don't say i never did nothing for ya -- i've contributed to your vocabulary, if nothing else. unless you're too lazy to look it up. yeah, you didn't look it up, did you? alrighty then. neurasthenia: a psychological disorder characterized by chronic fatigue and weakness, loss of memory, and generalized aches and pains, formerly thought to result from exhaustion of the nervous system. no longer in scientific use. well, it should still be in use, goddamn it. for the last almost two weeks straight, i have been fighting almost constant stomach cramps and nausea, on and off headaches, bleary eyeballs, and a sore back (read: generalized aches and pains). let's break them all down, shall we? stomach cramps and nausea -- work related stress causing ulcer. on and off headaches -- work related stress causing abnormally high blood pressure. bleary eyeballs -- work related stress causing sleep deprivation and red, puffy eyes. sore back -- work related stress causing neck and back muscle spasms. freaking excellent. now kiddies, what's the common thread here? could it be.... work?!!?!?! damn my need for money and damn capitalism!!!!
in all seriousness, my mood is more serious than i am letting on. continuing with the theme of my last post, my work life has degraded into something dark and ugly and slimy and smelly and horrifying and my conscious self is coiled up, huddling in a corner of my brain, arms wrapped around knees, rocking back and forth, muttering under her breath to just make it all go away. it really is an interesting condition/state of mind. there are some people who would undoubtedly be thrilled to have a job like mine -- sit at a desk all day in a comfortable chair doing work that while demanding is not particularly hard. i am sure that there are some people out there who could deal with and maybe even thrive on the crazy, self-absorbed, immoral boss and the steady stream of complaints and the office politics. however, i am not in that group of some people. for whatever reason (my own limitations, childhood traumas, etc.) i cannot seem to make it past the negative points of my job that stab into my body like ice picks. i feel like a dark cloud is hovering above my head, putting a crushing pressure on my shoulders, and i can't get away from it. yet, i am self-aware enough to realize that this is a panic/horror of my own making. i am in control of my emotions and my thoughts, and i am the one who is dwelling on the bad and the ugly rather than trying to accentuate the positive.
i believe that a portion of this state of mind arises out of a mid-twenties crisis. in august, i will officially be a quarter of a century old. for most of my life, i was ahead of the class. i started college at 16 with a 4.0 GPA. i finished university with honors and a double major at 20. i finished my master's at 22 -- sooner, if i wasn't such a lazy ass. but now.... well, i have been working at a doomed and dysfunctional non-profit as an administrator for the last two years. i spent all my savings immigrating to canada. while i learned some useful adminstrative stuff (nifty tricks on excel, how to use a database, the difference between a statement of claim and a statement of defense, etc.), in my mind i have not learned about or gained any new, different, or marketable skills. i have got to get out of this place, but i don't have another job lined up. nor do i really want another job. jobs suck. i want a career (note previously mentioned trite i-want-to-be-a-writer post) but i have no idea how to start it. especially given the geographic limitations placed upon me by my boyfriend's very secure and well-paid union job that he probably couldn't get anywhere else in north america. (that sentence refers to the fact that the job market is absolute crap in vancouver for anyone other than a skilled tradesperson which i am not and which i am not interested in becoming.) said wonderful and spectacular boyfriend has offered to support me financially if i want to quit working for a while to finish the book. he is so freaking amazing. how many other boyfriends would offer to do that? when i asked him why he has so much faith in me, he said, "i think it's great that you feel passionate about something and you're trying to go after it. and i believe that you can do it and that it will be great and if you don't do it now, you'll regret it when you're older." oh, getting teary eyed now. so, other than a man who believes in me and loves me and supports me and is the bestest person i've ever known in my life, what am i left with? (don't get me wrong -- i am SO thankful for chris in my life that i really wouldn't have any regrets if he were the only good thing in it, but i feel that i need to follow this panic attack to its logical end.) a flimsy and nascent book idea, no time to write it, and even if i did write it, what about publishing it? and even if i did publish it, what about getting paid for it? and what about the next one? and what about buying a house and maybe one day having a dog or a kid and a retirement fund? what the fucking hell am i doing with my life??? aaaarrrrgggghhhhhhhhh. oh, god, my stomach hurts.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Monday, May 08, 2006
nudity, sexuality, and violence
i've just finished reading a recent post from a friend/coworker that got my thinkin' cogs slowly grinding (a miracle on a monday morning after five hours of sleep, and after i woke up to a mysterious and painful bump on my head -- mayhap chris decided i'm more work than i'm worth and attempted to elbow me to death in the wee hours of the morning?). i only read the goddamned thing because he promised scenes with coarse language and sexuality. boy, was i disappointed to find NOT ONE cuss word and no smooching, groping, or flashing either. false advertising. not only did this post make me think thoughts that are entirely too deep, it also got me wayyyyy too emotional.
