Today I finished a few things. I finished reading a book that I had started so long ago I don’t even remember I first picked it up. It’s called Coping with Difficult People by Robert M. Bramson Ph. D. It was a difficult read, not because of the content, but because it dredged up old memories of difficult people and my encounters with them. More than once I put the book down because I could feel myself getting upset and disgusted. The book has solid advice, but it’s geared more towards office settings and sales, based on the examples used in the book. The basic premise of the book is that there are difficult people especially in the workplace and we need to learn coping methods so we can have a more productive workplace. It goes on to describe the different archetypes of difficult people, the sherman tank, the sniper, the super agreeable, the indecisive, and the complainer. At the end of the book it complicates these by adding thinking styles: synthesist, idealist, realist, pragmatist, and analyst. It requires you to do amateur psychoanalysis of your difficult person using trial and error. If you pick the wrong type archetype and thinking style, the suggested coping method might backfire, but I guess that’s ok if you’re not worried about the consequences. The idea is that you’re trying to take action instead of being reactive, and if you get it wrong that doesn’t matter so much because you’re making an effort. If you forced me to give you a percentage on whether I’d recommend it it or not, I’d give it a 51% recommendation and 49% skip it. Not a strong recommendation, but that’s how I feel about it.

I finished watching season 1 of Dandadan. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a shonen anime about a couple of kids, a boy (Ken Takakura aka Okarun) and a girl (Momo Ayase). The boy believes in aliens. The girl believes in ghosts and the supernatural. The girl takes pity on the boy because he is being picked on and she stands up for him. In an attempt to talk to the girl who stood up for him he negs her for believing in ghosts. It turns out they were both right. The two help each other fight off aliens and demons throughout the series. The two have feelings for each other, the boy and the girl, not the aliens and the demons. It’s a fun anime, full of action. I highly recommend it. If I had to describe Okarun using the difficult people methodology I’d say he is an indecisive analyst and Ayase is a sherman tank idealist. Thought, I think the characters are more nuanced than that. They both change and grow as the series progresses.