[768] Feel So Real

I anticipate this being such a bad, boring, and redundant blog, I'm not even going to bother sharing it to facebook where anyone might actually see it. If, by chance accident you've clicked your way to it, it's your fault if you try to suffer through it.

Thus we're brought to our theme. Blame. I certainly feel blamed for nearly everything. That's a great and ignorant way to start. An “everything” statement. Whether people have fun or not. When I have “friends” or not. Whether I decided to “mature” and take responsibility for the path my upbringing set me on. When people say things to the effect of “it boils down to the individual,” I think they mean it boils down to the handful of people “everyone” feels comfortable blaming for “everything.”

Elected or monetary leaders take a different kind of blame. That's too easy and prescribed. Of course, it's their job, if not explicitly, than as a natural end of their wealth and notable consequences they wreak. Billionaires deserve blame in similar measure to politicians. You can feel and see changes, for better or worse, as immediately as any over-arching conception of society can.

The other kind of blame is for people with clashing dispositions with norms. They get the emotional blame. They don't claim eminent domain and destroy your land. Instead, they describe the shared space or relate to that domain in ways that makes you feel as though someone has slashed and burned your land. Sometimes, it's antagonistic. Sometimes, it's just a survival strategy. The world is out to kill you, after all, and it takes a specific and small percentage of people who can play with that fact every day without breaking.

I've re-read a few blogs from the last year. The constant theme is me feeling less in control, being “broken by the system,” as I capitulate to jobs I don't want or time spent doing things “beneath” me as I wait, and wait, and dream, and wait some more as excuses are offered about why I can't move. In this instance, I mean literally move. I've said it before as well; when I had time, I had no one care to help. When I had money, I didn't have the space. Now that I have the space, my time is further occupied, and I was compelled to eat up more of my money than I cared to in needing a car or in doing necessary house fixes I was ignorant of.

If I had a ton of motivated energy, it would eat me from the inside. It's got nowhere to go. I took acid over the weekend at 2 in the morning out of boredom. I put together a little schedule of “minimal standards for engaging the world” like reading 10 pages, 1 news article, 1 comic, playing and walking for 10 minutes, and stretching, just so I can squeeze in a remote semblance that something “productive” is happening in my otherwise killing-time posture.

I know I desperately need to go out and make new friends. No matter how much I don't like people at large, the general strategy of meeting everyone and picking out the 2 who don't suck isn't the wrong one. It still results in generally good times more often than attempting to beat the dead horse of who I've surrounded myself with currently. Do I blame them for never wanting to do anything? Or, can I blame them for leading me on that it might be they just don't want to do anything with me? I feel like I'm thrown bones here and there. I'd rather be alone.

The line I appear to be stuck on, from those past blogs and what still rings in my head, is that I miss believing in things. I miss having the hope I could maybe have a life with someone I cared for. I miss thinking that your time and effort equaled what you could expect to take out of it. I miss writing with a sense of ignorant passion that it was going “somewhere” if only to a mental place that would allow me to keep outputting the intensity it would require to learn everything and take over the world. Now, it's like pressing my back against the seat of a roller coaster, pretending I'm making it go faster.

“It's just a ride, it's just a ride. No need to run, no need to hide. […] It may feel so real inside. But don't forget it's just a ride ”

I have a trigger happy startle reflex. It's a piece of the reason I have to focus on things like not clenching my jaw or experiencing spasms of grinding teeth. Long ago, I was trained to always be on alert, and the feeling of impending doom and danger has never gone away. I was shopping for mouth guards because I'm tired of the unnecessary tension in my temple. I was envious of a monk I read about who was given a test to not jump at a loud noise (he knew was coming) and he stayed cool. I bring up this reflex because it's an example of me being “primed.” When I jump, it's not something external's fault. That is, it's my mom's fault, but today, you'd hardly get points for “scaring” me anymore than you would a squirrel.

I think people at-large are similarly primed to react. Instead of facing how and why, they blame whatever scares them. They blame the “negative” influences that refuse to perpetuate their delusions. I think there's a disconnect between imagined circumstances and worth, and playing dress up. I think you can engage with the world, and everything about it that wants to kill you, and not be “negative.” I think my disposition is old-hat and cliché in different cultures. I think if I ever manage to find the right pocket of people who use language and recognize, both on and off paper, what I have and am preparing for in the future, every lazily hurled scornful sentiment will one day register as a fleeting memory if remembered at all.