some persistent themes included: the horrific myopia of our boss (not literally -- he's deaf, not blind), the family-like emotional and psychological ties of affection (as in, we like each other, mostly) and dysfunction among and between the office staff, and the general feeling of professional castration and uselessness that our organization often fosters. boy, i hope i don't get dueced for this post. good thing my boss is a technophobe. anyway. i feel that writing about themes 1 and 2 would probably fuck me up this early in the morning, so by default, i'm gonna talk about theme 3. now, the coworker who got me thinking about all this stuff definitely has the shittiest job in the office -- he is/was the administrative assistant to our executive director (it's a little unclear exactly what my coworker's position is now, as we have added yet another staff member with an ambiguous catch all job title). he is/was responsible for loads and loads of unnecessary typing, answering the phones, looking up bus routes for our erstwhile director, and a pile of other random and unpredictable things. his input was not wanted or required, in spite of the fact that he's fairly smart (though a pinko commie -- we can't really take him seriously, then, can we?). said coworker is understandably fed up -- when you eat a diet of shitcakes and shitballs and shitsticks all day everyday, you tend to get full fairly quickly. however, thinking about his plight got me thinking about the plight of others in the office. at the apparent opposite end of the spectrum are myself and our IT/finance manager. we have 'held the ear' of the boss for the longest time, have been here the longest (bless our hearts), and therefore have earned certain privileges. however, though i am dubbed the operations manager, i do not have the authority to make decisions on even the smallest points of policy, or even the smallest points of operations. the guy who is/was working as the admin assistant was supposed to be my 'second in command' as far as operations are concerned, and he was co-opted by my boss, and now i am doing the job alone. which is fine, in principle, but really, this job is best shared by two people. that's how it was in the past, and that's how it was when our little organization was operating at peak efficiency. so that's my cross to bear -- even though i can talk to the boss, and sometimes have him listen to me, he only listens when i give him answers he wants to hear. so of course, it makes me feel a bit like the office bitch -- i deal with the consequences of outdated policy or our director's inaction/missteps. as for the finance/IT manager, he is often asked to literally make up budgets, to shuffle money from our director's personal account into our office account, and to make all of this awful accounting look like it's on the up and up. he doesn't get to protest. he doesn't get to decide anything. the boss says jump for the money, and he has to ask how high. also, he is supposed to be working on a dedicated server to streamline our IT.... our website crashes all the time because our shared server can't handle the traffic, and we are running two databases, which causes all sorts of errors. but, our boss won't earmark any money to purchase a shared server. it's absurd. so the IT guy has to listen to all of us bitch about the IT system, when he isn't given the budget to buy what we need to fix the problems. our volunteer manager has a pretty decent gig, though she has to explain why it is that volunteers sometimes don't show up or change their schedules -- obviously she is doing something wrong when college students and teenagers decide to sleep in or fuck or anything fun like that instead of showing up for their volunteer work. our publicity/fundraising person has to write drafts and drafts and drafts of grants, only to be told that the project sucks and have to start again. she can't publish any posters or ads or anything because she doesn't have a budget either. each of these problems arises out of one source: the b-o-s-s. he has managed through his manipulation and his obtusity (is that a word?) and his awful awfulness to kill the spirit of not just my coworker who talked about it on his blog, but every staff member in this office.
now, i know that i said above that i was going to talk about theme 3, and my concluding sentence looks a lot like theme 1, but the two are inextricable from each other. having a boss who treats you like a child, who patronizes you and uses your labor like an abused sex toy to be taken out for his own gratification at his will and leisure (see, i got in some sexual content after all) is incredibly demoralizing. hold on. before you accuse me of white, lower-middle class self-pity, i do recognize that having an office job, no matter how shitty, is preferable to picking cotton in a hot field all day or cleaning out shit buckets, or whatever, consider that i do realize there are much worse jobs out there and i am by no means implying otherwise. i'm just trying to articulate the effects of working at a place where the boss is like a little dictator. in spite of the fact that ALL of us in the office have a bachelor's degree or better (two of us have master's), in spite of the fact that most of us have participated or directed meaningful social or political actions, in spite of the fact that we are all pretty darn decent, smart, and worthy human beings, we are not treated as such. and not only does this have an effect on our senses of self on a personal level, but it also has a devastating consequence for our senses of self on a professional level. i mean, how do you view your professional self when you have gotten what seems like so very little professional development? how do you view your professional self when you have no room for promotion? how do you view your professional self when your ideas are consistently pooped upon? how do you view your personal self when your boss refers to the royal "we" in a way that dehumanizes and devalues you? how do you view your professional self when you only exist at the office to serve the whim of another human being? you start to view yourself as expendable, as fairly useless, and you start to be afraid. you start to wonder if you would be able to cut it at a 'real' job, you start to think about your resume and how few skills you have acquired during your tenure at this place. your professional self shrinks into a little ball of apprehension and ennui. so... even though that effect is not so awful has having your fingers hacked off by a machete while cutting down sugarcane or not sleeping because of spasms in your back caused by ten hours of heavy lifting, it is there and it is significant, and for most of us, it really sucks.
