Weekly Thoughts 6/10/23

Last night, I watched the Michael Keaton Batman movies. They’re fun popcorn movies; clearly weren’t trying to “say” anything, but they had a lot more style than the modern movies, and I liked that Bruce Wayne had a discernable personality. It reminded me of something I thought of when I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the other day, too. For as much crap as there is to give in this current Hollywood era, I think it’s easy to forget how much better we’ve gotten at writing movies in the past two or three decades. Like, I’m not saying the movies I named are bad, because they’re good, but even today’s crappiest movies have much tighter structures, a clearer throughline, and are generally better at communicating what the characters want and why. Joker was a mobster who takes over his mob, and then he starts poisoning cosmetics in this complex puzzle piece manner for attention. At what point was anyone going to tell us Joker wanted popularity more than the money and power of being a mob boss, to the point he was throwing away 20 million dollars? You pick it up, but I don’t think it’s unfair to want Joker to say that first.

Anyways, I’ve noticed that I am stubborn and uncompromising. That’s not a knock against me, to be clear; I think those are good qualities. Even if I don’t always know how to express it, I know what I want, and I’m very reluctant to accept anything else. But everything has pros and cons; the obvious downside is, of course, that I usually don’t get exactly what I want, because that’s usually how life goes. I’ve talked before about how I have a very “all or nothing” mindset; I’m wired to prefer to go without than go with something less than what I want or feel I deserve.

It really feels distressing to do less, too. When I work a closing shift, part of my job is to get my department looking presentable for the next day. I know what I consider the bare minimum for that task, and until just a week or two ago, I refused to do it any other way. It might take a while, because my department is the largest in the store, but it’s worth it. I still see a bunch of stuff out of place and other problems I can’t take the time to deal with every night, so I settled for a certain standard. In order to get a few things done that my boss asked for, I did what they consider the bare minimum, and I left that day stressed out because my department looked like crap. No one else thought so, but I knew there were still hangers sitting janky, and some of the hangers were hooked backwards, and there were still size tabs on the ends of hangers instead of at the base. It’s terrible! I know the right way to do things, and I didn’t do it that way.

History says I’ll eventually get used to it, especially if it frees up time for other things and makes less work for me. I guess the distressing part is really that I’m the one placing the higher standard on myself, and I don’t have the decency to let myself off the hook. Partly that’s because I think highly of my abilities, and I don’t want to settle for less than what I’m capable of. I do think part of it is that I’m too used to being on my own, that I don’t have any other standard to compare myself to. All I know is what I imagine myself being able to do, so it doesn’t occur to me if I’m being hard on myself. On a few occasions, I’ve found that I’m a lot better at things I think I’m bad at than other people, and it’s always a strange experience. “Basic competence,” as I think of it, shouldn’t be beyond what the average person is doing. So either I need to be nicer to myself, or figure out how other people are doing the things I struggle with, since we have to be using different strategies.

On a related note, I play a lot of Pokémon Café ReMix. I play as often as my stamina refills, as a break from whatever I’m doing; for the uninitiated, that’s about every hour and fifteen minutes, or however often I’m available for that schedule. It’s a part of my life, and it will be until they discontinue service. That changes when there’s a one-minute cooking event. Without getting into details, that’s a special event game with a different play style than normal, which actually takes longer than normal to play, despite its name. It’s generally harder, as well. I want the event Pokémon being offered, and whatever other prizes are up for grabs, but it’s a real slog, and it feels less like a challenge and more like a system designed to keep you from winning. I’m least motivated to play this game I literally play as often as possible when there’s a one-minute cooking event. It’s starting to dawn on me that I’ve been living my whole life in a one-minute cooking event.

I tend to dislike getting praise from people when I feel like I didn’t earn it, but often I do like it if I’ve been working hard and still haven’t accomplished what I’ve set for myself. I think that’s why I like being accountable to other people. It’s funny how circular things can be. I tend to think that I’m not motivated to do things for my own sake because I don’t value myself enough. Now I’m thinking that maybe I actually value myself too much, and that’s what’s so scary about doing things I want to do. So while I still (perhaps stupidly) think it’s good I decided I was capable of doing anything I set my mind to when I was a child, that’s also keeping me from drumming up motivation to do to anything, because I only learned how to tell myself that I should be able to do better.

I feel like an old person, too. I keep trying to come up with a way to say, “I should learn to tell myself I’ve done good already,” and I keep rejecting the basis of the thought. It’s good to have high standards, so I don’t get complacent. It’s bad to value hard work as a standard of quality, because you can work really hard and really long at the wrong thing and get bad results. It’s good to delay gratification, so there’s something to look forward to. None of my grandparents were like this, so what proverbial grandparent was drumming that kind of puritan nonsense into my head? I asked to move up in the store, and my boss said I was “too relaxed.” I didn’t know what she meant, because I’m not a relaxed person. I assume she didn’t say it for this reason, but I think I know more about why I’m not relaxed.