I've wanted some version of the same things for 15 years. I want my own thing. I want my own space. I want to be loud. I want to have a sense of independence and autonomy. I want to pick my friends or at least the people who I'll give the chance to fail at being friends. I want to be able to have the time to focus on things that could grow to be more than hobbies. I want to experiment. I want to discover a resting state that isn't half concentrating on trying not to be tense. I want extremely first-world selfish freedom and access to pursuits I bought into related to the story of American Exceptionalism, and I have an array of wholly unexceptional masses to navigate through on my way there.

I want those things because I want to find more people like me. I want to create an environment. I want to prove that there's nothing “negative” about being realistic about the degrees in which things suck and the amount of work it takes to make them suck less. I want to protect a space that works overtime in disabusing the excuses and lies that protect useless flitting-about existences. I still retain the power. No matter how despotic of spirit I get, the land is mine, the house is getting complete, and the car will eventually be paid off. I can budget. I can choose to work more. I can force myself into finding new disappointing groups to interact with until the one-in-a-million person clicks for a while. I can record my effort and be as redundant as I want to be until I find the line or sentiment that keeps me going one more day. I will eventually remove myself from suffocating mediocrity.

And that becomes an alienating thing too which people will resent you for. Forget aggression. When people see you excited and enthusiastic, knowingly or not, they find ways to pick at it. They know you like them? Time to cite the depression and not answer texts or come hang out. They know you had an idea to save money and eat better? Better blow you off at the time and wait 3 months so they can implement your plan with someone else. They know you have a few solid things you like to do that are fairly inexpensive and low effort? That's okay, I'd rather go out with people I've had more shit to say about than you ever could.

Is it better to hate from a distance? Is that genuinely a “good” thing to have a looming resentment for everyone around you as opposed to voicing concerns or opinions? People seem to like it this way, even if they hate each other. They sure get to appear in more pictures together. The “negative” kept at a safe distance. I think this is more an American thing, and I think it's horrible. Just like you can't escape either, it's a million piece puzzle with numbers to match where they connect how we got Trump. Don't face your racism, elect a white nationalist. Don't tackle your fear and bigotry, beat your chest with your gun. Don't admit you're stupid and poor, blame the poorer and desperate. Don't help and believe in things, find poster children to blame, endlessly.

I think I'm tired of being blamed for making sense and pointing out inconsistencies. At least I don't lie about my circumstances. When you want to bemoan the circumstances that have me sleeping on a couch at 30, that never erases the house waiting for me and land I'm begging to occupy. When I finally got pushed against a wall, I used my degree. Whether I practice for 8 hours a day or only read 10 pages, I'm a composite of hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and achieved some technical sophistication that's outpaced the majority. I am an exception to many rules. I have a good reason and good history to believe as much or more awaits me.

When do I ever hear this from anyone else? Or, they do something in secret and save their struggle so there's more room for the social media story. Or, they keep their goals contained to more “realistic” and palpable responsibilities. “Why, yes sir, in 5-10 years of slogging along, I'll have quite the 6 month travel fund, huzzah!” Maybe that speaks to an important distinction. A sense of urgency. When you “know” a certain path, say the collect a regular paycheck path, is going to work for you indefinitely, you adopt a concept of yourself to match. “Oh, I could never achieve that without at least another 6 months!” Not so much doing the math or theorizing other sacrifices or experiments, just spit-balling you're “stuck” for another safely anticipated period of time. I can't operate like that.

I don't have the money or level of health insurance to get “seriously” sick. I don't have the resources to rebuild if everything burned down. That friend who's about to die unexpectedly in the next 2 years I'm almost certainly never going to find the time to visit if I keep at the paycheck-to-paycheck pace of modernity. Not to mention, I don't want to just visit, I want a working and consistent relationship with my friends. I want my time back. In many many ways it was better being bored and alone awash in study money than it is being mildly engaged and ensconced in a regular work environment. I'm getting more stories, and everyone isn't the worst, it just simply isn't “me.” It's another game and procedure I find distracting and haven't figured out how or if it speaks to the whole in a more helpful than harmful way.

I don't move enough. I fidget, and toss, and drive, and tap, but I don't flow. My moment doesn't carry into enough breathing examples of what I should be doing, so it feels stuck. I'm left to be airily amoral waiting for a cue from a god I don't believe in. I've every excuse to lounge and enjoy and excuse and blame, and when I get up and look for agency, I take myself down errant paths evading the feeling that it's more and more seconds eroding in service to fluff. I appreciate relative stability. I like being fed and warm. I'm trying to set my house in order. It's as messy as I'm letting on, and I'm trying to deal with it. Don't be so negative.