now then. are you as depressed as me yet? i figure you must be. you're either depressed cause you can relate to the stuff i've said or you're depressed cause you've just wasted ten minutes of your life reading this shit and you're thinking that humanity is doomed if self-interested, sniveling little bitches like me populate the north american work force. in either case, i have to pat myself on the back for a job well done.
some persistent themes included: the horrific myopia of our boss (not literally -- he's deaf, not blind), the family-like emotional and psychological ties of affection (as in, we like each other, mostly) and dysfunction among and between the office staff, and the general feeling of professional castration and uselessness that our organization often fosters. boy, i hope i don't get dueced for this post. good thing my boss is a technophobe. anyway. i feel that writing about themes 1 and 2 would probably fuck me up this early in the morning, so by default, i'm gonna talk about theme 3. now, the coworker who got me thinking about all this stuff definitely has the shittiest job in the office -- he is/was the administrative assistant to our executive director (it's a little unclear exactly what my coworker's position is now, as we have added yet another staff member with an ambiguous catch all job title). he is/was responsible for loads and loads of unnecessary typing, answering the phones, looking up bus routes for our erstwhile director, and a pile of other random and unpredictable things. his input was not wanted or required, in spite of the fact that he's fairly smart (though a pinko commie -- we can't really take him seriously, then, can we?). said coworker is understandably fed up -- when you eat a diet of shitcakes and shitballs and shitsticks all day everyday, you tend to get full fairly quickly. however, thinking about his plight got me thinking about the plight of others in the office. at the apparent opposite end of the spectrum are myself and our IT/finance manager. we have 'held the ear' of the boss for the longest time, have been here the longest (bless our hearts), and therefore have earned certain privileges. however, though i am dubbed the operations manager, i do not have the authority to make decisions on even the smallest points of policy, or even the smallest points of operations. the guy who is/was working as the admin assistant was supposed to be my 'second in command' as far as operations are concerned, and he was co-opted by my boss, and now i am doing the job alone. which is fine, in principle, but really, this job is best shared by two people. that's how it was in the past, and that's how it was when our little organization was operating at peak efficiency. so that's my cross to bear -- even though i can talk to the boss, and sometimes have him listen to me, he only listens when i give him answers he wants to hear. so of course, it makes me feel a bit like the office bitch -- i deal with the consequences of outdated policy or our director's inaction/missteps. as for the finance/IT manager, he is often asked to literally make up budgets, to shuffle money from our director's personal account into our office account, and to make all of this awful accounting look like it's on the up and up. he doesn't get to protest. he doesn't get to decide anything. the boss says jump for the money, and he has to ask how high. also, he is supposed to be working on a dedicated server to streamline our IT.... our website crashes all the time because our shared server can't handle the traffic, and we are running two databases, which causes all sorts of errors. but, our boss won't earmark any money to purchase a shared server. it's absurd. so the IT guy has to listen to all of us bitch about the IT system, when he isn't given the budget to buy what we need to fix the problems. our volunteer manager has a pretty decent gig, though she has to explain why it is that volunteers sometimes don't show up or change their schedules -- obviously she is doing something wrong when college students and teenagers decide to sleep in or fuck or anything fun like that instead of showing up for their volunteer work. our publicity/fundraising person has to write drafts and drafts and drafts of grants, only to be told that the project sucks and have to start again. she can't publish any posters or ads or anything because she doesn't have a budget either. each of these problems arises out of one source: the b-o-s-s. he has managed through his manipulation and his obtusity (is that a word?) and his awful awfulness to kill the spirit of not just my coworker who talked about it on his blog, but every staff member in this office.
