Eugie’s to do list:
• At the day job, the new Official Code of Georgia Annotated supplements and volumes came back from the publishers.
•Guest bios need editing for the Dragon*Con program book, deadline Aug. 7.
•Daily Dragon prep is in full swing.
And it’s official, my hamsters overfloweth. Again.
It’s a great cosmic irony that folks who haven’t yet had any coffee are expected make it.
At my day job, whoever’s first into the office (or into the kitchen at least) is the one who makes the coffee. Usually that’s not me, but this morning it was. Spilled water and coffee (grounds and brewed) and scalded myself. Sigh. At least I didn’t electrocute myself or blow a fuse.
Ow.
In the ongoing effort to subdue my immune system, my doctor prescribed Atarax, an antihistamine—one of the “may cause drowsiness” variety. Took 10mg last night. Now I can’t feel my brain.
If you need me, I’ll be drooling on my desk.
So the House and Senate of the Georgia General Assembly are taking furloughs due to the budget deficit, and hence, the employees of the Office of Legislative Counsel are being required to also take a mandatory one-day-a-month furlough. They’re having a meeting about it to answer questions and whatnot this afternoon at the capitol, but today happens to be my 4×10 day off. Debated whether to go in for the meeting, but I figure it’s not worth the time and gas. I’ll get the lowdown from my co-editors tomorrow.
All in all, it could be worse. A day a month is better than a day a week—which some state employees have had to do—and it’s hella better than being laid off. But the line between black and red for our household budget is sliver-thin, and it’s gonna be hard finding another notch in our already-cutting-off-circulation belt.
The thing is, this is another hard knock exacted by the state in a string of them. They’re also increasing our parking fees from $15 to $40 per month, and as a result, I’m relinquishing my parking spot. I only used it occasionally, during the legislative session and for the occasional doctor’s appointment or when I overslept and needed to drive in to avoid being late—not enough to merit $480 a year—but it was pretty important to have during session. Going to have to figure out how to manage now without a parking space. And they also decreased our health care options, so I’m going to have to switch from my current plan next year. Very annoying as it means I’ll be losing the rheumatologist I adore who pulled me out of a months-long flare-up and has kept me stable for years.
I still love my day job. After spending 11 years as a highly paid but soul-battered cubicle monkey, money is low on my priority list for job satisfaction. And I still have incredible job satisfaction, enough to outweigh the annoying sensation of being reamed. But I really would prefer to forgo the reaming.
Torchwood! Torchwood! Torchwood! Yay!
Back from the 3rd Dragon*Con ’09 All-Staff meeting. T minus 46 days until the show. Time to don my director’s cap and start gearing up in earnest. Eek! Where’n heck did this year go??
Realized that I’ve been dwelling upon the nature of identity a lot of late, dancing around the issue in the subjects I’ve been researching and the stories I’ve been writing. It’s been subconscious, so the “whoa, recurrent themes of identity!” came as a bit of an epiphany. Post-epiphany, I wanted to get some of it down in writing in order to help organize it in my head.
Quickie background: I did a lot of research on the halo effect for “Whatever Skin You Wear.” (None of which I ended up expounding upon, but which I undoubtedly will in some future tale. Research is never wasted, I tell myself).
In a rather large nutshell, upon first encountering a new individual, people spontaneously seek clues indicating whether that person’s intentions are good or bad (i.e., their warmth) and also their ability to act on these intentions (i.e., their competence). And these impressions are based upon appearances. Shallow but true, appearance is the single most obvious and accessible personal characteristic in social interactions, and we’re geared to be influenced by it.
As it turns out, something like 80% of our impressions of others can be loosely clumped into warmth and competence trait categories. These two classifications are markedly universal across cultures and made very quickly, often in as little as 1/10 of one second. Yeah, Mom was right. First impressions are important.
Also, warmth is gauged faster than competence, with attractive people rated as more warm compared to their less attractive counterparts. Furthermore, when we judge an individual as being warm, we tend to judge them as competent too. That cognitive bias, the manifestation of the affect heuristic, is the “halo effect.” Or, to put it simpler, folks tend to assign to good-looking individuals favorable traits like talent, intelligence, and kindness. And they do so predominantly without being aware of the role that physical attractiveness played in the process.
For example, research with school children showed adults interpret aggressive acts from attractive children as being less naughty than when their less-attractive peers engaged in such acts, and also that teachers attribute more intelligence to good-looking children.
So yeah, Psych. 101 no brainer: appearances influence how people perceive us.
The offshoot of that is what I’ve been pondering: how our appearance influences how we perceive ourselves. How much do others’ expectations mold who we are? How much does our self-concept develop from what we observe when others react to us?
With my most recent story, “Whatever Skin You Wear,” donning different virtual avatars allows people the freedom to reconcile who they are inside with their outer appearance. And I realized after the fact that it’s the counterpart/inverse story to “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” where it’s only when the masks come off that people are able to come to know who they really are. Totally unintentional that. As I said, “whoa, recurrent themes of identity” epiphany.
And also, I really, really want to lock people into rooms and do experiments on them.
Never had an issue reading e-text vs print, but I may now have switched over to the prefer eBooks camp. Backlighting and adjustable font sizes makes for happier Eugie eyes. And anything to decrease the strain on my eyes is a definite plus.
Recently got new glasses and contacts. I have degenerative myopia, and my glasses prescription is now so high that I can no longer get the frameless style that I prefer (the lenses, even uber high indexed, etc. are too thick), and I can’t order my contacts online because the power dropdown list doesn’t go high enough.
My eyes, they sucketh. Which is rather problematic, considering my occupation(s).
My “Beautiful Winter” is the cover story of the new issue (#13) of InterGalactic Medicine Show, featuring gorgeous artwork by Nick Greenwood. Shiny!
Getting close to fork sticking on “Whatever Skin You Wear,” I think. Waiting on one or two more critiques before sending it out. In the interim, the plan is to resume flogging The Stupid Novel.
