Blue Saturday

I dunno if liking or disliking slow jams is really useful here

OMG, Noodle, I totally want to take this personality test now. DO IT DO IT DO IT, this is the best thing ever, the Vague-'Ell personality index.

Write a short funny book on this in the exact parodic style of management, and I'm sure some publisher would take it on, either as parody or not realising it wasn't real!

This could be as wildly unsuccessful as, well... OK, it would probably sell about as well as "Crap Towns" but I would totally buy the fuck out of it and give it to all my (future) bosses.

Liking or not liking slow jams = Urgent & Key, imo.

I'm going ~out on the town~ today with another ILX0r but please please please make this be a thing!

Social drinking affects my work productivity more than drinking alone
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

The only thing more pointless than my job is my existence
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

I enjoy watching soap operas because the characters have more serious problems than I do
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

slightly reinstated apparently :/

and my ability to turn up for work hungover didn't last so long

i hate doing this to myself. i hate not ever being able to do this to myself.

opening up 4 or 5 Youtubes of the same track at 20-30 second intervals makes some pretty great drones yo

we should do the crap personality inventory

yeah we shd do, how did i not put Procrastinator as a type?

need to snap out of the zombie torpor first

need to snap out of:

nothing looks solid, there is a sheet of glass between me and outside, i can't bear to talk to most people, i'm counting time off in my head constantly, can't bear to go to sleep at night, work doesn't want me to have any time, business going on, dead lifeless world all around, miss my children's constant presence, timetabled, parcelled up into sleep and snatches of inconsequential timewasting and work work, got the creeps from all the wellmeaning creeps around me, not buying into whatever i'm sposed to be buying into, loss of addiction = loss of contact with people i actually do like, nooooooothingness, life = over, out of lives, let things crumble, obligations gonna wind up dying like i lived in debt and unreliable, if i keep going here i can nearly imagine the way OUT but then i remember the way out isn't real if there's nothing to live on with it, endgame, used everything up and stop now

i dunno why what's okay for other people isn't okay for me, must be my own special spoilt failure, pitiful excpt u know fuck that pity

for a bomb that would infern my world and leave everybody else's intact fo them

NV, I know I am on the other side of the glass right now, but yup, I know a place very much like that one down there. Not there right now, but really feeling you being in there.

Hope you find a way to snap out, but completely understand how it works when you can't. If that "leave, but leave everyone else around you intact" button was available, I'd have taken it long ago. But the people whose lives you interact with in a positive way - including mine, in whatever tiny way - are both the glue and the curse.

it's different, in a bunch of ways, and when i try to grasp it i'm not so clear. but i like life, i wanna stick with it - it just relies on being crushed by things which are its opposite

really hit a wall today. i have faked my way thru holding down a job, and i'm really pretty angry at schlubs around me who don't know what addiction is, who don't know what's wrong with the life they're forcing me to live, who don't get why i can't shut up and give up everything just for a roof over my head and food and the chance to look after my loved ones

really year zeroing here, can't see how i can go on at this way of being, a question of time before they realise i can't do it and throw me out into yr authentic poverty

finding it quite hard to think today (today's excuse: face numb after dentist) so not really capable of offering anything more than this but

NV <3

thanks both of you :)

i'm gonna try and practise thoughtful silence for a while. laters.

Thinking of you, NV. <3

I know what helps me in this kinda mood is, oddly, to give in to the meaninglessness and the hopelessness, and to feel that emotion, and accept it and acknowledge the validity of it and inhabit it for a bit, and all those ~therapy speak~ things which sometimes help and sometimes don't. But just say "this is real, this is where we're at" and then wait for it to pass then pick myself up and start climbing the shit mountain again.

But I'm not going to patronise you by even thinking that either you don't know this stuff already, or to assume that what works for me might work for you. Bah!

But really just poking you with a stick and saying you're great, and also I really appreciated your thoughts on the lyrics thread, about "str8 dude listening to Beyonce" because that was a booming post.

give in to the meaninglessness and the hopelessness, and to feel that emotion, and accept it and acknowledge the validity of it and inhabit it for a bit

since i've already broken my sabbatical i wanted to say this is v. good advice i am trying to observe

"how to be in an office without feeling like a naughty kid (because you're not doing what you're supposed to do (because you kind of can't))" is what i ought to be thinking about, from the innermost kernel out, i think

Right now I am trying to do "feel & acknowledge the validity of this anger, inhabit the emotion & let it pass" but this is hard work, emotionally, and I don't want you to feel like I was recommending something without understanding how difficult it can be. x

it was the necessary next step forward, i spent half of last year trying to keep my job, now i need to think seriously about whether i should, whether i can, and what the alternatives would be. and i need to do it without being too resentful of the well-meaning people around me who don't see the quandary.

