shadows of echoes of memories of songs

There's feeling full of fail, and then there's feeling full of existential fail. I've spent most of today wanting to curl up under the desk in a little ball and howl like an over-tired toddler. I was working for the Department of Fail, which always saps my will to live -- they're not really inherently full of fail, but I and my colleague J. are contracted to work a few days for them and so all the problems they save up for us are the things that are either a) completely intractable and/or incomprehensible, b) sufficiently bitty and faffy that nobody has ever had a chance to sit down and really get them, or c) enormous cans of worms (these are invariably simple-looking tasks, and for all I know they may be given to us in all innocence, but they turn out to be many-headed sharp-fanged fail-hydras from the Dark Places). It doesn't help that the DoF is also located in a vast open-plan office, flickery-fluorescent-lit, and dry as a desert; being there makes me feel exhausted and drained and even more queasy than I was already starting to feel.

[Yes, I know I'm lucky to have a job at all, and I shouldn't complain. And I know I'm lucky that I'm not suffering (yet, so far) from all the horrible things that can go wrong in pregnancy, so I should be practically rejoicing at tiredness and a bit of recurring queasiness. And depression is all in the mind so it can't be that bad. And the Tories will fix everything if we just let them get on with it.]

Today was a day of cans of worms involving ( javascript and CMS horrors )

During all this fail-wrestling I was keeping a vague eye on twitter in the hope of getting some voices of sanity filtering in through all the madness, but in fact it just made things worse: it was a non-stop stream of rants and shouting, flickering away in the background like the last TV fuzzily broadcasting the apocalypse, showing the world falling apart while I was stuck inside designing better deckchairs for the Titanic. And outside it got darker and colder and I didn't want to stay in the Department of Fail but I didn't want to go out into the cold either, and every time I get home I feel like I don't ever want to go out again, but every time I look around me here I feel as though everything is a reminder of some kind of brokenness (inside or out) which I should have either fixed or got rid of, and I want to hide from it, and there's nowhere left to hide except going to bed, and even that doesn't help because I'm uncomfortable and I sleep badly, and going to sleep just means waking up into another day of fail.

And there's not enough time left before everything runs out of time. Working days, days before Christmas, days before the baby arrives ... days before the end of something, of everything. When I die they'll cut me open and find nothing inside but small charred fragments of to-do lists.

This Sunday I'm running in the Town & Gown 10k again, in aid of Muscular Dystrophy. About 5 of my colleagues are running too, and I don't think any of them are trying to raise sponsorship at all -- for them it's purely about the running. I found this surprising, but perhaps I'm just naive and lots of people take that attitude -- if so, how do these events actually make any money for the charities? (Do some people raise so much sponsorship that it makes up for it?) I can sympathise with a certain degree of embarrassment in asking people to sponsor you -- I don't find it easy, and certainly when it's a regular thing there's a sense that people are probably rolling their eyes and thinking oh no, here we go again. But if I really couldn't bear it, I wouldn't enter charity events! Or I'd just sponsor myself to the tune of £50 or so and accept that as the price of taking part. :-} I just worry that the whole thing is a really inefficient way of raising money for anything, and it's just a sop to middle-class guilt, and I'd be better writing a cheque to the charity and not wasting other people's time by asking them for money. The more I think about the whole "get sponsored to do things" model, the more absurd it seems. Mind you, the more I think about anything the more I just unravel it. Perhaps I should do a sponsored not-thinking-about-anything-for-a-day in aid of an Existentialist society or something.

But I am weary, weary, weary of being constantly made fun of by colleagues for trying to do the right thing, for trying to think about what the right thing is in situations, for trying not to be selfish; I am tired of getting snide comments like "oh you're so virtuous" and "I'm just not such a good person as you" in response to anything I say about anything I do. I don't want to preach and I try not to come across as preaching (though I do question and debate rather than just pretending to agree with things that I don't agree with), I don't think I'm particularly "good", I certainly don't think I'm "better" than other people as a person, in fact most of the time I think I'm a big heap of fail and I struggle to stay motivated to do anything. I don't think people are innately "good" or "evil", I think it's all about actions and patterns of action and choices, and you can't necessarily infer anything from the information you have about one person's choice in one situation. Obviously I think some choices are 'better' (which is almost always a relative judgement rather than an absolute) than others, otherwise how would I ever decide to do anything? But I don't even think I make relatively-good decisions more than average (how the heck would anybody measure that anyway?), I think I try hard but (as in most things) I feel as though I work harder than some to compensate for finding things harder.

But there's a whole nother blog post in there (a book, really) about trying to get things right, about guilt and blame, about fail and win, about the unfashionability of morals and the mess we've replaced them with, which I'm probably never going to have the time or energy to write.

Anyway ... in the unlikely event that you still want to sponsor me after all that angst, my online sponsorship form is here (they're officially endorsing online sponsorship this time, which is definitely progress!), & I will be very grateful indeed (because, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it does make the running seem more worthwhile, even though these days everybody's given the money before the run, so the original model sort of doesn't work any more). And if you don't, that's fine, & I promise I'm not judging you for it in any way! (Saying that makes me feel like people will think I'm saying it because I am judging and want to deny it, but honestly, no, just no. Let me at least be the owner of my own thoughts.)