Our friend the thyroid (and other miscellany)

I continue to learn fascinating thyroid facts.

For example, I learned that not only is my usual second cup of coffee now not necessary, but if I forget and have it anyway, I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack.

I learned the thyroid apparently controls thirst. It's weird to suddenly more than triple one's daily water intake, let me tell you. Probably healthy, but weird.

This one's bizarre but true: I'm chattier. Seriously -- I kind of sort of borderline enjoyed making small talk at one of my more dreaded annual receptions earlier this evening (and when it started getting tedious, I sneaked out the back. I'm also ballsier).

The most striking difference is in the mornings. I'd been trying to get on a schedule of working out in the mornings for...mm, about eight months now. The alarm would go off at 7; I'd hit the snooze every ten minutes until 8, and then sleepwalk through getting ready for work while alternately berating myself and promising I'd start my workout the next day. Nowadays, the alarm goes off at 7; I get up and hop on the exercise bike. Easiest thing in the world. In fact, I can almost not understand what the big deal ever was.

Ryan Anonymous suggests that I am indeed manic. I disagree. "Manic" would imply feeling...oh, I don't know..."up" or "positive" or "happy." I've definitely got more energy, but, as I said to K, it's more energy for good or for evil -- for complaining about my job with renewed vigor, for instance. In some ways, I'm even more agitated about the ludicrously poor fit with my employment now that I can divert more life force away from basic metabolism and towards getting really worked up over it.

Take yesterday. There's this guy at what we'll call the head office who has previously told me to my face that people of my rank are too lowly for him to email directly. He's a bit simple, so I didn't give it much thought -- I'm quite happy not to watch his torturous experiments with language, quite frankly. Except that my boss is out of town this week -- a fact this guy was well aware of -- and there was something that needed my urgent action. So this guy emailed a bunch of people in his office, my boss (who did not have access to her email), and not me. I only found out about it -- some time later -- because one of his underlings heard about it, and, fearing to contact me because I was too high up (this is not, I assure you, something I encourage; it's just part of their office culture), contacted one of my underlings, who conveyed the message along a lateral chain of people until it reached me, and I had approximately twenty minutes left with which to execute the task.

Ok, fine. That's not actually the part that sticks in my craw (the thyroid med also enlarges my craw). What really gets me is that, naturally, after I executed the task, I ranted and vented to every officer in earshot about unhealthy organizational communication, and every last blessed one of them thought that what this guy did was completely reasonable.

That's the 19th-century Thai princess who drowned in front of hundreds of people because it was taboo to touch a royal. That's the Saudi girls who burned to death in their school because the police wouldn't let them leave without their abbaya.

That's the reason I'm a freakin' horrible diplomat.

Oh, and Asmara? Here's the thing I don't quite understand: when a constituent organization actually jumps through all the hoops and fills out all the papers to be allowed to put out a call for volunteers, and the position has been vacant for the last several years, and one makes some inquiries about it and asks some questions...that's what we'd think of as a buyer's market, yes? And so when the seller -- really the sellers, both at post and in Washington -- completely and utterly ignore the shopper, that's a little puzzling, yes? All I can conclude is that if that's how they treat the people they're ostensibly desperate to get, I probably don't want to stick around to see how they deal with folks who don't have a bargaining chip. Feh.