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j4These last two days at work have been phenomenally unproductive, even by my usual standards. My project manager has been off sick for a couple of days, and I'm always worse at getting work done when he's not around -- and at the moment there's very little to do, and I'm not feeling motivated enough to create work for myself out of thin air. By the time I left work yesterday I was practically in tears just from the sheer pointlessness of the job, and (by extension, since it's the thing that eats most of my time) of my life. I only wish I could say that this was a rare occurrence.
As a result, I really wasn't in the mood for karate after work yesterday. I told sensei I wasn't feeling very "together", and he appeared to ignore me, and instead asked me to help him put the blinds back up in the dojo (the dojo was vandalised last week, and he's been repairing it bit by bit) before the lesson. Then he started talking about various aspects of self-defence -- particularly how to be aware and safe in the street, and how to deal with intruders in the home -- and getting me to think of ways to get out of imagined situations... and before I knew it, we'd had a productive and interesting lesson, and I hadn't once thought about how miserable I was feeling. Clever trick. :-)
Before that I'd been thinking of staying home rather than going to the pub, but I did go in the end ... I usually do in the end, because it's preferable to sitting at home moping. Got to the Castle to find that the usual Thursday night crowd had temporarily merged with the CUSFS social. Fortunately managed to avoid getting dragged into too much geeky conversation! It was a shame that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lnr was so late getting to the pub, but nice to have a chat and a bit of a snuggle eventually.
...
It's funny, though, how the morning after a night in the pub I only seem to be able to remember the stupid embarrassing things I said, and/or that everybody had the same conversations as they always do. I feel bad for feeling like this about a pleasant evening spent with friends, but I think it's just part of the general feeling I have that I'm not going anywhere. I can't tell the difference sometimes between yesterday, last week, last month; it all just blurs into one long day of getting up, going to work, coming home, pottering about and/or going out, and going to sleep, and waking up still feeling tired.
Work today has been worse than usual. I've done virtually nothing useful, and I haven't even been able to concentrate on anything non-work-related... I've recently been trying to put together some internal documentation to put on the company intranet intranet (in some cases just converting things from hideous Word-document-with-hyperlink world of hell, in other cases rewriting stuff that hasn't been updated since 1994, in most cases just writing from scratch), but my motivation isn't helped by the fact that I know that a) nobody will use the documentation -- they'll still come and ask me the same stupid questions again and again -- and b) my job title still won't change, and I'll be an "editorial assistant" until I leave, because they don't have a little box labelled "unpaid systems integrator, perl scripter, documentation writer, speaks-to-programmers, unix support for DOS weenies, and general techie dogsbody" that they can put me in.
It's all just so frustrating. I know it shouldn't be: after all, it's only a job, and it pays me enough to cover my half of the mortgage; but over the days, weeks, months and years it just wears me down. I feel like I'm railing against the darkness, but every time I try to lift my hand to light a candle, my limbs turn to lead and the table with the candle on shoots up out of my reach like something from Alice in Wonderland. Maybe, just like Alice, it's me who shrinks when I feel like this. Curioser, as they say, and curioser. One side will make you grow taller... but the bottle labelled "Drink Me" is half-empty.
Now, how can I kill the last half-hour until hometime...
As a result, I really wasn't in the mood for karate after work yesterday. I told sensei I wasn't feeling very "together", and he appeared to ignore me, and instead asked me to help him put the blinds back up in the dojo (the dojo was vandalised last week, and he's been repairing it bit by bit) before the lesson. Then he started talking about various aspects of self-defence -- particularly how to be aware and safe in the street, and how to deal with intruders in the home -- and getting me to think of ways to get out of imagined situations... and before I knew it, we'd had a productive and interesting lesson, and I hadn't once thought about how miserable I was feeling. Clever trick. :-)
Before that I'd been thinking of staying home rather than going to the pub, but I did go in the end ... I usually do in the end, because it's preferable to sitting at home moping. Got to the Castle to find that the usual Thursday night crowd had temporarily merged with the CUSFS social. Fortunately managed to avoid getting dragged into too much geeky conversation! It was a shame that
lnr was so late getting to the pub, but nice to have a chat and a bit of a snuggle eventually. ...