now, i know that i said above that i was going to talk about theme 3, and my concluding sentence looks a lot like theme 1, but the two are inextricable from each other. having a boss who treats you like a child, who patronizes you and uses your labor like an abused sex toy to be taken out for his own gratification at his will and leisure (see, i got in some sexual content after all) is incredibly demoralizing. hold on. before you accuse me of white, lower-middle class self-pity, i do recognize that having an office job, no matter how shitty, is preferable to picking cotton in a hot field all day or cleaning out shit buckets, or whatever, consider that i do realize there are much worse jobs out there and i am by no means implying otherwise. i'm just trying to articulate the effects of working at a place where the boss is like a little dictator. in spite of the fact that ALL of us in the office have a bachelor's degree or better (two of us have master's), in spite of the fact that most of us have participated or directed meaningful social or political actions, in spite of the fact that we are all pretty darn decent, smart, and worthy human beings, we are not treated as such. and not only does this have an effect on our senses of self on a personal level, but it also has a devastating consequence for our senses of self on a professional level. i mean, how do you view your professional self when you have gotten what seems like so very little professional development? how do you view your professional self when you have no room for promotion? how do you view your professional self when your ideas are consistently pooped upon? how do you view your personal self when your boss refers to the royal "we" in a way that dehumanizes and devalues you? how do you view your professional self when you only exist at the office to serve the whim of another human being? you start to view yourself as expendable, as fairly useless, and you start to be afraid. you start to wonder if you would be able to cut it at a 'real' job, you start to think about your resume and how few skills you have acquired during your tenure at this place. your professional self shrinks into a little ball of apprehension and ennui. so... even though that effect is not so awful has having your fingers hacked off by a machete while cutting down sugarcane or not sleeping because of spasms in your back caused by ten hours of heavy lifting, it is there and it is significant, and for most of us, it really sucks.
now then. are you as depressed as me yet? i figure you must be. you're either depressed cause you can relate to the stuff i've said or you're depressed cause you've just wasted ten minutes of your life reading this shit and you're thinking that humanity is doomed if self-interested, sniveling little bitches like me populate the north american work force. in either case, i have to pat myself on the back for a job well done.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
dum de de dum dum
well, it's happening already. barely eight pages and three character sketches long, and already i am starting to do with my current 'book' project what i have done with every other intended book in the history of me -- thinking that the idea is crap, that it's so been done before, and that i am a stupid fuck for believing i could ever write something interesting, creative or good enough to be self-published, much less paid for by a publisher. sucks, sucks, sucks. this after a blitz where i wrote pages and pages without even having to stop and think about them, this after a moment of i-can-totally-do-this certainty. ah, what a difference a sleep makes. don't really know what to do here -- even though i definitely write for pleasure and escapism (notice i don't write for literary value -- i have no literary delusions of grandeur -- i just want to write fun, entertaining pulp fiction, i want to write the kind of books that i have read and loved and consumed like crack for my entire life) i am also writing because i want to make a living as a writer. shudder. that is just ever so slightly less trite and overdone than wanting to make a living as an actor (no offense meant to any starving and aspiring actors out there). but how can i make a living as a writer if i suck so much at it?!?!?
perhaps these were the thoughts going through harvard chick's head when she rationalized plagarizing like FIFTEEN PEOPLE. (yes, i am still stuck on her.... fuck you for judging me.) my great friend jenny, knowing how interested i have been in the subject, kindly fowarded me two recent (as in published yesterday or today) articles cataloguing the catastrophic plunge of harvard chick into infamy. the first one is a quote from salmon rushdie (just one of the virtual football team of authors she is accused of copying from) talking about what a shame it is that she would do something like this and jeopardize a writing career this early in her life. the other is from the harvard crimson, the paper that originally outed her, and it refers to further possible incidents of copying from such well-known authors as sophie kinsella (the shopaholic series). holy moly cow. and you want to know how she defends herself? she says (hold on, i'm laughing too hard to type now) she has a photographic memory, and she internalized these passages without realizing it. hah! my above-mentioned friend jenny could be said to have, if not a photographic memory, nearly so, and let me tell you -- she can remember a lot of shit, AND she remembers that she READ it. she doesn't think she came up with, for example, durkhiem's theory on tribal spiritualities. again, i am amazed that a girl who could get into harvard could be dumb enough to come up with these weak defenses. i guess she can't just come out and say she did it on purpose, and that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that for legal liability reasons. but i would certainly respect her a lot more if she did. i mean... let's see. unintentional, almost word for word copying. victimized and betrayed by her amazing photographic memory that's not quite photographic enough to remember the real authors' names....have mercy. gotta roll my eyes here. a lot. again.
