Well I have landed in Orlando. Early even. Amazing.

Thanks Kristin & apologies all - just a little overwhelmed last night. Better now. Plei - so sorry about your aunt.

Plei - sorry for your loss.

Connie - sorry for your loss. I definitely grok how big a chunk of one's life a cat can be.

carry-on/slash around town bag

Hee! I think The Adorable One is probably the only person other than me whose mind would immediately leap to a Kenneth Williams place with that phrase. Um. But I enjoyed it, so thank you.

It's probably pointless and a waste of time, isn't it, to call out someone on a writers' loop for being a pedantic, condescending snob who thinks her country (England) is utterly superior to mine when it comes to literature, intellect, and all-around civilization? Because it's pissing me off. ETA it's not that I don't love England, because I do. This woman just can't complain about anything in the publishing world without slurring "Yanks" and our tastes, and she's even playing the "it's called English for a reason" brand of prescriptivist grammar.

winces

Oh, again, dear. On behalf of my nation, I extend our humblest apologies. Try to keep it from souring your feelings about the country and its people (as I keep telling myself wrt La France). Although you don't need me to tell you that. Still - sorry for the BritDickery.

They decided not to, because they thought it was better socially for kids to be with their age group, and because they thought that I'd get teased in a higher grade because I was so small.

See, in the UK system it's not even an option, really - it would be truly exceptional and unusual, at any rate, because the whole concept is that your age determines where you are. And that every class is supposed to contain a wide range of abilities, and that the teacher is supposed to be differentiating in order to accomodate children who are working at a whole range of levels.

But I'll not go on. It's interesting hearing other people's experiences and their takes on the matter; I remember when I was in Primary School and whizzing through the Literacy work, the teacher eventually extended me by sending half the kids who wanted help to come and ask me. I felt like the cleverest person in the history of cleverness evah.

Apparently that feeling hasn't changed; seems that my (perhaps excessive) confidence in my own intelligence & reasoning skills is such that I won't just go along with things when I don't agree with them, and want to keep talking it over until the other person has made me see why they are right. Rather than just saying 'okay then, if you say so - clearly you are more experienced than me, so you must be right, even though it seems really counterintuitive to me'. And I think that's the crux of why I'm not working as well with my co-worker as I did with my previous co-worker (at the School Of Evil Badness in Cairo). It's me being Queen KnowItAll. Or at least - I don't just accept that the other person is right. I need to be shown why they are right.

t cringe-inducingly shameful confession

And no small part of this is the fact that I generally think I'm the smartest person in the room.

t / c-i.s.c.

Not here, obviously. God, that's one of the things I love about this place. But in my meatspace life - yeah. Which is quite revoltingly arrogant of me. Ick. Anyway, I annoyed him, he patronised me, I offended him, he sniped at me, and it was all rather horrible. Over lunch, in front of our colleagues. And then we sat there in the embarrassed pause, and then he said maybe we should go elsewhere and talk, and then he was apologising and I was crying (because I do cry rather horrifyingly easily) and apologising and it was all just a freaking mess.

He's a good bloke. I should pay more attention to his advice.* Even when I disagree with it. It's hard for me to do that. It's actually very hard for me to do that - sort of threatening-the-foundations-of-my-sense-of-self hard, actually. If I can see someone is smarter than me, then fair enough. But if I think they are not smarter than me, then I keep thinking maybe I have a point, and maybe they could be mistaken, and maybe they need to show me why (continued...)

( continues...) they're right. I'm finding it very hard to just suck it up and go along with stuff; in fact the best I'm doing is going through the motions, rather than accepting that they're right. Ngah.

Anyway, yes - still feeling a bit raw and tearful, even hours later. I think I need a holiday.

not-surprised, Fay and I have a higher "match percentage" and "friend percentage" than pretty much anybody I've chatted with on OKCupid

Damn straight! Buffistas Unite! Oooh, and you list Ender's Game - I'm just revisiting it as an audiobook, and loving (1) the book and (2) the format. Not done the audiobook/podbook thing before - it would not be an understatement to say that it was a revelation. But...Ender's friend, from when he first arrived at Battle School - what was his name? I don't have a copy of the book, you see, but VoiceGuy pronounces it 'Ally' (as in 'they were allies'). But surely it should be Ali? Or is that an actual reflection of funky spelling? I'm hoping the latter, because the notion that the reader doesn't know how to pronounce Ali, when clearly the kid is Muslim, is depressing as fuck.

(And, yes, it nearly made me cry on the skytrain yesterday. Because Ender is six, and so are my kids. And that sort of killed me right there.)

(*of course, the thing is that in this conversation I hadn't actually asked for advice. So when he was saying 'no, you shouldn't be doing that' and I was saying 'but...this is why I'm doing that. What would it gain me to not do that?' he was being annoyed at the fact that I wasn't just accepting his advice. Whereas I was unwilling to undo what I'd done just on his say-so until I could see why he was right. Because, you know, I hadn't gone cap-in-hand for help. But maybe that's just how he sees me at the moment. Or in general. I don't know. He was all "You always do this. You ask for advice and then you just ignore it. Fine. I'll not give you any more advice." And I was all :"!!!!")

It's spelled "Alai." And I'm sorry to her you had co-worker conflict: always sucks.

(And if it helps you get over the shame, I almost always think I'm the smartest person in the room, too. At least about many things.)

And if it helps you get over the shame, I almost always think I'm the smartest person in the room, too. At least about many things.

Funny story. My brother is probably the smartest person I know...and well, I know all of you guys, so that's saying something. He's also someone who's brilliant and knows it.

This summer we all participated in a family research study, looking at whole families (or as much of the family as could participate) where one of the members (in this case, me) has a certain psychiatric diagnosis. So, anyways, my brothers came into town for our yearly family trip and were able to participate. In the car, on the way up to Maine, we were talking about some of the questions (though, we didn't do much of this). My brother said his favorite question was, "Do you often feel superior to other people?" His response? "Yes. But that is because I am."

Love him, but humble he is not.

Oh poor Fay! Everyone gets a free work meltdown every now and then, I figure.

I have this thing where I think I'm pretty smart, but then assume that when I achieve anything, it's because some mistake has been made along the way, and they'll figure it out eventually and take it all away from me.

I didn't not skip a grade, I was held back in 3rd, more for social reasons than not being able to do the work. Although I was struggling with math.

My brother and FSIL are in town and it's been enjoyable, other than I can't spend time with them tonight because I have to work on my paper. But last night we were watching Criminal Minds and I figured out one of the plot points immediately because almost always when the situation happens the result is the same on any tv show. At the end of the show I was talking about it and got in an argument with my brother because there was no way he'd believe I figured it out without the foreshadowing. It just reinforced why we aren't close. It's like he can't ever act like I'm right or knowledgable about anything, he always has to argue about it.

Plei, sorry to hear about your Aunt Margaret.

I spent about 3 weeks in Kindergarten at then moved right into 1st grade. Even though I was always the youngest, somehow I was more mature than many of my classmates all the way through school. I don't know if it was the only child thing, child of divorce thing, or what.

I do feel that it left me with a need to prove myself and show that I deserve to be where I am. I graduated high school over 20 years ago and still have that need.

Now I have the opposite issue with CJ who did two years of Kindergarten. I know it frustrates him now that he was held back. We thought he was ready for Kindergarten when we first started him - so did his preschool teachers - but by the end of the year it was obvious he wasn't ready to move onto 1st grade.