Monday, May 09, 2005

Insomnia again.

Fell into a troubled sleep at around 11. Woke up at around one this morning. It's currently three am. I'm going to be a bear at work, I can tell. It kind of serves them right, however, as they're the ones largely responsible for my state.

Now, I'm not one of those girls who resents the fact that she doesn't work in the field she chose to study; far from it. I never went into that thinking that I would. In fact, I consider myself darn lucky that I had the chance to work totally immersed in both literature and music for the lion's share of my career. Few people get that chance.

What I do for a living now - low level bureaucracy - doesn't have to be terrible. It leaves me in less a state of penury than other above-the-board options. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, I could almost fool myself into thinking that what I did made a difference. After a while, however, it started taking its toll on one's soul. Doesn't help much when you're a sorely mismanaged resource in a place that doesn't have to depend on good management for survival. Now, I find myself being awakened by pressing thoughts of paper-pushing and powerpoint presentations. Not where I want to be. It feels like failure.

2 comments:

Simon Kenton said...

It's quite recent - historically recent - to have a notion of fulfillment in your job. Some people - JS Mill, Wallace Stevens, TS Elliot - did quite well without it. There is a good passage in the "Life" when various of the usual suspects were talking about how a noblewoman had died for love, and Johnson said that you would never find a charwoman with 9 children dying for love - she would not have afforded herself the luxury.
Set up supervenient goals and make it clear to yourself how much closer to those goals you are brought by each week on the job.

Be said...

Oh, I don't mind what I do largely - I just don't like to be wasted. That is, I'm a serf at heart - I'll haul bricks, shovel sh!t, spend the day going up and down the halls of my building pushing a penny with my nose so long as it's of use and will benefit my organization. There is a lot of stuff I do, however, and redo and redo (ad nauseam), that is just useless. I hate that, as my salary (and that of my managers) comes from taxpayer money. It really upsets me to not be a good, efficient use of that money. That's all.