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Phone calls
Jan. 20th, 2023 02:45 pmIt’s snowing.
The day started early, with a phone call, which is weird, because I have do not disturb turned on and most of the people with the ability to punch through that were in the house sleeping, too, and the rest know better, generally. But this was the school district announcing a 2 hour delay. Yay! It may be five ish in the morning, but once I got the alarms shut off, I could sleep until around 9. Well, I did get up at 7 ish when I heard my son in the kitchen to say, “Two Hour Delay” and hear back, “I know”.
I have a number of scheduled weekly phone / zoom calls, another not quite weekly call, and then two people who I talk to on the phone one or more times a week. In a normal week, 2-3 of these won’t actually happen. In general, the calls are between 1 and 2 hours — I’ll call a halt at 2 hours even if it’s still fun, because I get tired and Life Continues Around the Phone Call, and many calls naturally come to an end after about an hour, or the person on the other end has scheduled an hour and they are busier than I am (at least, they have more tightly scheduled activities. This week, _every_ single call happened, and some of the calls involved discussing the very recent death of someone who many of us knew, altho who no one was currently in close contact with (not a relative — I barely knew this person two decades ago, so this isn’t a big impact on me on any level, but it was a big impact on some of the people I am close to).
Also!
During one of today’s phone calls I was explaining something, and I had a whole slew of subsequent realizations and will now go off and draft something about that. The triggering phrase was, “for people with personality disorders, feelings are facts”, and I had some issue with that phrase and was saying, it’s not that they think that feelings are actually facts, it’s that their perception of and interaction with reality is not based on facts, but rather on feelings, and so much of our society is so fact based that lots of our relationships are really more transactional than feeling-based, and at _that_ point, I really started thinking about my two characteristic descriptions of personality disorder (“characteristic way of not solving their problems” and “persistently disruptive of reciprocal prosocial norms”) and was like, oh. I think I get it now.
I love these phone calls and would not change anything, and I’m still doing my zoom cocktail hours tonight, but also, I swear I am going to have a Day of Silence on Saturday. I mean, I won’t, really, but wow.
The day started early, with a phone call, which is weird, because I have do not disturb turned on and most of the people with the ability to punch through that were in the house sleeping, too, and the rest know better, generally. But this was the school district announcing a 2 hour delay. Yay! It may be five ish in the morning, but once I got the alarms shut off, I could sleep until around 9. Well, I did get up at 7 ish when I heard my son in the kitchen to say, “Two Hour Delay” and hear back, “I know”.
I have a number of scheduled weekly phone / zoom calls, another not quite weekly call, and then two people who I talk to on the phone one or more times a week. In a normal week, 2-3 of these won’t actually happen. In general, the calls are between 1 and 2 hours — I’ll call a halt at 2 hours even if it’s still fun, because I get tired and Life Continues Around the Phone Call, and many calls naturally come to an end after about an hour, or the person on the other end has scheduled an hour and they are busier than I am (at least, they have more tightly scheduled activities. This week, _every_ single call happened, and some of the calls involved discussing the very recent death of someone who many of us knew, altho who no one was currently in close contact with (not a relative — I barely knew this person two decades ago, so this isn’t a big impact on me on any level, but it was a big impact on some of the people I am close to).
Also!
During one of today’s phone calls I was explaining something, and I had a whole slew of subsequent realizations and will now go off and draft something about that. The triggering phrase was, “for people with personality disorders, feelings are facts”, and I had some issue with that phrase and was saying, it’s not that they think that feelings are actually facts, it’s that their perception of and interaction with reality is not based on facts, but rather on feelings, and so much of our society is so fact based that lots of our relationships are really more transactional than feeling-based, and at _that_ point, I really started thinking about my two characteristic descriptions of personality disorder (“characteristic way of not solving their problems” and “persistently disruptive of reciprocal prosocial norms”) and was like, oh. I think I get it now.
I love these phone calls and would not change anything, and I’m still doing my zoom cocktail hours tonight, but also, I swear I am going to have a Day of Silence on Saturday. I mean, I won’t, really, but wow.