Psychiatrist told me that she wanted to extend our next meeting (next Monday) to an hour, on the basis of a conversation with the neuropsychologist who tested me.  She also told me to bring in bottles of any supplements, etc. I take.

Not sure if this is a good sign (that the neuropsych evaluation uncovered something new) or just a sign that that the neuropsychologist made my psychiatrist more worried about the supplements I take than she previously was (the neuropsychologist did seem concerned that I was taking a lot of supplements).  But I’m choosing to be hopeful.

Man I haven’t felt awful in this particular way in a while

Mind all yelling at me about how everything is horrible and insufficient and that the world is so thoroughly wrong, down to its smallest constituents, that it must be one of God’s bad first drafts or something, and I’m just like “please shut up, you’re really repetitive and I’ve got things to do”

Ooh, the second part of the ADHD test turned out to be a Wechsler!  I get to find out whether I’m still IQ Georg!

Blargh my mood is unaccountably bad today

I was productive yesterday, work up in a bad mood, met with my adviser (was 15 minutes late because I suck), he called my latest research idea “ingenious” and even that didn’t cheer me up

But I will see, and be cuddled by, the wonderful bohtie later today so there is much hope for mood improvement

todbrowning replied to your post: anonymous said:Yeah. You’re kind …

tbh you are probably one of the least assholish people on tumblr

kadathinthecoldwaste replied to your post: bartlebyshop reblogged your post:Yeah….

I think you’ve gotten grumpier in the last few years, but “asshole” is a term I generally apply to people considerably more thoughtless than you. We’ve had our disagreements, but I’ve never thought of you as thoughtless.

Thank you both!  (I meant to respond to these comments earlier but never had time.)

Joe, I think you’re right about the grumpiness.  I think of it as a good thing: for a lot of my late teens, and to some extent my early twenties, I had a unnecessary lack of intellectual self-confidence.  I mean, I was still aggressive and even arrogant sometimes in arguments, but internally I was always very unsure of any of my beliefs and the aggressiveness was a mask for insecurity (“please just admit you’re wrong about this, because I’m worried that I’m the one that’s wrong, because I'm always worried about that”).  As I’ve grown more confident, I’ve grown more able to say “that’s just bullshit” about certain opinions, and that can come off as grumpiness (or a sort of world-weariness).  I think, in a overall sense, it represents progress.

Also, I guess I want to explain what I’m trying to do with the “#i’m an asshole” tag, since every time I use it people reassure me that I’m not an asshole, which is appreciated, but shows that I’m not really communicating well.  The idea behind the tag is that it’s for posts that I consider unusually catty or critical of people’s personalities (as opposed to what they say).

I think I try to be pretty nice and polite on here in general, and even when I disagree with what someone is saying, I try to criticize the statement and not the person.  But then there are times, occasionally, when I just want to talk about how a specific person drives me up the wall – not any one specific thing they’ve said, but the broader patterns in their behavior, their personality.  And I want some way to single out these posts and kind of chide myself for making them whenever I do – some way to say “I feel kind of bad every time I do this, and sometimes I let myself do it, but I really want to try not to do it very often.”

So I tried to do that by inventing this self-deprecating tag, "#i’m an asshole", for these posts.  As though, after saying what I say in the post, I’m saying “jeez, I’m really a raging asshole sometimes, aren’t I?  I should make sure to keep that in check.”  Of course the tag is not sending that message very clearly, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect.  So maybe I should change it to something like “#i’m an asshole sometimes and i want to try to not be one very often”.  Except something less grammatically awkward.  I’m open to suggestions.

Okay.  Committments.  Work now.  No tumblr (rebuke me if you see me posting).

Then, this evening, post some commentary about rasputinette’s The Bitter Drop.

(Maybe also, try to work on Floornight if I feel up to it because I worry that I’ve taken a long enough break from it that it’ll be hard to get back into writing it.  But I won’t hold myself to that.)

sir-argues-a-lot replied to your post: A thing about me and therapists is tha…

I don’t really get the feeling this guy would be a good marriage counsellor either, given that he’s basically just pushing his own personal biases onto others.

Yeah, it really made me wonder whether my parents got the kind of marriage counseling they actually needed.

A thing about me and therapists is that, for some reason, they’re often really impressed with me to the point that it can be a problem (kinda like that one dril tweet)

The most hilarious/disturbing instance of this was when my relationship with my dad had gotten really strained at some point and he took me to the same person who had been his and my mom’s marriage counselor for years for some sort of father/son therapy thing

Which ended up consisting of him chatting with my father alone for 20 minutes, then chatting with me alone for 20 minutes, and then bringing us both into the room and being like “dude your son is the most awesome person ever and if you ever get angry at him you are not appreciating his unique amazingness”

Specifically he said I was a “committed relativist” which was apparently the highest/best tier in this system of human philosophical outlooks he believed in, one which few people ever reach?

(Predictably, this experience did not actually improve my relationship with my father; it just led to him saying things like “let’s be committed relativists here” in a really spiteful and sarcastic tone in later arguments)

It only just occurred to me that three of the four major fiction projects I’ve written in my life are about how human life is fundamentally broken and can only be made tolerable through fundamental change brought about by some sci-fi/fantasy mechanism

~soooooo angsty~