It's funny, though, how the morning after a night in the pub I only seem to be able to remember the stupid embarrassing things I said, and/or that everybody had the same conversations as they always do. I feel bad for feeling like this about a pleasant evening spent with friends, but I think it's just part of the general feeling I have that I'm not going anywhere. I can't tell the difference sometimes between yesterday, last week, last month; it all just blurs into one long day of getting up, going to work, coming home, pottering about and/or going out, and going to sleep, and waking up still feeling tired.
Work today has been worse than usual. I've done virtually nothing useful, and I haven't even been able to concentrate on anything non-work-related... I've recently been trying to put together some internal documentation to put on the company intranet intranet (in some cases just converting things from hideous Word-document-with-hyperlink world of hell, in other cases rewriting stuff that hasn't been updated since 1994, in most cases just writing from scratch), but my motivation isn't helped by the fact that I know that a) nobody will use the documentation -- they'll still come and ask me the same stupid questions again and again -- and b) my job title still won't change, and I'll be an "editorial assistant" until I leave, because they don't have a little box labelled "unpaid systems integrator, perl scripter, documentation writer, speaks-to-programmers, unix support for DOS weenies, and general techie dogsbody" that they can put me in.
It's all just so frustrating. I know it shouldn't be: after all, it's only a job, and it pays me enough to cover my half of the mortgage; but over the days, weeks, months and years it just wears me down. I feel like I'm railing against the darkness, but every time I try to lift my hand to light a candle, my limbs turn to lead and the table with the candle on shoots up out of my reach like something from Alice in Wonderland. Maybe, just like Alice, it's me who shrinks when I feel like this. Curioser, as they say, and curioser. One side will make you grow taller... but the bottle labelled "Drink Me" is half-empty.
Now, how can I kill the last half-hour until hometime...
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no subject
Date: 2002-11-15 09:08 am (UTC)Me too, to almost all of that (except some of the work stuff, I guess, and the snuggling). I guess that doesn't help much, but perhaps, I dunno, stuff. blah blah emoticon. etc. ~smile~
The CUSFS people came back here after and there wasn't much geeky conversation, really. We talked about religions for a lot of the time, about Judaism in England in medieval times and stuff. It surprised me.
no subject
Date: 2002-11-15 09:16 am (UTC)When the CUSFS lot were in the pub the conversation seemed to be divided into technical geeking and ideological geeking, with beards on the former side and handwaving on the latter. Trust them to have the interesting conversations out of my earshot, eh... ;-)
no subject
Date: 2002-11-15 11:14 am (UTC)~hugs~ If you find a way out, let me know, won't you? I'll do the same.
And in further news ...
Date: 2002-11-15 09:11 am (UTC)"Now, how can I kill the last half-hour until hometime..."
What I don't understand is what people did at work before LiveJournal.
Re: And in further news ...
Date: 2002-11-15 09:17 am (UTC)*laugh* yeah, er, right. Fine idea apart from the fact that WorldCom have had a hiring freeze for the past 2+ years that is....
That and now that the 3rd round of redundancies have gone through, the people that are left at WorldCom are running around like headless chickens or are sitting around waiting for the inevitable.
I'm kinda glad that I got out of WorldCom when I did to be honest.
Re: And in further news ...
Date: 2002-11-15 09:28 am (UTC)Still, I'd apply to them if I thought they'd take me. It'd probably almost look like a career move, too, if you squinted at my CV from sufficiently far away. ;)
Re: And in further news ...
Date: 2002-11-18 04:15 am (UTC)As for working for WorldCom... I don't think that its something I'd want to inflict on anyone, let alone a close friend like yourself :)
Re: And in further news ...
Date: 2002-11-15 09:24 am (UTC)(Yesterday I read the man page for 'ls' out of boredom.)
no subject
Date: 2002-11-15 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-17 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-01-01 10:24 am (UTC)this sounds pretty much how I've been feeling for most of this year. It's really hard to be in a situation like this because the symptoms themselves sap the will to do anything about it, so it seems impossible to find a way out. add a nice dash of 'I have no right to moan when so many are out of work /starving/homeless' and you have a recipe for exhaustion and misery!
Without wishing to be all me!me!me! here I have spent most of a year dredging through this stuff and feeling like this and having decided to change career I now feel clearer and lighter. it feels like having one's mental garden turned over for spring with new furrows laid down for plants to be bedded in. hard work will be needed but at least I know what to do. so if it helps at all, there are ways out of these feelings and I hope that you find them, if that is what you choose to do. And thanks for being so eloquent.