has anyone made this joke?

[dragonlady7]

I, for one, welcome our new Soviet overlords.

Heh heh heh. Yep. Ahh.
Am on the reception desk today. A couple weeks (month?) ago, the PTB flipped out and were like, B is not to do the reception desk at lunch anymore, keep her off the desk, she should never go up there.
Bzuh?
OK. At first I missed my little Zen half-hour of reading webcomics and answering phones, but then I got used to, you know, actually getting work done, and it was nice to not have to be absolutely scheduled like clockwork about lunch, so if I had a call to make at 11:55, I could do so without worrying that I wouldn't get to take my lunch break.

So it was odd when I came in this morning and the PTB were like, "You have to do the reception desk for a couple of days while the receptionist gets trained in customer service."
Uh, ok! But it was oddly done, not by the normal person who tells me what's up.
And it's not that I hadn't noticed this, but the normal people who used to tell me what was up sort of haven't been telling me things lately, haven't really been speaking to me at all. Before Thanksgiving I was wondering if maybe I'd personally offended one of them, but I can't think how. I've really racked my brains trying to think of where I misstepped, and can't think of it.

I spent most of last week not doing sales, but doing PR writing. I got very little Sales work done, but it was by specific request. So I was actually much more productive last week. But, none of the Customer Service end of the office is speaking to me.

Bleh, I am so disinterested in the real world I couldn't even try to tell you what any of it means.
I hate to be the kind of person that does this, but man, I wish I was unemployed right now. I can't bring myself to quit-- there's no reason to quit, I like it here and I like the people. But I don't understand what's going on half the time.
And I'm really struggling with the fact that I know no matter what my job was, I would wish I didn't have it. I must be fundamentally lazy: I just don't like to work. I am far more interested in the contents of my head than in any real-world situation. I get so stressed out by the simple act of leaving my house every morning, and am so impatient to get back through the door of my house. I want to be at home. I want to be alone. I want to be sitting at my computer writing.
I wrote nothing this weekend. I was too on-edge. I have too much hanging over me. I know I don't even work that much in a week-- 42 hours or so, and then the about 12 hours of roller derby stuff. I had time this weekend to spend hours shopping online. Because if I opened my word processing document, all I could think about was the stuff I had to be doing. PR stuff for derby, mostly, but then I worry about work again. I decided not to care, to just do what I do and if they fire me, fine, and if they don't, fine, but it still preoccupies me inordinately.
And there's so much to do around the house. Z has spent the last two weeks or so deeply immersed in some project he won't tell me about. Every moment he is not required to be doing something else, he is sitting with his computer intently absorbed. He was doing this during Thanksgiving, even-- sitting on the couch while the conversation went on around him.
I want to be able to do that. I don't have time to do that. I finally yelled at him on Sunday morning and said if he didn't at least do the rest of the dishes while I was at work, he'd be in for it. I've been cooking the meals, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, cleaning the litterbox, even playing with the cat-- all of it. The house is a fucking shambles ever since Thanksgiving, and he's off in some dreamland. I understand zoning out to work on a project. But because he is so extensively involved in this project, I have no time I feel I can spend on mine.
It's not his fault, per se, but I somewhat pathetically want to know when it's my turn.

But of course it's not him. It's the fact that I am a lazy sod who can't deal with working a real work week like normal people. I've been whining about having to work too much for three years now; then I was unemployed a year, and whined that I didn't know what to do with my life, and before that, I whined about working at a normal job that I hated. (I really did hate that job, though.) So ever since graduating college I've been miserable, either through not knowing what to do or hating working a real job.
Obviously, I am just a person who hates working real jobs.

This is a completely useless conclusion to reach, however.

And I feel that the fact that I didn't know how to write a novel, but tried, during the year I was unemployed, means no one will ever take my attempt seriously again. I've kept thinking, I should take a couple months off to finish this novel, and then I mention it to Z, and he nods very seriously and says, "Like last time."
Because I was 22 and thought that The Way To Write A Novel was just to Let The Words Come. I would turn on iTunes and pause it when I wasn't writing, and at the end of the week I would have over 100 hours of music played. I wouldn't eat, wouldn't sleep, didn't leave the house for weeks at a time. And produced 300,000 words of drivel, which I am still working on making into Barbarians_Novel. Which is going well, and at 3 very solid publishable chapters at the moment, but is not finished because I never sit down and work on it because either I don't have time or I am too wound-up about the time I don't have to use the time I do have.

I feel extremely trapped.