There are blunt economic realities of "I need to keep this job."

But then there are all those other quandaries around it, of should I, can, I, what are the alternatives.

I'm still kinda not really OK with talking through the details of how I left my last job (or indeed the circumstances of leaving the one before) but there came a point where I felt like I was keeping a job to prove I *could*, to prove that I was not lazy, or crazy, or unemployable, or just suffering from a bad attitude or giving in to blunt force sexism in the workplace. But then coming to terms (LOL therapy) with the fact that there were very real and pressing and important-to-my-health reasons why I had to leave both jobs. (Even if it took a panic attack so bad I went to my GP thinking it was an actual heart attack, to force me to confront one of those sets of reasons.)

I am certainly aware that being able to leave a job is a luxury. But there's also a point where you have to acknowledge if something is a bad fit, even if it looks good on paper or in your idealism or whatever, and find other alternatives. I don't know what those alternatives are, and to be honest, I'm using every diversion technique I have right now to fight own the rising panic.

Sorry if this is me just making an awful noise over in another corner with no relevance to anything. I never know whether to "offer advice" (which will be totally not-relevant and unhelpful) or "tell a similar story from mine own life" (which will also be not-relevant and unhelpful with the added bonus of super selfish and self-obsessed) or say nothing or just say "I hear you" and go away.

this thread was called "mumbling to myself" with the implication that everybody was free to do that, and the understanding that that means that people will overhear and sometimes mumble back

- having just been in a disciplinary wherein we addressed how much i want my job alongside how much i need it and i'll continue to work this thru in my head. cos my "need" for it is predicated on having a proper home for my children and that's a helluva need, but i have to make it stop being the only reason cos on its own it's never quite enough

or, whisper my darkest thought - "kids, i love you enough to not kill myself directly"

there's something in that truth that is the sickest part of my soul

(Sorry, finding a great deal of ILX hard to read: meaning process, correctly navigate socially, cope with vicious outbursts etc, at this moment. Don't want to make things worse.)

((Mood on the turn, feeling catastrophically stupid & naive. Couple weeks of expansive good mood, feeling great, brilliant threads, writing 15-20k words of novel a day does not mean "all cured, better now" it means a massive crash is in the post.))

That "won't kill myself coz of kids" thing goes both ways. The only reason I'm alive is coz my suicide would destroy my Mum.

need to work self-harming tendencies into the fake Myers-Briggs :/

actually if had a passivity/aggression axis and an intro/extroversion axis that wd do the job nicely whilst allowing for homicidal impulses too

bad weekend, bad dreams, bad mood

had unfortunate dreams last night but i don't think they account for the fug in my head today

have been/am trying hard to be mindful, but it's always poised on a knife-edge for me - non-mindful options are so much nicer, in many superficial ways

No bad dreams here, because I haven't really slept in several days. I'm not mindful so much as hyper-aware. I am relating everything to Interpol. I am Interpol, you are Interpol, we are all Interpol, everything is Interpol, my heartrate adjusts itself automatically to the tempo of every song. I no longer have thoughts that aren't Interpol related. I am beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea for my mental health. Except I don't feel unhappy or depressed at all, in point of fact, I feel great? I'm not worried about what I'm feeling right now, but what I'll feel like in 2 days when the experiment is over?

tbh lack of sleep doesn't do wonders for my stability no matter how giddy the highs feel but we're all adults here

...because insomnia is just another ~lifestyle choice~?

I know I'm not sleeping because I haven't been exercising properly. I haven't been exercising properly because I somehow fucked my foot up so bad I was walking with a cane for two weeks. Swings and roundabouts.

sorry i shouldn't've meant you were choosing not to sleep. i guess when i've had bad sleep patterns it's felt like a deliberate avoidance - cos of fear of death, usually - on my part. forgot there were other versions. also i think apnoea distort my bedtime/quality sleep time ratio.

my heartrate adjusts itself automatically to the tempo of every song

anti-aerobics

Sorry, NV, didn't intend it if that came off as fractious (any more than my normal spikiness, in this state of mind) - I knew you weren't being callous. I could *choose* to end the 22Listens experiment at any time but OCD thoughtworms would just choose something else to attach to if it weren't Interpol, and Interpol is pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things. (If at any point I start talking about how Bernard Sumner controls my thoughts, again, tell me to go to the ER, though, OK?)

I would really prefer to be sleeping properly. Last night I tried to knock myself out with a massive lashing of codeine cough syrup, but can't rely on that for obv reasons - and it didn't even work.