[767] Lines In The Sand

Convergence! Too many things all tying to a theme equals, gotta write. You may or may not be familiar with Chris Gethard. I'm not, but for my constant immersion in media. I clicked a random episode of his show I've never watched. Then I clicked somewhere in the middle of the episode. Then I watched as a caller from Bloomington, Indiana did his betting game on air. That's what brought me here. Of all the gin joints in all the world, people literally call into that show from all over the world, I found the one serving Bloomington gin, on a whim, while I'm arguably in the middle of 3 entirely different things to watch.

Next thing. I had a dream that was straight out of Interstellar. I was doing something innocuous, like brushing my teeth, and at the same time, doors were opening on a subway, a bird was flapping it's wings, and some other picture I can't remember was moving in sync with my movements. This, I take it, is because I started reading a book called “Now” about how science is trying to understand what that means. We have particles that can flow backwards in time, we all agree on the lengths of different things no matter our individuated frames of reference, and we all pretend to have a grasp on our butterfly-effect waves we send into the world. It was almost like a mini-acid trip dream that felt oddly reassuring that I was part of the machinery.

The third thing is a meme picture a friend I haven't really seen or talked to in a while posted about getting better at dealing with stress. It postulated either she was getting better, or just not giving a shit anymore. She's posted another one about one day having the money to actually live like the person she really is. Massive red flags go off in my head any time I relate too closely to what I consider “throwaway” sentiments and cliches about life. I promise, if you dig through blogs I wrote towards the end of high school and start of college, I say constantly how often I want nothing to do with the regular struggling Joe narrative and pull-cord sentiments of the old and lazy.

The fourth thing is just me recently musing on a kind of ethical style. As of late, I'm realizing my ethics, so to speak, have morphed a bit. Anymore, I wait to consider something as ethical or not in the moment. I have some loose standing presuppositions, like don't murder perhaps, but otherwise, I'm kind of waiting to see what I see or feel what I feel before I allow something I'm doing to register one way or another. It's not amoral, but it's not specifically speaking to a moral either. Sometimes I feel justified in driving like a dick. Sometimes I want to throw the gum wrapper on the floor. Sometimes I want to be as polite as can be while you unload your pointless and boring life story. I didn't know what I was going to pick until it was happening.

The more I find myself under the “rules” of normal society, the more I find myself wanting to play with boundaries in other ways. I know, barring everything, what kind of person I am and what I need to be doing in order to not lose my shit. It is an impulse I not only refuse to try to kill, but one I revel in as a kind of personality drug. It's the levels of obscenity or pretentious air. It's the complete blunt disinterest in things you purport to care about or find funny. It's a harsh boundary, but it's my boundary. But this raises old questions in a new paradigms.

What's got me here? Why is there little to no emotional investment in the grand standing narrative example I might be setting for the world? It's old news me calling myself an anti-particle, villain, or self-indulgent loon. Have I truly been shaken hard enough that I can't conceive of the “proper” thing anymore? Is my restraint more a hamstrung choke than wise and measured practice? Can I refrain from floating too far away from anything making sense?

I've had several opportunities over the last few days to lay into people who've objectively mislead me or had me on the receiving end for the consequences of their unforeseen circumstances or disorganization. I've been letting it ride. When I thought my job was going to get a leg up on me in monopolizing my thoughts, I picked a “morally equivalent stress relieving” course of action that seems fair enough and has me continue to get the job done. I think that just gave me the insight. When you start to scoop up points of corruption into your perspective, you're forced to make little negotiations. Why not eat more sugar when everyone's got so much candy and cookies and donuts they bring to the office, and why, you didn't have breakfast! That last call was super annoying and technically cut into your break. Better sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes and talk or smoke it out.

Perhaps what I conceived of as my morally backed insistence to work outside the confines of normalcy is decaying after being subjected to the regular world. Recall, I have a job paying me more than I've ever made, just got a new car, have spent kind-of wildly on some things for the future and in eating out so much, though not so much lately, and this is the place I've always conceived of as “losing.” That car is debt and a substitute for the rent I was trying to escape. Those indulgences I'm always and forever going to be doing alone, and my job, for as noble as it exists in the minds of those around me and for the odd amount of power it grants, has nothing to do with where I saw myself at this point in my life. I don't have it “bad,” but I don't have it “me.”