And Somewhat-Boss has just stopped by to explain that this week's shifting around in personnel may be due to Overlord-Boss telling Actual Does-Things Boss how pleased he was with the work I did last week for PR, and so perhaps my position will be shifting, and I'll be more Important.
But I feel like no matter what I do, no matter how good I am at this job or what a good job I do, I'll never find it rewarding. It's a good company, that makes a good product that helps people, but ultimately, the company is about making more money for the founder and his demanding wife who live in the South of France and buy $500 espresso machines and ship Mercedes-es across the Atlantic for their comfort. I can't at all hold that against them-- at least he built the damn company himself, and he knows what he's doing, and there's no one else who deserves the money more, though he could probably stand to treat the factory workers a bit better. But, at least he is located in the US-- he's not buying his components pre-made from human rights violators in China or something. It's not that I'm just working in a bad place. I just hate working.
Which is, pretty much, an insoluble problem. I have all these ideas for various projects that perhaps I could earn a living doing-- writing, the website I was thinking of making, etc.-- but I have pretty definitively proven, these last four years, that I am not capable of getting these ideas into salable condition in the scraps of spare time around the rest of my life. So I need to be able to take off a bunch of time, a couple months at least, to finish them. But I won't see any money from these ideas for quite some time after that. A book takes months, years, many years even, to be published, and you don't make much off an advance, and may wait even more years for royalties, if there are any.
Uhhhh.
So basically, I'm just lazy.
What can I do to make myself able to deal with going to work? I keep fantasizing that if I could just get a couple days, a week off, I could stop feeling so overwhelmed, could catch up on things around the house and get back into writing and maybe finish something.
But I know a couple days won't touch it. A week would just be squandered in laundry, dishes, dusting, vacuuming, clothes-sorting, mundane household tasks that, once done, only need to be done again.

So I just don't see any way to stop feeling trapped and miserable. The weather isn't helping-- December has caught me by surprise. And Z's preoccupation isn't helping-- I'm so overwhelmed I've shut down, so there are certain things I'm passive-aggressively Leaving For Him To Do, like the kitchen garbage which is overflowing, because I feel like if I do it, it will be Too Much-- but I know that the instant there's a whiff of Passive-Aggressive Bullshit on my part, he goes into Standoff mode, and so I know he will never touch that kitchen garbage despite my having said nothing.
I've said about seven times that we've got to put the storm windows/doors up; Z has done that every year since we've moved in, so while I could probably figure it out, he already theoretically knows how. But he hasn't, and won't, and what am I supposed to do, nag him again so he shuts down and won't do a thing I say? I'd figure out how do to the doors on my own but in what spare time? The weekdays, before I leave for work, when it's dark? Or after I get home, when it's dark? Or on the weekends, when I'm doing the rest of the household chores, or spending my entire goddamn day at roller derby? When? When am I going to do this thing too???
Sighhh.
This has become a brain-vomit post, but my life, at this point, is brain-vomit.
So we went out for a couple hours on Saturday night. At one point I was sitting next to Z. "So," he says. He looks perplexed. "We never hang out." Several hours later we are home. He sits beside me on the couch. He opens his laptop. We do not speak for several hours.
I wonder why we never hang out, man. I really wonder.

Comments

[eveiya.livejournal.com]

Heh. Me too. I've had loads of jobs in my life, some even doing work I would do (and have done) unpaid with some of my time, but absolutely none I ever wanted to be doing 8 hours per day, five days per week or whatever - or even half that much. I can't imagine any job I'd choose to do if there was any option available to me of having even the bare minimum income to survive without a job. I've spent as much time as I could afford (and more, really) unemployed, or semi-employed, or being a "student", and I know I never get bored or frustrated or have any problems filling my own time, even on so little money that I can't spend beyond basic, minimal survival essentials - so, even with no going out socially at all, no travel, no non-essential shopping, for months or years at a time. I'm absolutely a born layabout. It frustrates and depresses me immensely that I just can't achieve that situation for myself in any sustainable way!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I'm really good with money too. The year I was unemployed, money was no issue the whole year-- I survived on about $300 a month-- because I bought nothing, went nowhere, and had nothing.
Z quit his job to go back to school, and that was fine-- he had a bunch of money saved, so he could pay his expenses (which were larger than mine) from that.
Then he gave every last dime he had to the school for tuition. And didn't tell me he'd done so until the car payments had come overdue.

So that was a bit of a crisis, and I flipped out. (The car was $400 a month.) If I'd had warning, maybe I could've done something, but as it was I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, flipping out, and finally got a job at the last second just as the last of my savings that I'd been surviving off was depleted.
And now money is a sore topic between the two of us and I don't dare try living off my savings again because Z gets all funny that I'm going to flip out on him.
You know, if he'd warned me in the slightest, had told me perhaps a month in advance, or at least told me when it happened, I probably wouldn't have flipped out at all. You know?
Anyway.

I could survive a dang long time on not much money. I would be happy too. But I don't think I could endure the sarcasm about when the freakout is coming.

[spacellama.livejournal.com]

You are an artist, and this does not mean that you are a lazy person. I know several artistic types who work to live, not live to work. That is, they go to brain-numbing jobs (even jobs that they like) and count the seconds until they can go home and paint or program or write. I think the trick is to know what your core soul is and prioritize that in your rare "free" moments. I know of someone who wrote a fantasy novel during law school that way. I don't think he slept at all, poor guy. But now he's a licensed attorney who write trashy fantasy novels on contract and loves is.

Wow this comment is going on forever. Mainly, I just want you to realize what a special and wonderful person you are. Don't diss yourself just because you aren't in love with the 9-to-5.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

wellll....I guess you could join a commune. (I hear there are still some.) But more realistically, perhaps you could force yourself to learn how to do things you want to do in the time you have.

Even if it's not as good as if there were months of free time floating around.