I know it must be getting really old for you out there but I have to quote artbroken once again. I don't know why this is so but he often posts some very deep and thoughtful stuff which more often than not strangely seems to resonate with what I am feeling at the moment. At the time he posted this a month ago I could relate pretty well with what he was writing. And after this week, and especially the last two days, I can do so again. He writes:
Take this job and fuck it, I don't care, shoot me now and make the hurting stop
Three days into the new temp job and I've lost my bottle. I can't handle this, I really can't. Tomorrow I go in and tell them that I'll stick around until the end of the week if they like, but no more.
The reason? It's boring. It's incredibly boring. It's so boring my mind is tearing itself apart to keep itself occupied - and no, that's not an exaggeration. I'm doing data entry for a medical insurance group, and it's the kind of repetitive brainlessness that kills the soul dead as fucking mutton - look at paper, pick out numbers, stick them into computer without needing to know what they mean. It's the kind of work that will one day be done by robots with OCR scanners, and those robots will go to the pub after work and talk about how boring it is and how they're going to exterminate the human race as soon as they get lasers, and they will be justified in doing so. We fucking asked for it.
[...]
And on top of that, just to guild the lily... I can't care. I can't care about medical insurance. I can't care about helping some doctor throw money around to avoid the consequences of being drunk in surgery and giving someone a third anus. I can't care about giving rich teenagers another way to spend Daddy's money while they learn how to make MDMA in the bath. And no, that isn't fair in the slightest, and I know that, and it doesn't matter. I've done a lot of public service work, and that really does make a difference to me - to hold to the notion that, on some level, I'm serving the public, the regular working-class folks like myself. Never mind that I'm hardly working-class (whatever that means) in my attitudes and interests; at heart I'm still a mechanic's son from a coal-mining town, and I'm already resenting the rich doctors who form this business' client base.
It'd be easier, just a bit easier, maybe even tolerable, if I thought other people in the job felt the same way. There's a we're-in-this-crap-together attitude that can make a shitty job survivable, the knowledge that others there are dying inside too and we can go to the pub and bitch about it afterwards. That resentful camaraderie let me stick it out at Borders for 18 months; it let me keep going for 5 months at the call centre (that and being able to read a book a day between calls). But everyone here seems to love it; they're happy to be there and keeping the wheels of litigation protection working smoothly for their clients. It's great.
...Jesus, a life of quiet desperation is horrible, but it's better than being born dead and never knowing it. I think this is honestly the first time I've been exposed to such utter banality in Melbourne, and it's making me crazy.
Incidentally, yes, I know I'm being horrifically elitist and judgmental and unfair and arseholeish over this. None of that changes how my gut knots up at the thought of entering another form in that place full of pleasant, cheerful, totally alien people.
I can't. I can't. I can't. Staying there for five months (as I'd agreed) will permanently damage me. And in the face of that I don't care if I have to eat dog food to make ends meet, or if my temp agency disowns me in retaliation. Whatever, fuck it, mea culpa, get me out.
Granted, my life is not there - yet. But I, too, am bored out of my mind every day now. And the new teacher's constant mispronunciation of "Tag" as "Take" and "Size" as "Sights" (that's just a rough approximation. Phonetics never were my strong suit) doesn't make it any better at all. The central sentence is: "it's so boring my mind is tearing itself apart to keep itself occupied". Meaning, that in these eight hours my mind is racing around looking for something interesting. And sooner or later this always leads to me thinking extensively about my life, how it led me to this pointless point and where the fuck it will or can lead me in the future. I am always reminded of a Thomas D quote, when I think about this, because I really am alone with my head all the time. When I am home or somewhere else where there is something else besides total boredom I am mostly able to shove these depressing thoughts aside and even do something productive every once in a while, but eight hours are just too fucking long to occupy my mind just by surfing through the net and reading all kinds of stuff.
And like artbroken wrote in his posting the conclusion seems pretty obvious that "[s]taying there for [three more] months [...] will permanently damage me." If it hasn't already. Today I made a list with check boxes for every day that still I have to go there. If I didn't count wrong it's still 54 days. This is an awful lot. I am so glad that there are now two days of weekend in which my mind can start to heal a little.
Okay, time to go to bed and make up for all the sleep I didn't get in the last few nights.
-- now playing: Jens Lekman - A Man Walks Into A Bar --