alright, enough of that shit. when i don't have the dumbest harvard chick ever to occupy my thoughts, they return to the endangered future of my book. i feel like a schizophrenic manic depressive (please, no comments here about my callous use of the schizophrenic and manic depressive conditions -- my mother has suffered from the latter and my mother-in-law still suffers from the former, so, having lived with people who live with said conditions, i feel that i have earned the right to invoke said conditions in my blog... again, fuck you for judging me). i mean, one day it's like, i am going to be a writer. as in a W-R-I-T-E-R. and the next day, it's like, i am going to suck at everything until the day that i die, and i will probably suck at that too (how does one suck at dying? well, maybe they drown in a hundred pounds of elephant crap or maybe they die of auto-erotic asphyxiation or maybe they use too much easy off and then stick their head in an oven.) at this point, you can probably read a sense of panic in my words. panic is exactly what i am feeling. which is weird, cause while my prevailing emotion is usually annoyance, it isn't panicky annoyance. i guess this is what happens when you want something really really badly. or when you love something. i have this same panicky feeling but worse when i remember that chris is mortal and that i am so ridiculously imperfect and one day something might happen that removes him from my life. okay, i am glad that i got that out of my system. i think thinking about something (someone, i guess) really and truly important, no, essential, to my existence has put the book into some perspective. i'll either work on it, or i won't. i'll either finish it, or i won't. and just because i don't finish this one doesn't mean i won't start and finish another. but jeez, i hope this is the one. cause i don't have any more ideas. heh.
perhaps these were the thoughts going through harvard chick's head when she rationalized plagarizing like FIFTEEN PEOPLE. (yes, i am still stuck on her.... fuck you for judging me.) my great friend jenny, knowing how interested i have been in the subject, kindly fowarded me two recent (as in published yesterday or today) articles cataloguing the catastrophic plunge of harvard chick into infamy. the first one is a quote from salmon rushdie (just one of the virtual football team of authors she is accused of copying from) talking about what a shame it is that she would do something like this and jeopardize a writing career this early in her life. the other is from the harvard crimson, the paper that originally outed her, and it refers to further possible incidents of copying from such well-known authors as sophie kinsella (the shopaholic series). holy moly cow. and you want to know how she defends herself? she says (hold on, i'm laughing too hard to type now) she has a photographic memory, and she internalized these passages without realizing it. hah! my above-mentioned friend jenny could be said to have, if not a photographic memory, nearly so, and let me tell you -- she can remember a lot of shit, AND she remembers that she READ it. she doesn't think she came up with, for example, durkhiem's theory on tribal spiritualities. again, i am amazed that a girl who could get into harvard could be dumb enough to come up with these weak defenses. i guess she can't just come out and say she did it on purpose, and that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that for legal liability reasons. but i would certainly respect her a lot more if she did. i mean... let's see. unintentional, almost word for word copying. victimized and betrayed by her amazing photographic memory that's not quite photographic enough to remember the real authors' names....have mercy. gotta roll my eyes here. a lot. again.
alright, enough of that shit. when i don't have the dumbest harvard chick ever to occupy my thoughts, they return to the endangered future of my book. i feel like a schizophrenic manic depressive (please, no comments here about my callous use of the schizophrenic and manic depressive conditions -- my mother has suffered from the latter and my mother-in-law still suffers from the former, so, having lived with people who live with said conditions, i feel that i have earned the right to invoke said conditions in my blog... again, fuck you for judging me). i mean, one day it's like, i am going to be a writer. as in a W-R-I-T-E-R. and the next day, it's like, i am going to suck at everything until the day that i die, and i will probably suck at that too (how does one suck at dying? well, maybe they drown in a hundred pounds of elephant crap or maybe they die of auto-erotic asphyxiation or maybe they use too much easy off and then stick their head in an oven.) at this point, you can probably read a sense of panic in my words. panic is exactly what i am feeling. which is weird, cause while my prevailing emotion is usually annoyance, it isn't panicky annoyance. i guess this is what happens when you want something really really badly. or when you love something. i have this same panicky feeling but worse when i remember that chris is mortal and that i am so ridiculously imperfect and one day something might happen that removes him from my life. okay, i am glad that i got that out of my system. i think thinking about something (someone, i guess) really and truly important, no, essential, to my existence has put the book into some perspective. i'll either work on it, or i won't. i'll either finish it, or i won't. and just because i don't finish this one doesn't mean i won't start and finish another. but jeez, i hope this is the one. cause i don't have any more ideas. heh.
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