Get Your Own Back

There are a lot of things people will tell you are the keys to a successful or happy life. A lot of them have to do with a bunch of woo-woo self-help-ese like "loving yourself" or "practicing gratitude" or "consistently taking your prescribed mood stabilizers in the correct dosage," but no! We're not all smelly hippies, there, Moonbeam. Some of us have bootstraps to pull on, and no, I don't need the history of the idiom here, thank you very much!

I'm not going to make a lot of money with this kind of directive, because it has the frustrating quality of being absolutely bleedin' obvious: you have to absolutely decimate your own expectations. I know the usual phrase is "manage your expectations," but I already told you, we're not hippies. We're talking about rates of return on an emotional investment here. If you can get a little psycho-social relief from expectation management, what kind of result are you going to get from battering them over and over, watching little pieces fly off, until they're almost unrecognizable as expectations at all? Returns on investment as percentages? That's some 1990s shit. Returns as multipliers? Now we're in the 2020s, baby. Even if the end result is the ultimate destruction of everything you touch, aiming for less is some boomer shit. Why want a BMW and some shit McMansion when you can want a private country of your own on an ocean oil platform you can retreat to when the world-ending event you're engineering finally kicks off? History will show we really invented ambition in this millennium.

In terms of scale, fine, I'm not exactly there yet. I don't have the money to be that luxuriously apocalyptic. But I can practice what I preach way down here in my plebeian way. Like my vacation this week, for example, as I outlined last week. What was the expectation for that? Psychological equilibrium? No. A checklist of locally achievable tasks, domestically, personally or professionally? Stop it, still too much. Accomplishment of anything measurable? WHY AREN'T YOU PAYING ATTENTION, of course not!

The stated goal was: sit in a chair in relative proximity to a sleeping cat. Reader, that is happening right now! Anything else past this? Gravy. And speaking of gravy, that's mostly what I have gotten done this week: eating things (not all of them congealed like gravy, but a higher percentage than I'm comfortable saying). And spending money unnecessarily. I now own, at age 49, the first pair of Air Jordans I've ever owned, for example, so that's something I definitely don't already regret. But other than shoes, I'm basically taking the opportunities to really work in my nutritional edging, meaning eating things right up to the limits of what my doctor-prescribed low-fat diet will allow. And filling in those gaps where the cholesterol should go with sweaty fistfuls of carbohydrates typically the form of baked goods or varying potato preparations. I'm still like six months from my annual blood panel for my physical, that should be plenty of time to make it look good for the medical records. I'm pretty sure that's what's important when it comes to long-term medical self-care: you only have to count what makes it on the report.

So I'm doing OK this week. The people at the new job I'm going to have told me essentially nothing, which is increasingly stressful day to day. Luckily there's some overlap with the job I'm leaving so I can reach out to people on the side and fill in whatever I need to know. But as daunting as that seems (or genuinely is), it's another opportunity to apply my foolproof system of expectation evisceration. All I have to do is envisage an absolutely horrendous outcome. Not like a comet hitting the building; the envisage-ing can't be so unrealistic that you can't actually integrate it into your current expectational imagination. Just other major things like, say, a government shutdown that interrupts funding to the point that they start eliminating jobs ON THAT DAY starting with those with the least amount of seniority. That is something that could actually happen! Now, no matter how bureaucratically fubar the whole thing ends up being, if I get to the end of Day 1 (or even Week 1, dare I dream?) without being fired in that specific scenario, well, we're laughing, ain't we?