Day 3.1 Driven to madness
May. 19th, 2009 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
(short week; yesterday was a holiday)
It was below freezing this morning, but since I don't have a winter jacket that is expendable enough to throw onto the floor/on top of the fridge in a dusty workshop area, I just put on a sweater and headed out to work, cold weather be damned.
We didn't really have anything to build - or do, for that matter - until approx. 3PM. The tradespeople are working five days behind schedule and hardly any of them showed up to work today either and so there's just nothing that's ready for us to do our part for.
And I think precisely because we had nothing to do, I had to put up with all of the rest of my coworkers talking about how drunk they were on the weekend (among other drunken times).
Sigh. It makes me feel kind of lonely and alienated, that I have trouble interacting with them because they're too young for me. I think that one of the benefits of my Asian background is that there's so much pressure to "stay in line" in order not to "lose face" that civility and decorum are extremely important. This serves a social-class purpose as well; there's a lot of emphasis on upward social mobility in Chinese culture and we believe that that's achieved through good education and good, cultured manners - not necessarily formalities but acting in the respectable manner of respectable people.
It just becomes an unconscious thing, that we do not glorify or show off our vices as points of pride, if we have any at all. And people who do do that get unconsciously kicked a notch down the figurative "respectability meter".
Consider Sunday afternoon, when I went over to visit CSG. He just came back from Sweden last week and had brought some random Swedish newspapers for me (I haven't quite had the chance to see if there were any IKEA ads in them). He's a bit of a jazz piano player and really wanted to learn more about classical music and technique and so we had some good conversation about that (among other stuff. He EPIC FAILS at Swedish crosswords, and I EPIC FAIL at Swedish vowels). To be honest I don't remember all that much of my music history but the discussion was engaging and educational. I found myself longing for that sort of conversation today, longing to be around CSG (for such socializing).
I finally bought myself one of those everybody's favourite FAMNIG HJÄRTA cushions, which I've had my eye on since... I started this job. I keep whining about wanting to buy it, so I just went ahead and bought it so I don't have to whine about it anymore.
I also took home a good portion of a roll of RATIONELL VARIERA drawer mat that we had left over from our work and would have gone into the garbage otherwise. It's just that non-slip kind of mat stuff that's good for a lot of things.
I feel like my breathing is unusually shallow tonight. Unfortunately I had a rather sizable whiff of second-hand smoke from my coworker's cigarette and I hope it's not because I'm allergic to tobacco smoke or something (I shouldn't be; it's not like I haven't been around smokers before). Maybe I've just caught some illness from the cold weather, but there was a fleeting thought upon mortality as I was coming back on the bus from shopping for a belated birthday gift for CSG, and I wondered if my parents would honour my wish to be buried in Finland.
Items assembled
It was below freezing this morning, but since I don't have a winter jacket that is expendable enough to throw onto the floor/on top of the fridge in a dusty workshop area, I just put on a sweater and headed out to work, cold weather be damned.
We didn't really have anything to build - or do, for that matter - until approx. 3PM. The tradespeople are working five days behind schedule and hardly any of them showed up to work today either and so there's just nothing that's ready for us to do our part for.
And I think precisely because we had nothing to do, I had to put up with all of the rest of my coworkers talking about how drunk they were on the weekend (among other drunken times).
Sigh. It makes me feel kind of lonely and alienated, that I have trouble interacting with them because they're too young for me. I think that one of the benefits of my Asian background is that there's so much pressure to "stay in line" in order not to "lose face" that civility and decorum are extremely important. This serves a social-class purpose as well; there's a lot of emphasis on upward social mobility in Chinese culture and we believe that that's achieved through good education and good, cultured manners - not necessarily formalities but acting in the respectable manner of respectable people.
It just becomes an unconscious thing, that we do not glorify or show off our vices as points of pride, if we have any at all. And people who do do that get unconsciously kicked a notch down the figurative "respectability meter".
Consider Sunday afternoon, when I went over to visit CSG. He just came back from Sweden last week and had brought some random Swedish newspapers for me (I haven't quite had the chance to see if there were any IKEA ads in them). He's a bit of a jazz piano player and really wanted to learn more about classical music and technique and so we had some good conversation about that (among other stuff. He EPIC FAILS at Swedish crosswords, and I EPIC FAIL at Swedish vowels). To be honest I don't remember all that much of my music history but the discussion was engaging and educational. I found myself longing for that sort of conversation today, longing to be around CSG (for such socializing).
I finally bought myself one of those everybody's favourite FAMNIG HJÄRTA cushions, which I've had my eye on since... I started this job. I keep whining about wanting to buy it, so I just went ahead and bought it so I don't have to whine about it anymore.
I also took home a good portion of a roll of RATIONELL VARIERA drawer mat that we had left over from our work and would have gone into the garbage otherwise. It's just that non-slip kind of mat stuff that's good for a lot of things.
I feel like my breathing is unusually shallow tonight. Unfortunately I had a rather sizable whiff of second-hand smoke from my coworker's cigarette and I hope it's not because I'm allergic to tobacco smoke or something (I shouldn't be; it's not like I haven't been around smokers before). Maybe I've just caught some illness from the cold weather, but there was a fleeting thought upon mortality as I was coming back on the bus from shopping for a belated birthday gift for CSG, and I wondered if my parents would honour my wish to be buried in Finland.
Items assembled
