Friday, March 19, 2004

bad mental weather Hi readers.  I'm theoretically supposed to be enjoying spring break, reading frivolous, plot-driven books, checking out SXSW bands, and generally wasting my time.  I've done some of that, but mostly I'm working hard at my engineering project management job, and generally feeling tired, overwhelmed, and annoyed.  My innate perfectionism prohibits me from just throwing my hands into the air and crawling into bed for 12-14 hours, but that is what I would dearly, dearly love to do.  Instead, I just kind of impotently paw at all these tasks, seething with resentment the entire time.  This is no way to live one's beautiful spring day life.  Is it? I have so much to do, and so much of this 'to do' is of such a multivariate and complex nature that I simply cannot (or will not) sit down and make a plan.  I need a plan!  On top of managing a complex silicon validation project, supervising three project analysts, and laying the groundwork for a tremendously complex silicon eval project in 2005, I am also on the hook for a ten-page analysis of the radical republican right by 4/29, and the completion of my UG thesis a month later (which right now consists of about 85 unorganized, thoughtless, and scattered pages of crap).  All this, of course, along with writing new songs with my band, becoming a better drummer, recording said songs with band, tending to my interpersonal relationships, continuing the renovation projects on my house, thinking about springtime gardening projects, tending to our dying 13-year cat (who requires sub-q fluids 2x a day), watching the cat inevitably inch towards death despite our efforts, and trying to exercise regularly (which is the only thing that gives me the slightest pleasure these days).  Whatever.  I need a vacation.  I can't do much about this, except INCREASE MY CAFFEINE INTAKE.  To that end, I went out last weekend and bought a super-duper, coffee-o-matic Cuisinart coffee maker.  I was sick of tepid, watery coffee, coffee that had cooled to the point of undrinkability after spending one minute in the cup.  With this Cuisinart, I can control the heater plate temp., and I can tell it when to turn said heater plate off.  I felt a little foolish dropping $100 on a coffee pot, but then I realized that I was spending approximately $80/month to acquire a daily hot cup of coffee at my local coffeehouse, so disgusted had I become with the tepid bilgewater that I had been drinking at home.  I work from home - can I write this essential productivity tool off on my taxes?  My Cuisinart coffee maker is also quite lovely and stylish, and I often gaze upon it with something akin to affection.  After all, it meets my needs uncomplainingly, it doesn't bitch at me to work harder, earn more money, be nicer, stay up later, hang out and drink beer, spend more time with it, call it more often, stop tossing in the bed or waking up sweaty and terrified from a bad dream, or anything else that the human beings in my life regularly demand.  Therefore, I love it unconditionally.  I will go out tonight to see TV On The Radio at SXSW.  I am grimly determined to have "a good time," which is always a strong indicator that I will leave my chosen venue gripped with some 2:30a.m. inchoate, crepuscular sadness.  So it is written, so let it be done.  I will work tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and...). At times like this, my fear of the future tears at me so constantly that when I am finally able to relax, to sit outside with my dog and just throw the tennis ball into the yard,  I find that I cannot get into a comfortable position.  I realize that I've been holding my body in some defensive posture - shoulders up, jaw clenched - for so long that relaxation is simply an impossibility.   I need a massage, but of course that would involve intimacy and vulnerability, and we're having none of that these days, apparently.   In addition, my mind is filled with thoughts of pain, dismemberment, and death.  Explosions.  These thoughts are at times so strong, and so overpowering, that I cannot help but yield to some vestige of superstitious thinking, and wonder where the ax will fall.   This terrorist bombing of the Madrid commuter train has really gotten to me.  I think about it constantly.  In Newsweek, I saw a picture of a dead woman with a bloody wound in her neck, still strapped into her seat, with this enormous gaping maw of twisted, burning metal yawning around her lifeless form.  She was dressed very nicely, probably going to work at her white-collar office job.  And now she just doesn't exist, you know?  No. Let me clarify - her existence has been erased in the crudest, vilest, most explicitly upfucked way imaginable. Her body has been defiled, and her singular existence stolen, in a manner that points at nothing but the promise of further pain, hate, void, abyss, despair and destruction. This is the world we live in, and human beings did this.  And it happens every day, on some greater or lesser scale.  Hell - we're living in a time in which we can observe the population of an entire continent die a slow, painful death from HIV/AIDS.  This is bad, I know it.  I also know that the only way out is through it.  I can't live with the thought of not succeeding at my life, of not being the absolute best at the things I've chosen to do. I know that sounds trivial, given what I've written above, but it doesn't seem that way to me. I don't want to leave things unsaid, or works undone, is all.  I don't know what else to do.  5:13:06 PM