![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Dec. 14th, 2019 01:44 pmAs we lurch toward the end of the year, I find myself looking forward to the holidays. It seems damned perverse to yearn for more free time while my workload's been the lightest it's been in years. But months of being a human ping-pong ball do take their toll - and certain forms of intellectual grunt work can, like a bad smell in a large room, take up rather more space in the brain than one might expect. At the same time, my health troubles have been intensifying and draining my energies to an alarming degree. On the top of all this, the new year threatens to be a stressful one - I shall definitely have to move, and probably go job hunting, which are nasty things to have to do simultaneously. I should very much like to fortify myself for that.
On some days, I estimate that every hour of paid work requires two hours of unpaid travel and one of unpaid prep-work. This may be an exaggeration, but not by much - some days this is certainly the case. Traffic has a way of sucking one's soul every bit as surely as one of those cosmic plasmavores, and turning your frontal lobe into garden mulch. (This, no matter how good the audio-book may be). It is one (among many) of Modern Civilization's great perversities that neighbourhoods where work is available and neighbourhoods where rent is affordable are rarely the same neighbourhood. Unless you belong to the 1%, the existence of which is another perversity. . .
Which is all to say, that my day tends to feel a lot longer than it actually is. More to the point, my days are spent in a state of flux - wherever I happen to be, I am required to be somewhere else. Time and space do not neatly match up - in my world, they are enemies. There are some folks deal well with this sort of routine, and some who even may enjoy it. I am not among these folk - I'm damned sick of it, and my leading expectation for holiday is to stay in one place for a time.
(Now should one ask in all fairness "why do you bother", I direct one to the part of the intro where I said "I shall probably have to go job hunting". Fact is, for a time the system worked, and I was happy with it. Times change and systems fail.)
There's also the mental taxation of constantly chasing nebulous goals. If I were simply digging a large whole, I could at least see what I was doing, how much I had left, and roughly estimate how much time it would take. Most importantly, there would be no doubt about what it was I was required to do. Here though. . . things seem rather a stream of never-ending riddles than a set of definite tasks. I've never been any good at riddles; sometimes I just can't get it. Or, I take a wild guess with very mixed results. One can carry on like this for a while, but there comes a time when the whole machinery just wants to crash and burn. "I dunno! Don't ask me! Go away!"
Then, there's the stomach. Battleground of the gods. Or the demons. Or both. Somewhere around 2013, powerful forced selected my gut as the next Vígríðr or Óskópnir. It's gotten worse every year; in the past few months, a day hasn't gone by where I haven't felt like something was devouring me within, or trying to claw its way out with razor fangs. The doctors cannot tell me what's wrong - all tests have consistently come back as "normal". This should come as a relief. But all that means to me is that nobody can see the monster tearing me up inside. As Lovecraft said, "the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown". I don't like not knowing. As long as it's apparently nothing it could possibly be anything. Non-existent problems have no solutions. But getting back to my original point, it is exhausting when one's body is constantly at war with itself. There were days when I would have called off work, if there had been any. There were days I was just so friggin' tired. . . Not so bad today, or yesterday, but there were days. What did Bobby Blitz of Overkill sing in "the Thin Black Line"?
"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Long story short, for a bunch of reasons, I'm ready for my break, even though many might argue I'm already in the midst of one. . .
On some days, I estimate that every hour of paid work requires two hours of unpaid travel and one of unpaid prep-work. This may be an exaggeration, but not by much - some days this is certainly the case. Traffic has a way of sucking one's soul every bit as surely as one of those cosmic plasmavores, and turning your frontal lobe into garden mulch. (This, no matter how good the audio-book may be). It is one (among many) of Modern Civilization's great perversities that neighbourhoods where work is available and neighbourhoods where rent is affordable are rarely the same neighbourhood. Unless you belong to the 1%, the existence of which is another perversity. . .
Which is all to say, that my day tends to feel a lot longer than it actually is. More to the point, my days are spent in a state of flux - wherever I happen to be, I am required to be somewhere else. Time and space do not neatly match up - in my world, they are enemies. There are some folks deal well with this sort of routine, and some who even may enjoy it. I am not among these folk - I'm damned sick of it, and my leading expectation for holiday is to stay in one place for a time.
(Now should one ask in all fairness "why do you bother", I direct one to the part of the intro where I said "I shall probably have to go job hunting". Fact is, for a time the system worked, and I was happy with it. Times change and systems fail.)
There's also the mental taxation of constantly chasing nebulous goals. If I were simply digging a large whole, I could at least see what I was doing, how much I had left, and roughly estimate how much time it would take. Most importantly, there would be no doubt about what it was I was required to do. Here though. . . things seem rather a stream of never-ending riddles than a set of definite tasks. I've never been any good at riddles; sometimes I just can't get it. Or, I take a wild guess with very mixed results. One can carry on like this for a while, but there comes a time when the whole machinery just wants to crash and burn. "I dunno! Don't ask me! Go away!"
Then, there's the stomach. Battleground of the gods. Or the demons. Or both. Somewhere around 2013, powerful forced selected my gut as the next Vígríðr or Óskópnir. It's gotten worse every year; in the past few months, a day hasn't gone by where I haven't felt like something was devouring me within, or trying to claw its way out with razor fangs. The doctors cannot tell me what's wrong - all tests have consistently come back as "normal". This should come as a relief. But all that means to me is that nobody can see the monster tearing me up inside. As Lovecraft said, "the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown". I don't like not knowing. As long as it's apparently nothing it could possibly be anything. Non-existent problems have no solutions. But getting back to my original point, it is exhausting when one's body is constantly at war with itself. There were days when I would have called off work, if there had been any. There were days I was just so friggin' tired. . . Not so bad today, or yesterday, but there were days. What did Bobby Blitz of Overkill sing in "the Thin Black Line"?
"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Long story short, for a bunch of reasons, I'm ready for my break, even though many might argue I'm already in the midst of one. . .
