. And people listened. Which was nice.

Now I just need to make the enthusiasm for doing my job last till Monday morning.

I also need to get more confidence in speaking in public. I'm much better now than I used to be, but I still get flustered when I feel like people Just Aren't Getting It. Part of the reason I'm so much more confident in writing is that I've spent years and years writing, just for myself, with nobody there to laugh at me when the words come out all weird. Clearly I need to do the same with speaking -- just talk to myself when nobody's listening. For some reason, though, it seems so much harder; I can imagine myself talking out loud but it's very hard to actually talk out loud when I'm on my own. Just to babble, the way I babble in writing, getting the hang of the way the words feel, playing with them until I can throw them up and catch them between my teeth with my eyes shut.

I feel like this is a lesson I keep coming back to (and maybe one day I'll actually do the homework) -- that there's a kind of mental block, an obstacle that I think I'm going to call a "Just-Do-It barrier", that's practically impossible to break the first time, and a little more manageable the second time, and little by little it gets progressively easier until presumably one day it's almost second nature, the way writing is to me now. I've found this with karate -- more so because it's a physical skill and I haven't the grounding in physical skills that I have in intellectual ones -- and I've found it with music, particularly recently when I've been trying to force myself to learn to improvise. I'm good at visualising and planning things in my head, but breaking the Just-Do-It barrier is a leap that all too often I just can't make.

* * *

On a slightly different tack... Do you ever get a kind of vertigo-like feeling accompanied by incoherent wishes along the lines of "I want to do everything! I want to be everything! And I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TIME!"? Or is that just me?

I WANT MORE LIFE.

Comments

[nja.livejournal.com]

You're not going to be able to do everything, and some of the time we're all incapable of doing anything. That's life. I ought to be reading the Critique of Pure Reason or experiencing the majesty of Mahler, and instead I'm listening to a jazz album recorded when my mother was four months pregnant with me, and reading people's wibbling on the inertnet.

I get vertigo-like feelings, mainly when I'm wandering back across the park with an egg salad roll and there's a bird making an interesting sound in a tree and I look up and forget momentarily why I'm looking up because the trees are lovely and green even at this time of year. I nearly fell over yesterday looking at the leaves. You don't have to be doing Great Things all the time.

Most of life is going to pass us all by, so take pleasure in what you can grab as it whizzes past.

[j4.livejournal.com]

It's not even wanting to do Grate Things, it's wanting to do everything. At every level of life. It's not just that I want to be a mother and a teacher and a web-designer and a systems analyst or whatever you call it when you look at what people do and say "this is how you can make it all Work Better" and I want to run a second-hand bookshop and a sushi bar and a net-cafe in Dublin and I want to own a vineyard and run a sanctuary for badgers... it's not just that the list of things I will never have time to read frankly terrifies me... it's not just that there are so many places to visit, and so many things to see, and languages to learn, and different foods to eat, and music to listen to, and people to meet, and conversations to have until 4 in the morning over a million different varieties of coffee... it's even just the little things, the fact that I want to sit around pontificating about things on the internet and in pubs, and I want to read all the Saint books until I know them backwards, and I want to redesign my home page, and I want to sell all my superfluous stuff on eBay, and I want to tidy my room and paint the spare room and put shelves up in the library and cook nice food and, and, and, MORE LIFE.

And, as if all that moon-on-a-stick-coveting wasn't enough, I want somebody to share it all with. :-/

[nja.livejournal.com]

Infinite possibilities. Infinity makes everyone's head spin. You can't have infinity.

Incidentally, I'd be up for the badger sanctuary thing. I'll start collecting the badgers tomorrow. I'll start everything tomorrow.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I want infinity!

A badger sanctuary would be cool. I'll start collecting today. Or at least I'll start something today. I read a book earlier. And watched a film. So I've done something.

We should go to Kew, where they have a human-sized badger sett.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

There's a farm for sale up here.
It's on Badger Lane.
Got 400k spare?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Sadly not...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Oi! That was my idea for a day out!

[j4.livejournal.com]

You're not the only person who's suggested it in the past! Unsurprisingly, a lot of people have heard of it & thought of me in conjunction with it. And when I said "we should go..." that "we" wasn't intended to mean "AJN and I on a romantic badger date" or anything like that. It sounds like it would be a cool trip for a group of people. Maybe one day I'll get some people together & we (general "we") will go and see it. Or maybe I'll never get round to it. Or maybe I'll go on my own so that at least all my friends feel equally pissed-off because I didn't invite them.