So if you're not you, what's the moral? I'm the walking embodiment of unrelenting revolt and provocation who plays dress up and juggles crazy stupid people's lies. Play along? Remain patient? Stay in the moment until the next check comes? Go overboard in giving handouts to the dumb and needy that you know in advance they're psychologically incapable of figuring out or sticking with? That's the rub too. I've been reading more about people. The dirty facts about how we treat ourselves do much work in tempering my will to chase “helpful” impulses I might have to pretend inform people. It doesn't mean you can't try, but it does mean if I don't feel a genuine impulse to try, I'm not going to. I never believe the show I put on for myself.

[766] Deuces

I'm searching for a car. This entices many things I do not like to happen all at once. Leaving aside that I know next to nothing about cars, brands decide to shit the bed for some years and certain models have fatal flaws that you can find if you want to dig through 7 quasi-reliable ratings pages per each make year. They all basically resemble the same few things to me. I'm the same person that thought I might get a used but reasonable beater when I turned 16 who's main concern is getting from point A to B. But as you're no doubt aware, many cars, of all shapes, ages, and sizes, occupy a wide array of potential in that space between.

I find it default overwhelming and frustrating. Not least of which because even the people who I know who seem to know the most about cars differ seemingly arbitrarily. Ford? Shit, but such and such model from x year can be great! KIA? Garbage, but totally affordable and 2013 wasn't terrible if you can stand to look at it. I had a Mini, right? BMW! Oh...you caught them on those junky corruption years, so your brand new car will blow the transmission, have its back hatch rust off, and 7 other things you'd never believe should go wrong with a car less than 5 years old. I've legitimately only ever believed in Tesla, in big part because I think Elon Musk is the kind of obsessive autistic type that couldn't produce total shit on purpose or it would kill him. (edit 2024: Oh, how people change.)

I think about the slogans. “Built to last!” “Built Ford tough!” “Unlike any other.” I recently watched Russell Brand's latest stand-up show, and he reiterates how we're perpetually beat over the head with bullshit wording and advertising and politicking to the point where any degree of sincerity, even the world's biggest fuck up like Trump, we'd be ravenous for. It's my inbuilt disdain for anyone who's forced to be put into a “lemme sell you something” posture. Let things be for sale. Let me buy them because they're actually good or useful. You can take it a personal route and think it dishonest and disingenuous to flout all of your best traits and pictures on a dating site while you lure someone in to lie to them for a few months before the cracks start showing.

I crave a form of stability even while occupying an intellectual attitude that everything's always changing and nothing is forever. At the same time, I occupy, as this book I started on the physics of “now” points out, every waking minute of my conscious existence. This remains constant. Each ounce of pain and pleasure trapped by my choice to hold or capacity to relish. I can build environments that persuade this persistent moment something is more stable and consistent that I'm otherwise exposed to and enagaged with.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

New section days later.

I've spent the last 3 hours looking at and playing with my finances. No matter how you shake it, If I can escape the specter of rent, I'll have 50% of my income to do whatever the hell I please with it. Well, that's not precisely true. I'll be able to pay in advance on my car loan, or the same with back taxes, or make 1 kinda-large and unnecessary purchase each month with little to no repercussions. My finances are dead even in me being able to work for a year at the “normal” pace of eating and drinking what I like and enjoying some moderately priced entertainment and paying off all the bills and becoming debt free, or I can hardcore mode it, spend every penny on bills and Ramen noodles, and be done in like 8 months. This also barring any pursuit of extra income.

I need something real to look forward to. I like playing my guitar and reading. I like to play some video games or moderate exercise. I NEED TO CREATE. Or, at least, I need to trick myself into thinking my expenses are speaking to my creations. I can't tell you how many times I've dreamt of digging holes. Why? Because a big enough hole is now a pool, or a fire pit, or a drainage system. Instead of my sitting stupid with too much energy on the couch while I debate whether I want to waste money on seeing a movie for the sake of leaving the house, I'd be blasting one of the thousand I have on my projector while I kill so many itch birds one shovel-full at a time I'll hardly be able to believe it.

