New Tea With Alice, Salon 34 Details

There 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