Anyway, bad sleep, bad dreams, yeah, I hear all this.

sleep, brain...it's all v. chicken and egg. if i didn't have to do work in prescribed hours i reckon my pattern wd settle of its own accord. and like i said i rarely experience that "jesus my head will NOT go to sleep" but i think that's often cos of being in deficit.

even sad dreams i could accommodate into a "able to wander around all day being wistful and mulling it over" lifestyle. the problem comes back down to the reality of being this efficient machine for 7.5 hours a day.

So if I actually managed to get, like, 7 whole hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, why do I feel so burnt today?

7 hours is about yr daily requirement, if you've had lots of less than 7s in the days before that then you're still way overdrawn at the Bank of Morpheus as i understand it. plus the sleep you have had probably neutralizes that dreamy high of long-term wakefulness

meanwhile i've been sleeping and behaving and i'm still totally unable to get my head in the game

i wanna spend the day reading New Left peeps and not whatever it is i'm supposed to do here when i'm not actually helping people

oh man and i can't even begin to untangle "helping"

it's pretty weird actually, don't seem to be able to convincingly explain to boss that my head is swooshing about like one of those blue tide box toy things

OK, yeah, I guess I've had between 2 and 5 for the past week or two so I've still got one hell of a sleep debt to pay off. I'm due to enter ~depressive phase~ later this week so perhaps I'll sleep for 3 or 4 days straight when I hit it, that'd be nice.

"Helping" - what does it even mean when your job is helping people? Because of the corrosive effect of Paid Labour, and yet "helping people" is supposed to be an inherently emotionally rewarding thing to do, what does it do when even your desire to "help people" gets ground down by being associated with all the negativity of... (I don't even have a word for what it is so I'll just say ugliness of the capitalist model, though the moment you say "capitalist" it brings in a raft of associations I don't even intend. Just the way that "making something your dayjob" makes it somehow inherently shitty and unenjoyable.)

I still haven't updated my CV. I still haven't even contacted any headhunters. It is not like I have anything else pressing and urgent to do. I am mucking about on ILX and obsessively doing the dishes and writing fan fiction. The only reason I can come up with for why I haven't started "Looking For A Job" is: "Because I Don't Have To."

Like, what is so fucking inherently ~amazing~ about jobs that I am supposed to get up and go look for one?

I have been having this argument with therapists since I was 16 years old (the first time I ever saw a therapist break their Therapy Face, when I was talking about the pressure I was under from my family about education and work and the inherent importance thereof and me just grinding my heels in and saying "nope, nope, nope" and my Mum holding forth for hours about the inherent Value and Nobility of labour and all this Protestant Work Ethic fucking bullshit, and I just ended up mumbling into my jumper "I don't want a fucking ~job~ I just need some fucking money" and my shrink burst out laughing and she laughed and laughed and laughed, which was very unprofessional, but it was also one of those moments where you see through all your own bullshit completely and totally in sheer stark relief. And then she said something like "Congratulations, Branwell, now you understand what it is to be a grown up".

And this is a lesson I've never forgotten, but still somehow never learned.

Anything that really has any kind of inherent enjoyment value, no one will pay you to do. Anything that you are paid to do, the mechanism of that exchange, and being *forced* to do, will strip the enjoyment from the activity.

The irony of all this being, that my Mum, when she was putting me in a pressure cooker to walk straight from a hospital ward into either university or a full time job, with no convalescence period at all, was deeply unhappy with her role as a stay at home mother. Now she works to support herself - and even working her dream job - all she does is complain about how annoying and frustrating it is, doing her dream job. I was right and she was wrong, all along.

Feeling very "shut up you blethering old woman, no one cares" today, TBH.

(This is of course, the point at which the obligatory zingers will step in to say that this is exactly right, and as it should be.)

i feel "sleep debt" unpayoffable

Sleep mortgage, more like.

i feel sleep cannot be metaphoticised into credit/debt financial model

Yes it can, we have completely amortised your physiology.

(not really, I just wanted to say that.)

zzzz

credit/debt may be a horrible metaphor, but from my understanding of current science and my personal experience sleep deficit is a thing and it doesn't go away of its own accord

BB you're saying clearly what i was sidling around, the horrible reality of paid employment in the society we live in. i end up self-identifying as lazy altho there's a million things i wd like to do because none of those things seem convertible into roof, food, the usual. amd many people have internalized that this grimness is the Order of Things, if not the Natural Order of Things, and they seem able to live with that, and good on them, but when they're used as a stick to beat those of us who really can't handle that reality, well bollocks to that.

tho the thing about "helping people" for me is not that i find that aspect of my job horrible, more that in providing a service i'm often not really or necessarily giving people something that they need, or want, or is of much use to them, so much as i'm policing and misleading and helping them to fit in to something that mayn't be of any value to them at all