I started looking for a different job, as if I don't basically enjoy this one, or like there was something “better” than the “even” state I'm in now. I don't plan to leave. I just wanted to see what my disposition might be situated for now that I've allowed Lifeline and DCS to pound me into this glob. I was also inspired by a story from Jennifer Lopez, or it happens with plenty of celebrities and famous-adjacent, about lying about their credentials and getting the job anyway, making some change or endearing themselves as one more in their infinite series of positive loop footholds. I can't help but think I'm “hindered” by my sense of...morality? Fairness? Wisdom? As if my current, arguably great state, was handed to me, and I've been searching for and missing some gimmick this whole time. I know, very well, better than that, but it feels that way nonetheless.

I'm increasingly sensitive to the idea of our capacity to zero in on the negative and have it allow a disproportionate affect on our attitude and well-being. I feel like I've exercised against this generally for years by writing, but even more, I want to tap into that next level, “Who do I want to be like that I'm not” when it comes to seeing people who seem to have something figured out. Patrick Stewart comes to mind. I struggle to think of who would follow him.Tom Hanks?

Part of what makes me insufferable is my ability and willingness to bear down on the present moment. That was the motivation to get all my shit done “now” and independently. That's reading past eyestrain or depression levels. That's playing until your fingers fail. I repeat, NOTHING ABOUT LIFE IS LIKE THAT. You get your paycheck every 2 weeks. Someone's not going to call you back for 3 days. A miscommunication or 12 will see the month-long task take over a year. I can't. I can't operate like that. You have to go to a place that zens-out and rides along in order to survive, but holy fuck, when I reach for my shotgun posture, I mean, I'VE BEEN 30 FOR ALMOST 6 MONTHS. And while that's sorta-true, but at least a month off, it's that mind frame that presses you to get shit done BECAUSE DEATH IS WAITING.

I have nothing new to say. This was told to me during a drunken verbal battle I have no idea how it got started. It's true, but the problem isn't that I need to reiterate. The problem is that the underlying problem never gets addressed. The problem is that efforts to address it bleed out over months and make it look like I don't have a goddamn clue. There's never anything new to say, from anyone, save a few physicists. But it does need to be constantly addressed and rearranged and brought into our collective consciousness. I certainly need to see myself dying to climb out of my bowels and stomach as I waste away on a couch pretending I'm not allowed weekends.

The reality is such that once something takes off, it shoots to the moon. Some stupid idea, some experiment, some trendy blog post. If you've laid the groundwork and prepared for all the coming potential, someone's begging to discover you or collaborate or exploit. The tools for gaming the systems of attention and marketing are as detailed as you could ask for and dirt cheap. But you have to be on the move. You have to be paying attention. You have to say, over and over again, who you are, what you're about, and what you hope to achieve, and then get to work.

[765] Clench

I think I'm losing control. Something I never quite understood was when people would be “stressed” about things they had no control over. I've definitely found myself at the bottom of a dark and dead pit after reading way too much terrible news about the world, but I suffer from the delusion that I can do something about it. It wasn't the terribleness in and of itself, it was observing myself, day after day, doing shit like delivering food or watching the blood shoot from my arm, somehow still thinking that “just around the corner” I would be all...”it.” The many steps removed you might be from “doing genuine good” while you're engaged in the things I have for money are as despotically described per your degree of hatred for capitalism or sympathetically understood by how much we all seem to have to pay the bills.

 

Importantly, up until I've adopted these “real world” jobs, I felt in control. When I needed to drop out of my “gigs,” I could. I picked to work back-to-back shifts because, again with my delusions, I thought 2 or 3 concurrent sources of income could be maintained on fleeting hours of sleep. I was “happy” enough to make the drives 6 or 7 hours away to try and get into drug studies. Whether I used my stays to sleep most of the time or read more in a week than I could in a year, it felt like I was steering myself into chosen icebergs.

 

Now? In place of my quick spasms of grinding teeth, I appear to have a perpetually tense jaw. I'm flirting with the “headache for no reason” thing I had growing up in my mom's house. I'm getting extremely lax in my caution against ridiculous meals and the amount of money I'm willing to spend on them. The stakes don't feel as high. The reminders and the language of the “old” and “settled” are surrounding my every waking moment. I'm not “randomly” interacting with “my kind of people,” be it for their off-kilter eccentricities or hopeful and naive language about what they want to accomplish.

 

For the variety of aberrant and “crazy” I may encounter throughout the day, it all speaks to a kind of underlying sickness that needs a cultural breed-out program more than haughty middle-management.

