Q's Place

[Quindary]

Welcome to the black hole. I don't know if you all really want summations of my life, but I may periodically post something in here.

At present, I am involved in the following pursuits:

- A program called WildFit, which is a 90 day "challenge" to revamp your personal relationship to (and way of thinking about) food. I'm at week 6 starting today.
- Investigating Joe Dispenza's techniques for personal transformation, to start practicing more seriously after WildFit...maybe sooner.
- Graduate school for IT Administration, almost complete with semester 2 (Technical Writing).
- The 40 hour grind I am striving to escape.

It's a lot of stuff to do. I never thought I'd be taking on so much in my life, especially not the level of food prep required for WildFit. I make myself smoothies and meals from scratch, and it's to the point where I even get annoyed that I can't really make food at work. Something about the workday is incredibly unhealthy, not just for me mentally but also physically - it feels like there is no room at my workplace to be human.

[Quindary]

Work life.

I don't know how many of you partake in the daily grind, or what your environments may be like. Here is mine.

I work as an "advanced customer-facing service representative", which does not properly explain the level of expertise required to properly do my job. We are habitually under the pressure of calling customers whose issues could not be resolved by the front line, some of which were not resolved by the front line despite that they should have been, as well as issues that my company cannot resolve but somehow it gets escalated to us anyway. We historically have always struggled with issues of tool access, partly because other departments assume that because we do not have an "Engineering" title, we do not know how to use these tools and should not be granted access. It has been an uphill battle for years.

My schedule is 4 days a week, 10 hours a day, with an extra half hour lunch. This yields the benefit of 3 days off, which I always have in a row.
I work every other Sunday for my company. Because the office is not open on Sunday, I work from home on that day.
Regularly, I have Monday and Tuesday off. On a week when I do not work a Sunday, I have Sunday off. On a week when I do, I get a choice of which day to take off, and I always choose Wednesday.
All other days I am in the office.

The way these rules pan out, I am on the clock Wed-Sun one week, and only Thurs-Sat the next.

My office is a dingy little one floor place that used to house a full call center. Lately, they moved all the people who answer calls over to a high rise down the street. They wanted to move us over to the high rise as well, but they didn't properly make room for us. So now, my department is surrounded by other departments that largely do not call customers. They do (boring) back end work with systems that were implemented by other people. This means they like to invite noise into the building (music in the background, crowding around tables for noisy events etc.) with no regard for the need of my department to be on calls. Some of the work that these departments don't accomplish for 1-2 weeks, we do in minutes to hours.

I almost miss having the call center around us. At least interactions with coworkers were purposeful, as they could come up and ask us questions and learn from us, and the noise was not a factor.

They plan to move us sometime between March and May, out to the same building as the call center employees. They have not updated us on this since January.

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As a department, our effectiveness is ultimately gauged by how many tickets we can resolve "within SLA". SLA stands for Service-Level Agreement - for example, if I told you on the phone that an issue would be resolved within 4 hours, it needs to be resolved within 4 hours to meet SLA.

I currently perform at the top effectiveness on the team by a long shot. I do that despite demotivation because I'm good at working tickets. Everyone else is demotivated as well and it drags many people's performance way down. Personally, it has long felt like I'm just a machine in someone else's design. I do not want to be the machine. I want to be the designer, and independently choose what I design.

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I am far more productive when I work from home. I can get tickets done at mass quantities and not be bothered by the environment. There is something social that ends up missing once in awhile, but I think contact with the "outside world" once or twice a month would suffice.

I also find the office is very stifling to humanity. Sure there are coffee stations, sinks, microwaves, water stations. But under current conditions, not only are the food amenities full, but so are the bathrooms. Constantly. Rarely can I walk into the bathroom near me and find a stall open, unless half the office left early for the day on a whim. There just isn't enough space to hold the horde, never mind any kind of real way to cook myself some food.. if I wanted to fry an egg, forget it. And with 10 hour days and forced half hour lunches, it is a long time to spend in that environment. I'd rather forego the lunch to leave half an hour early.

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Really, I'd rather quit the job and never return to that building again.

There is a balance to be struck somewhere. I used to love my job at a different call center back in the day. The work environment was arguably worse than this one - at least we get cell service in the building. If the food amenities here were bad, the ones there were utterly shit. There were no windows to see outside. The environment was rarely even cleaned properly, and when it was it probably grew mold because of the lack of fresh air. But because I appreciated what I did, I had no problem tolerating these circumstances.

So I'm complaining about environmental circumstances that are better, but because I do not appreciate the job, it all feels much worse. I should really count my blessings, but I definitely need to move on.

[Quindary]

I need to steal a moment and talk about my relationship to the physical world.

