doubting thom

<rant>

The federal government allows employees to request alternative or flexible work schedules, one of which is called a “compressed work schedule,” or CWS. CWS enables an employee to work eight nine-hour days and one eight-hour day in a two-week period, with the tenth day off.

However, the executive director in my bureau is restrictive about granting such schedules and I’ve been told that above a certain GS level she won’t permit it, so I’ve not been allowed to change my work schedule (never mind that my interim supervisor for most of the past year, two GS levels above me, was granted CWS).

This wouldn’t bother me so much, except that, as I’ve whined before, I’m too much of a conscientious nice guy in the office. For months we’ve only had one Administrative Assistant, and she has been coming in at 7:45 and leaving at 4:30; when she is on break or at lunch, and between 4:30 and 5:00, I’ve most often been the one stuck answering the phones or greeting visitors to the office. I’ve had to forego my own lunch a number of times in order to cover, and at my level I’m also not permitted comp time; yet the AA diligently and accurately records every minute that I’m out for a doctor’s appointment or otherwise on leave.

Last week we filled a second open AA position, so we finally managed to have full coverage on the front desk. Before the end of that first week, though, she’d requested and been granted CWS, which begins next week. After that, the original AA also requested and has been granted CWS. Fortunately, they’re taking different days in alternate weeks as their day off, but it means that now there will be one day every week that we’ll be back to a single AA; moreover, the nine-hour days will have the AAs here on their own after regular business hours end for the rest of us. With most of the trustworthy support staff I’ve known in the past, that wouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve seen at least one of these AAs playing solitaire, buying things and taking care of personal issues on the phone, throughout the day, as well as taking long lunches, every day. So I don’t expect much work to be done between 5 and 5:45 after the rest of us have left the office.

I know, I know… I probably should be grateful I have a job at all, and that it’s one that allows me to leave at 5:00; after all, it’s been many, many years since I last was able to work only an eight-hour day. On the other hand, I was making one and a third to two times as much back when I was working my twelve to sixteen hour days; a government salargy doesn’t provide a great deal of incentive to put in such long hours.

And I also can see that, given that the AAs are making even less than I am, it’s nice that they’re provided an opportunity for more flexibility in their work schedules. Sigh… I’m always trying to see it from both sides, even in the midst of feeling that the truism about nice guys sometimes does play out for me at the finish line.

</rant>

Despite the last few days devoid of posts, I am still here, and haven’t given up on this. Friday through Sunday, though, I was spending much of my waking hours editing my friend’s dissertation. My edits to chapters one through three were pretty extensive, but I have to admit that by Sunday, especially with the headache from all those hours reading onscreen text, I wasn’t able to be as thorough with chapters four and five, though I still think the results were an improvement over the originals.

And given the soggy Saturday–parts of the metro area were under flood warnings much of the day–I wasn’t too disappointed not to be outside. The gay and lesbian squaredance club with which I used to dance even cancelled their participation in the Pride parade Saturday night; I suspect a number of other groups likely did as well. Sunday was relatively dry, if still gray and cool, but my workload didn’t permit–and my mood didn’t encourage–visiting the Pride festival that day.

My friend had offered to pay me for my editing work, but I had told her that a nice dinner somewhere would be sufficient. Given that when I woke up this morning, I felt like I hadn’t even really had a weekend, I almost wish I’d agreed to the payment; I think I’ll have to select a very nice restaurant as compensation.

Last night, I wrote about my ambivalence about the upcoming Pride festival. The situation already may have been resolved, however, as today I agreed to do a friend a favor by reading and doing an additional final edit on her doctoral dissertion, which is due to the committee on Monday morning. At 200+ pages, I’ll likely be working on it most of the weekend, which probably won’t leave me time to worry about going downtown for Pride anyway. I’ve got the first chapter in hand now, and will try to get it out of the way tonight, but there are five more after this one.

Truly, I’m flattered that she asked me to do this; granted, her first choice was someone who already has a Ph.D. in the field, but when he had to back out due to other commitments, the fact that she felt my educational background and previous editorial experience qualified me to give a reasonably intelligent evaluation of her work (I’d prefer to think that way than to assume–as I might have at various times and mental states–that I was just her last hope and better than nothing) provides a little ego boost.

Oh, I was also really proud of a joke I made at work this week. I was in a security training class, and the instructor was explaining the various categories under which information might be classified. She noted that a new executive order is expected from Dubya, and will include a new category for classifying information: weapons of mass destruction. I mused aloud that I suspected that even though he was purporting that “weapons of mass destruction” would be in the document, we probably wouldn’t find it in the final analysis.

ba da bing. Thank you, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, elvish has left the building.

I must be getting old… or perhaps just more jaded. This coming weekend is the DC Pride Festival, and I haven’t even decided if I’m going to go to the parade, the festival or any other events, much less think about getting my hair cut, going to the gym, or buying any new clothes in order to look my smartest for the occasion. I’m sure I probably will end up going downtown, if even just for the eye candy–though sometimes that ends up making me even more depressed–but I don’t feel any particular excitement or anticipation about Pride this year.

