AliceFraser
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New Tea With Alice, Salon 34 Details
🕑 Added 2021-08-24 01:22:35 +0000 UTCThere is a new Tea With Alice up! With Craig Quartermaine, talking about opportunities, work, playing the cards you’re dealt, being lucky and how to talk about it.
Here you go: http://apple.co/2oyL7Vy
Non- itunes listeners can catch it here
Also, this week’s The Gargle is a lot of fun, and I was on The Bugle, so if you’re looking for an Alice Fraser podcast fix, there’s all that!
UPDATE
It’s a rainy day in Sydney during lockdown, forecast to pelt down for a week. The additional slight uphill slope to getting out of the house for a walk feels like an insurmountable barrier.
I have been juggling an idea that I want to write an essay about for you lovely Patreonites, but I think I probably need to run it past a few of my more political people first to see if it’s completely off-base or prima facie upsetting to even suggest as a topic of discussion - I don’t see it being talked about, but that might not just be because nobody else has thought of it. Maybe at tomorrow’s Salon! You can tell me if it’s wildly insightful, boringly obvious or incredibly offensive. I’m excited because I genuinely don’t know which it is.
SALON DETAILS
Link details: Tea With Alice Salon 34
Time: Aug 24, 2021 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada), Aug 25, 2021 10:00 Sydney, Melbourne Canberra (or your local equivalent)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89354440045?pwd=NTVOU25RN2hRMm9WZlV6S3U3SUlkZz09
I’ll send through the passcode tomorrow to the relevant levels. Salon 35 next week will be open to all Patreonites, and I may also film it because I have some announcements.
LONELINESS AND HORMESIS
I have been feeling more and more insular over the last months (year), while also missing friends. More than friends even, I miss just sitting in a cafe, working, people watching, walking around among crowds of people without feeling weird about it. That sounds dreadful, to say I miss people in passing more than I miss friends, but while I miss friends and loved ones more intensely, every day when I wake up, I think about catching the ferry into the city and wandering through a bookshop on my way to somewhere. Smiling and making conversation with cranky old people on the bus to practice not taking things personally. (Also good for crowd work. If you can a grumpy old man on the bus on-side, you can do anyone).
It makes me think about how much of our lives are about fitness - not just physical health wise, but the process of gaining fitness, which is repeating small difficult things to get skills built up for bigger or longer or more complicated things. Hormesis. More or less what vaccines do. But also what socialising does - gets us better at dealing with people; difficult people; charming people; sneaky people; people who are saying one thing and doing the other.
I’m trying to make an effort to reach out to my loved people more - I always enjoy it when I do arrange to have a chat, but I feel rusty, reluctant, shy, worry if I’m adding value and joy to their lives, loathe zoom because it feels like work, feel presumptuous for asking, and a little like I’m intruding on their lives or taking their time up. I worry they’re being polite. Which feeling apparently has a clinical term (rejection sensitive dysphoria), but I never know how I feel about pathologising things that seem like part of the human condition?
On one hand, sometimes it’s good to have terminology that encompasses a batch of feelings, and knowing that it’s ‘real enough’ to have a word for it can be comforting. On the other hand, I find it frustrating when people say things like “you had depression when you worked at that corporate job”. Because to articulate the mental *injury* of working in an environment that’s built to ruin people as a function of their internal state, rather than the inevitable outcome of external pressures feels disingenuous and probably nefarious.
That said, I’ve had my second vaccine, and feel very happy about it. A friend told me I should post about it on social media, to ‘normalise’ getting the vaccine, but I tend to have quite strong lines between public and private - I wonder if I’d talk about other minor medical procedures, if we weren’t in this het up time, and maybe vaguely resent the idea that this should even be a discussion; being told I’m obliged to take a stance on an issue (particularly one I’m not qualified to discuss or don’t find interesting) often makes me feel a little contrarian.
(Anyway, for those interested, I had one day of feeling a bit off colour - like mild Jetlag or coming up from a bad night of sleep, and apart from that have had no side effects from either shot. I also, in the weeks between my two shots had a booster of Tetanus/Pertussis/Whooping Cough, and that made my arm quite sore for about a week, which was definitely worse as far as minor side effects go.)
Hope to see you all at the salon tomorrow or next week!
Xx
A
Comments
If folks would like to continue some lovely clever conversations, have a look at our Discord: https://discord.gg/epJfApzF
So maybe you can cut yourself some slack on that point?
There are certainly people in my life who when I see a call notification from them, it’s not an unalloyed joy.
I'm grabbing something out of context here and this is personal so please feel free to ignore. This is something you might like to reflect on. You say - "...worry if I’m adding value and joy to their lives...". Suppose one of your family said that that to you - what would you say to them on that?
I think it can work in that way, yes, but in this instance I’m thinking about how it works in the opposite way; to frame something as a mental illness that’s actually a totally reasonable response to circumstances. (Being sad when you have no autonomy, being anxious during a pandemic, or when you have a new baby) Or even if it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism, it’s contextually a sane response to an unreasonable situation. To frame it as pathological or not-sane feels wrong to me.
I know what you mean by pathologising things that are simply part of the human condition. Giving it an "-itis" seems in some people to absolve them of their responsibility for recovery. I think it was Nish who said once that if you're over 30 you should have enough maturity & self-awareness to take responsibility for your own well-being, rather than simply blame it on parents / abuse / life circumstances. I know it sounds a bit harsh, & for some badly affected folk they never manage to wrestle their demons. But as is often the case, there is a grain of truth in there. I see my kids blaming "my mental health" for their bad attitudes or selfish behaviour, rather than owning their conscious part in at least trying to resolve them. It seems a little bit Bhuddist, in that an understanding of the consequences of one's actions, and owning one's own state of mind is an important part of growing up.
If anyone can bring you down to earth, it's Craig
Hooray, listening to your stuff always gives me a bit of that café comfortable co-existence vibe so thanks for that in these lonely times!
He’s such a sweetheart. Also when are you next free?
A Rational Fear
Enjoyed this chat with Craig x