Intellectually, I am aware that I have this physical meatsack connected to my existence. They say the body is the mind, and the mind is the body. But I've never felt at home with the idea that I am this physical thing. If physical matter is both a wave and a particle, I am attuned to waves - not particles. I am the mind that moves through matter and across my life, extensively divorced myself from the body that represents it.

This is not only because I am intuitive (in the Jungian), but compounded by the fact that I am transgender and grew up disconnected from my form. As a kid, I didn't know why I was disconnected from my form, I only knew that the form wasn't right and I couldn't figure out what was. I tried and tried to figure out the root of what I was, not willing to accept the body or its mortality. I eventually discovered my physical being wasn't right, but by the time I did, the mentality of separation from the physical was too much ingrained, and even the measures I took to fix my dense bodily self didn't fix the cleave.

To date, I still do not truly buy that I am a meatsack. I am not found in the flesh, despite how much I am called upon to intellectually accept that the flesh shapes "me". After all, the body must eat to live, and food changes the shape of the body changes the shape of thought. The brain houses the shape of thought. But none of that resonates with me. None of that is right.

Across my life, this is my albatross. I work around it by being the wave that attempts to shape the particle. After all, if particle is wave, then maybe I'm not wrong, and the body is as much illusion as reality.

Mental chimera.

[Quindary]

WildFit.

I started this little 90 day "food freedom" program at the beginning of February, and I did it largely because:

- I had realized that I really had to start getting my health in order.
- I really liked the name.

Yes, the name was half of what attracted me.

I didn't used to eat horribly, but I never really liked the foods that were good for me. And I was such a picky, picky eater. I was afraid of new foods.

Throughout the course of the program, I discovered about myself:


- I did in fact have a little internal salesman telling me to eat junk.

The salesman inside ME was not so much taking advantage of events in my life that were depressing or elating, or directly associating foods with a good time. It actually harkened from part of my history I had to root out, where I used to be restricted from eating junk so of course, I wanted ALL the junk.. the junk I liked, anyway. So I was the kid who stuck his tongue in the sugar jar... found all the stashes his mother hid... stole money off his father's dresser to go get the cookies at school. I ate what I could when I could eat it except anything that was flavored as fruit or nuts. I didn't like the HINT of anything natural in my sweets.

This bred a salesman that would take advantage of opportunities.

"We're passing a Sonic this way, you should stop for lunch... you haven't had Sonic in awhile."
"You're going to Walmart... there are those cookies there you like."
"They brought Dunkin Donuts to work. Better get the good donut from the box."


- I am capable of understanding bodily perceptions in more sensate complexity than I thought.

I started observing what actually happened to me as I put food in my mouth and learned a shit ton about the subjective aspect of eating.


- I now have a better idea of what nutrition my body actually wants.

I was able to experiment with a wide variety of real foods and now have a better understanding not only of objective "seasonal" cycles for eating, but also what kind of food my body likes and doesn't. Suffice to say I now have a list of foods I will NEVER eat again under any circumstances, and no amount of selling could make me eat them again.

No, no more Dunkin Donuts, Walmart cookies, fast food "chicken nuggets" (are those actually chicken anyway? the last ones I ate tasted literally like nothing), and so on.

Ironically, I discovered that I can eat real foods at a decent level of spiciness, but DAIRY (except eggs) would give me acid.


- I now have better actual eating and drinking habits.

I don't drink except room-temp water.
I make sure to leave 15 minutes after drinking water, until I eat. Then 30 minutes between any food and drinking water again.
I eat better variety of fruits, veggies and meats.
I eat what I need, no more, no less.


And then the concrete benefits of this program:

- Less sensitivity in my teeth
- Acid reflux went away
- Lost 24 lbs
- Body fat went from 23.5% to 16.9%
- Waist went down 6"
- Midsection went down 7.5"

My pants and shirts are getting too loose so I'll be needing a new wardrobe.

And my salesman no longer wants the crap junk non foods - when it actually pipes up, it only wants real foods, to which I am happy to oblige.

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But outside of all of that, I think the biggest thing WildFit gave me was unclouding my physical life. I now feel like I have the energy and ability to go forward again, not only with my mental pursuits but also with real-life pursuits I probably never would have. I exercise daily, I take the dog on more walks voluntarily, and when I have access to equipment I have exercise regimens I want to implement - and specific plans for my nutrition surrounding that. Me and my partner are moving to a new house in a new location where there will be a lot more nature surrounding us. I've been working more diligently on my career plans, even while I live in this whirl of awesome chaos.

This thing has renewed my body, and with it some part of my spirit. And given my mind new fields to play on. I can now finally start to live as the animal that part of me is.




Sometimes it's really all in a name.