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Alex and I visited the veterinary ophthalmologist today. We’re fortunate in that the animal hospital where he gets his regular veterinary checkups is just up the block, so I normally can take him over there, on foot, in his carrier. The appointment today, though, was in Alexandria, about a twenty-minute drive. Alex hates–truly, madly, deeply hates–the car, but he was pretty good on the ride there. He did meow a lot, but he didn’t scrabble against the metal bars or plastic sides of the carrier like he did the last time I tried to drive with him; that time I got so worried that he was going to hurt himself badly that I had to turn around and bring him home.

He also was really good in the waiting room, and initially during the examination. After a while, though, he got very fed up, and started hissing and spitting at the doctor and her assistant. After an initial examination, the doctor decided she needed to dilate his eyes, so she put the drops in and sent us back out to the waiting room for fifteen minutes. He was starting to get very antsy at that point, and was starting to cry and scrabble a bit. Oddly, two people with dogs came in at that point–well, it wasn’t odd that people would bring dogs to a vet’s office, of course, but odd in the way that Alex reacted, as he calmed right down, making no noise and just curling up in the carrier and watching them very carefully. Normally he would hiss at dogs, but he probably felt very insecure and just wanted to try to hide.

In the post-dilation examination, he was a very unhappy camper, indeed. The doctor did manage to check the pressure of his eyes for glaucoma, but he didn’t make it easy, and he let out one hideous yowl, the likes of which I’ve only heard him make once before, at his regular vet’s two weeks ago when they shaved his neck to check a bump there–he hates being restrained, especially by the neck.

The ride home was very rough; he cried the entire time, and started his wild scrabbling against the sides of the carrier. I kept talking to him and trying to reassure him, but by the time we got home, he was panting heavily and even gasping a little–I end up worrying that I do perhaps as much harm to him, in terms of his stress levels, by even taking him to the vet as he might be suffering otherwise.

Unfortunately, the ophthalmologist is stumped, and she says that it’s an unusual presentation. While the ocular pressure is higher in the affected eye than the other, she doesn’t believe that it’s glaucoma; significantly, and more positive, she does believe that he still has sight in the affected eye, something Alex’s regular vet thought was likely not the case. She believes that possibly his lens has become luxated and is adhering to the iris, or that there’s some neurological damage to the right eye that is keeping the pupil from fully dilating or constricting (she was able to fully dilate one side of the right eye but only partially dilate the side of that eye that seems affected, using drops); another possibility is a tumor. She wants to just continue to observe him for now, and to have his regular vet screen him for hypertension, since the blood that appeared in his eye two weeks ago–and which had drained by the following week–sometimes is indicative, in cats, of high blood pressure. So we’ll see her again in a month, unless there are any changes in the meantime, and we’ll go back to his regular vet to have the blood pressure checked and to take care of the lump on his rump.

Well, after months of revisiting the idea, I’ve finally taken the plunge and, like Gene, Jeff, Vernon and even, unbelievable as it seems to me, Faustus, have bought a TiVo. Yesterday I left work, picked up Alex’s lab test results from the vet to take with us to his specialist appointment on Monday, pulled into my parking space at home, and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to head back out to Best Buy. Half an hour later I was heading home with a new DirecTV tuner that includes a built-in TiVo recorder.

This is a little odd, from two almost opposing perspectives. On the one hand, I’ve always considered myself an early adopter of technologies, but haven’t bought a DVR despite a couple of years of thinking about it. At six years old I asked my parents to have Santa bring me a calculator for Christmas; when told that because of the expense (yes, this was before the time that calculators might be part of a kid’s meal from a fast food chain, back when calculators cost Real Money) it would be my only gift from Santa that year, I agreed and was content with that. My calculator, a big bulky thing, could only add, subtract, multiply, divide, compute percentages and square roots, and change sign–it didn’t even have a memory–but I nearly wore it out.

Over the years my early tech purchases have included a Sony stereo Betamax VCR; three Palm Pilot models and two Handspring Visors; four different Macs, three PCs and a laptop; a CD jukebox; a DVD carousel; wireless networking; a widescreen TV; and a Dolby Digital DirecTV receiver, among many, many others. I was one of Verizon’s (then BellAtlantic) first subscribers to DSL several years ago. More recently, though, I seem to be taking a more wait-and-see approach; I have yet to buy an MP3 player, for example, or satellite radio, or–until yesterday–a DVR.

On the other hand, I’ve taken almost a perverse pride, and have exhibited even some smugness on occasion, about my sparse TV-watching habits and my anti-television sentiments; between Thanksgiving and February, I’d used my television for broadcast video–I do frequently listen to the digital audio channels, and I also use the television in conjuction with the DVD player to watch movies–only three or four times. Since then, I’ve had it on only an additional handful of times.

