Monday: catching up a bit

I walked with M.

I went to Trader Joe’s and bought peanut butter and a few other things.

We had a nice steak dinner with mushrooms, cole slaw, tomato and bell pepper, air fried potatoes and turnips. It was yum. We didn’t eat all the steak, until A. realized there was steak and she finished it off after she ate her ice cream. I’m thawing another steak for tomorrow.

I decided that while Jenny Schwartz is fun, and Katee Robert is an extremely smutty good time, I wanted something with a little more to it for fiction reading and went in search of a Casey Blair option. I dove into Take Back Magic and am enjoying it immensely. I could also be reading Very Nice Funerals, but it felt like more of a commitment.

I finally reopened BIM 360, took a screen shot of where it isn’t working for me, and sent it back to E., who is trying to help me figure out what’s wrong. I mean, what’s wrong is really flipping obvious — I only have some of the permissions I need — but his last missive on the topic was October 11 and I only finally got back into it today. By the time I actually can view the model, I won’t really need to any more. Which is fine. So far, I’m still within the first 30 days “Free” period so it’s not like it has cost me anything yet (other than the time of people who I am also paying for, but whatever).

Apparently, tomorrow I finally get a presentation on all of the closets and which ones have what amount of mechanicals in them. Part of this is going to be making some adjustments so that access panels are not buried in the ceilings of small closets, because that absolutely bites. All access panels should always be in hallways, where the temptation to block access to them is extremely limited and obviously a bad idea.

Rabbit hole social comparison, personality disorder, wtf

“Another study by Arntz & Haaf (2012) examined how those with BPD make evaluations
in an interpersonal therapeutic context. Participants had telephone therapy sessions with an
alleged mental health professional who was instructed to act as either an accepting, negative, and
neutral therapist. Similar to Veen & Arntz (2000), this study used several VAS to measure the
extremity and valence of participants’ ratings of the therapists.”

(I’m reading https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1426&context=honors_etd)

OK, I want to know more about the ethics panel that signed off on this thing. I mean, on some level, I’m pretty sure this was driven by feelings of vindictiveness on the part of therapists who had spent a lot of time working with people who had BPD diagnoses. It just feels mean, and absolutely designed to increase distrust. Also, kind of hilarious. I supposed I should look it up. I guess as long as the participants _knew_ that this was acting?

“ What was unexpected was the fact that the group with the highest Dichotomous Thinking
scores came from the Low-BPD group during the downward comparison condition, though this
group’s average DT score was statistically the same as the low-BPD group’s score in this
condition.”

I actually really kind of love this finding? I don’t know that the author saw it the way I do, tho. I suspect that people comparing up do a fair amount of work internally to reduce distance. If I were to compare my skill at makeup to someone who is a stylist for, I dunno, Taylor Swift or Beyonce or whatever, obviously, I am pathetic and they are amazing. But I might try to convince myself that the distance is much smaller than it actually is. I would do this because this comparison is only gonna highlight how shitty I am compared to that person’s work. I might say to myself, “Obviously, they do this for a living, so they are going to do it better than me, but all things considered, I did pretty good for an amateur!” But if I’m trying to compare my ability to bake a cake compared to someone who rarely bakes, maybe used a boxed cake mix and not a very good one, I might really exaggerate just how much better my cake was than the person who used the not very good boxed cake mix. I’m gonna benefit self-esteem-wise in this comparison and so maybe I milk it for all it’s worth and then some. This might tend to manifest as higher DT scores in downward comparisons. “Oh my god can you even believe how disgusting this cake is! Who baked this! My homemade cakes are from scratch and I used” look you’ve all heard me on the topic of my baking.

I lie, of course. Mostly when talking about my cakes, I complain about how people describe them as “not too sweet”, and I will sometimes go off on people for describing my cooking as “the best diet food ever”, which if I were preparing diet food I might be happy about, but since I’m not, I am, decades after I basically quit feeding people who said shit like that to me, still bitter about.

What triggered all this? Well, I very strategically did not respond to something my sister posted on FB (linked to an article at the LA Times, which I _just_ unsubscribed from so while I still have access, I did not read it, but I believe the gist of it was some kind of concern trolling about kids eating food in pouches? I don’t know the exact beef. If it’s sugar, there are no-sugar-added options. If it’s recyclability, you can do TerraBoxes. *shrug* and then commented adding, “if you can’t teach your kids how to use a spoon, don’t have kids”) that was needlessly provocative, but having seen, at long intervals, over a decade of this kind of thing, and knowing the kind of person my sister actually is in real life (a highly skilled practical nurse who specializes in providing extremely compassionate care for children who have dire and often terminal medical conditions), I have really started to think a bit about why she does this, because we have a multi-decade history of me saying, hey, maybe not say this kind of shit, that turns into a meandering and pointless conversation and in the end, it comes out that something totally unrelated is really bothering her and if we’d just started with that, we could have skipped all the rest of the unpleasantness.

She’s getting over a wicked bad cold, so that may really have been most of it, altho when her voice comes out, presumably I’ll get some additional story about either a client’s parents bad behavior or something along those lines. Hopefully not something really sad about a client, altho fundamentally all the clients stories are incredibly sad.

You never know, tho — it could have just been blowing off some steam from the stress of the countdown to the election. People are really struggling out there. Take good care, and if you’re a complete asshole, I’ll chalk it up to the stress of the election and hope we all feel better after we’re past it.