You see, it's not just that I feel less like the arbiter of where I'd like to steer this ship, I'm watching myself play out the drama of the people's lives I engage with. Intellectually, nothing I encounter in these people's lives is “mine,” in a very important sense. Practically, I have to suffer the phone calls preventing me from getting something else done. I have to stress out about my car not making it across some backwater Indiana road. I have to take in the array of poverty and neglect scents. I have to feel the waves of denial and hatred pour out of insistent liars about how they perceive their family members and how they engage in the world.

 

I get it now. I don't want to recall my last hour explaining in detail how I managed a crazy situation, but not unlike writing, it feels like I don't have a choice. It's this, or bite through my jaw. Only now the stakes are higher. I take in too much crap into this kind of job, you can really fuck up someone's life. A fact that doesn't bother me at all, but a real consequence if I felt I was flirting with forgoing paying attention at all to how it's eating at me.

 

This is the kind of job that people can treat like they’re on a mission. I get the impression that whether they want to admit it or not, there's a little tingle in their downstairs about the power you have and it's almost throwaway amounts of good will you get from people who can't imagine what it's like to do your job. I think we should make an extra $20 every time someone tells me they wouldn't want to. But, there's a case to be made that via your “proper upbringing” and capacity for de-stressing and organizing, you may bring some good into the lives of people who desperately need it. My last meeting of the day, I caught a look from a mom who showed the mildest hope that I had told her something new and potentially powerful that apparently the legion of caseworkers and people they've dealt with before had not.

 

I know I'm a more positive influence than negative. For however terrible I may make you feel after you read something from me, I don't then go into my work or friend life and attempt to act dumber than I am or meaner than I feel. There are a fair number of people as or more competent than me in their different fields all, I'm assuming, experiencing their version of isolated personal hell as they cling to the drops of positive difference they make in the world too. Isn't that the problem? I don't operate under the presumption I can help anything. Like most things, I consider it something of a happy accident after enough probability waves can be tricked into flowing a different direction. By that same token, I can, at the very least, practice dismissing all the waves of shit that wash over me. I can function as a buoy that the errant parent or child can cling to for a moment before they inevitably drown, fine, nature of the game. I can't let all the rest start to surround me and make me okay with a level of complacency that I'm finding exhausting in a way too many work hours never has.

 

Job shit combined with that life irony of thinking I finally got something accomplished land-wise and energy wise, still waiting, doesn't make for a good “in the meantime” story either. I waited for months of good and honest work before I paid in advance to get this final piece completed. You'll note I'm not typing this from my heated and electrified home in the middle of nowhere. Is it inexplicable or egregious yet? No. Does having to “hide” my plastic drawer with clothing in it in Byron's room for apartment home inspections feel like a greater indicator as to the state of my life right now?

 

I think it's a blessing and a curse that I don't believe what I'm not doing. Maybe it's a relationship that doesn't quite click until we start talking and I realize you haven't killed yourself either in a similar way I'm attempting to avoid. I literally have my own rent-free place and land, and without the work done and me sitting there drawing inspiration about how to classy up the place, it's not quite real. I could be doing a great many deals of good service in my disposition and dishonestly-described “poor” work ethic, at least by comparison, but you're hard-pressed to persuade me otherwise that I'm not mostly going through the motions of semi-direction with regard to things that are mostly thoughtless complaints from the ignorant about the ignorant. And in the spirit of moral or litigious propriety, I have to treat everything like it's at least a touch on fire.

 

The State worries about “burnout.” They don't want your baggage to become client baggage or reflect badly on the work available to the public. They'll shuffle you between counties. They'll let you seek out different positions. The last day of training was a serious examination about self-care. I think in order to be truly burned out, it takes a level of both investment and disenfranchisement it's impossible for me to achieve. I take my job seriously, but the state of my moral soul and conception of myself is not in believing I'm doing any good or measured by the thank yous and tears. I can hate the fact that I've spent 3 hours of “overtime” in the rehashing and bitching, that my mind would do about something else anyways, but now it's consistently related to work, but not wake up 10 years from now wondering how I stayed there so long and on the verge of a breakdown.

 

As with everything, this too shall pass. Maybe next week I'll be home and not discover my stuff burned down or stolen, and you'll get a blog about how I plan to decorate or something. Maybe my mind will figure something out in my sleep about how to process and condense bullshit I don't have tonight. Maybe I'll have another sporadic removal and catch hella overtime that results in a check that makes me forget all about any particularly difficult client. Maybe I'm meant to just be disappeared for a while.