But I knew that there was quality programming–ok, and some eye candy and video junkfood–that I might watch, if I could do it when and how I wanted, which has been the appeal of TiVo to me. I also like the integrated DirecTV/TiVo receiver, which allows me to record two programs at once, or record one while using the recorder functions–pause, instant replay–for watching another in real time. Also, the integrated receiver means that the satellite signal–which is digital–is transferred directly to the digital recorder; using a standalone TiVo or ReplayTV would mean that the satellite signal would have to be converted to analog first and then back to digital, and some comments I’d read online suggested that there was a noticeable diminution of quality with that set-up.

My worst fears may have been realized, though. Only installed yesterday evening, it’s already downloaded several weeks of its program guide, and even has recorded a number of hours of programming overnight and this morning. So here I am at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon, still in my underwear, checking out the interesting things it’s suggesting and automatically recording for me, and watching some of the things I specifically asked it to capture for me–the interesting Bravo series about how a new Cirque du Soleil show comes to be, for example, the last two seasons of Will & Grace that I’d given up along with the rest of television, and possibly way too many animated series–Family Guy, Daria, X-Men: Evolution, and TechTV’s Anime Unleashed.

And, thanks to Schwans and Internet porn, I don’t even have to leave my house for food or sex any more. If I had a telecommuting job, I might never have to live my home until I died; wonder when the home self-cremation kits will hit the market?

While I’m on the topic of rain, over the long weekend, I rented and watched Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, a richly colored, evocatively joyful, well-scored (by Mychael Danna), wonderful film. Admittedly, my appreciation of it certainly wasn’t hurt by the several very yummy men in the film–like Parvin Darbas as the intended groom in the eponymous wedding, and Randeep Hooda as the recently-returned student from Sydney. While I have very eclectic and fairly catholic tastes in men, I often find Indian men (and other similarly dark and/or swarthy types–Mediterranean, Arabic and Semitic) particularly attractive. Maybe I should go husband-hunting in Delhi.

Then, on Tuesday, co-workers Tatiana and Tim and I had lunch at Matuba’s. On the way there, I told them about the movies I’d rented and watched, and Tim shared that he’d also enjoyed Monsoon Wedding, was now watching another Indian film–Lagaan–he’d just rented, and had put together a CD mix with music from Monsoon and some Bollywood sources. This morning I came back from a series of meetings to find a copy of the CD on my chair, and I’ve been sitting here tonight listening to it, and enjoying it very much.

Yesterday marked a full month without a clear, sunny day in the DC Metro area. According to Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels, as interviewed in the Washington Post, Monday, April 28, “was the last day during which an observer could stand anywhere in this region and see blue skies with less than 30 percent cloud cover.” May typically offers an average of seven clear days and highs of 75 degrees; this May has seen zero clear days and average highs of 68 degrees. The average year sees 36 clear days by May 28; this year we’ve had 17. Rain is falling outside my window right now, and cloudy skies and rain continue in the forecast for the next nine days.

Psychiatrist and Georgetown professor Norman Rosenthal, who first researched Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) twenty years ago, noted that the prolonged gray weather can create a situation where “[t]here’s a lack of energy, a lack of get-up-and-go, and we have a tendency to oversleep, overeat on sweets and starches. People withdraw from friends and family and have difficulty concentrating.” So that’s why I’ve been so asocial and unproductive. Uh-huh… yeah… and we went in for the weapons of mass destruction.

And it seems to be the topic of conversation everywhere. In every meeting I attended at work today, people talked about the rain, the clouds, and how tired of it they all are.

Personally, I like rain. And I love the cooler temperatures they’ve brought; sleeping at night with my windows and balcony door open is a delight, as the smell of rain and the tang of ozone and the crisp breezes ease my sleep. Even so, I’m so very ready for a change… I feel like I’m growing moss.

The other ubiquity in my life this month is the word schadenfreude. Not having noticed it used particularly frequently before, I first recently noticed it in a commentary by Michael Kinsley (washingtonpost.com) and then cropping up more and more after William Bennett’s gambling habit was reported upon at the beginning of May.

Yesterday, there it was again in one of the books I’m currently reading, Candace Bushnell’s 4 Blondes, and today my boss used it in referring to some interdepartmental relationships and issues.

So a Google News search on the term just now turned up eight pages of results, including a number of articles continuing to use it in reference to those who reported about Bennett’s habit, but also in reference to media baron Conrad Black in today’s The Scotsman, the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy in today’s (Maryland) SunSpot.net, yesterday’s Boston Globe piece on the Jayson Blair scandal, and even the amusingly vilified U.K. entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (Helsingin Sanomat).

There are even at least a couple of blogs named Schadenfreude: one and two. So… is taking delight in the misfortune of others just part of the human condition, or can we blame it on the rain?