Lets Practice Leaving Me the Hell Alone!
Stand-Alone Dreamer | 29 September 2004, 4:11am
It's a glorious, beautiful holiday here. I'd love to be in my pajamas, lazing around, doing nothing,
looking at the lazy spoiled kids in the neighborhood playing around with their oversized dog!
Instead, I'm here, at work, vainly trying to use my non-existent graphic design skills to finish up the presentation. I work 12 hours a day, non-stop, I rarely (never) have time to whine and fool around. It's not a matter of improving my time management skills, as all the time I have is busy being managed by a never-ending rush of phone calls, meetings, programs, and more meetings -- oh yes, and sometimes I try to eat. The infinite number of unread e-mails clogging in my mailbox, the un-answered phone calls, both official & personal, has started giving me nightmares.
There is a finite amount of work that one human being can do. If you want someone to be able to do everything well, you need to give him a reasonable amount of things to work on. 4 hours spent finishing up a presentation for an Israeli VP, no matter how important, is 4 hours I couldn't have worked on marketing, new proposals & programs, acquisitions or anything else.
When doing the entire program by one's own self, one cannot do everything, and therefore, rational creatures might let him off the hook; for not being perfect at maintaining his training record or for not single-handedly 'marketing' the management fantasies all over the globe or for not implementing 'high-priority' programs and research guidelines or for winning the Nobel Peace Prize and saving starving orphaned wallabees in Africa, on his miniscule 20-minute lunch break.
Granted, that became a rant more than a list of reasons, but I think the point can be considered made. I sometimes wonder whether I'm expected to work this much, and that in order to do everything that I'm expected to do, I should really be working more.
Looking through some of my old file archives, I ran into some old self-portraits from my time in college... I looked so different then. I almost could not recognize myself. Some non-describable sadness in my eyes; an uncanny feeling, may be a pure bachelor emotion, a form of estrangement, weird unfamiliarity, to say: was that really me? Also, did I really look like that? The pain inside is so evident from the face. I wonder: How come I did not realize it back then?
Current Mood: Screwed
Current Music: where the hell is the time for music!!
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WE LIE IN WAIT - Id Love to Wear a Rainbow
Stand-Alone Dreamer | 21 September 2004, 10:39pm
While I have never been more disappointed about human nature, I have been feeling extremely enthusiastic about my work. Even though poverty is still the sign of my times (it has alwayz been that way, no matter what I earn) it looks like if I hang tough and don't kill myself before in a desperate act of weariness and utter melancholia, the future may even look quite bright...
My work and sporadic exposure to psychedelics of human mind are what keeps me going (especially working with a team at New Jersey, where I keep laughing and enjoying the exciting challenge of managing people who stop working when I wake up & vice-versa). I still continue to read a lot (poetry, critical theory & more psychoanalysis) and my beard keep growing...
If that profound form of sadness did not keep growing within me I guess there would be nothing to stop me from achieving now what I most deeply desire. Still, that pain is still there, and, ironically, gives me the energy to get up every morning and let my life run the show for itself..myself, whilst I play the role of an amused wayfarer...
Honestly, I am still amazed at how when things seem to be the worst I still manage to feel optimistic and energetic. I wonder if I only cheat myself, or if in reality I will always need that weariness, that deep sadness to face everyday in life.
Current Mood: Heartbroken
Current Music: - One Hand In My Pocket
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WE CAME DOWN FROM THE TREES!!!
Stand-Alone Dreamer | 14 September 2004, 6:44pm
And then I realize the only physical exercise I did this week-end was climbing up and down the stairs. And it is already Monday, and the hours had passed by swiftly, by the minute, as always. I am not a morning person, in the sense that I don't look forward to it. But I still think & whine about the time to have breakfast, to smell the coffee, read the papers on line, a post here & a mail there, listen to music.
But I couldn't possibly work during normal hours, having to rush in the morning, not having time to think, to stare at the screen while say, Kathryn Williams whispering to my ears. My eyes are still half-closed, and my brain is not quite up yet, but my mind is still between a broken dream and a promised land. It will take me at least one more hour to be ready to start typing any coherent phrases, to make up my mind about all the things that have to be done if one wants to be a normal person.
I think of mornings as this space and place for recollection and reflection. I am reminded of the gorillas I saw at one of those National Geographic Zoo explorations sometime back, how they grabbed their heads with their hands, as if they were involved in some deep phenomenological diatribe, or as if trying to forget some painful memory. I was deeply moved by the immobile anxiety they showed; it was the unquestionable evidence that we had more than one thing in common. Unlike other primates in the zoo, the gorillas would not even move at all, unless for a slight movement of the left hand to scratch some area of the head. One of them was lying flat on his back, and held his head with both hands, sometimes covering his eyes. And I could not but feel empathy.
My mornings are like a day in a zoo: the consciousness that I am being observed, that things must be done, performed, that I am not totally on my own, and that I am not really free to do whatever I may want to. Mornings are the place where I realize that we came down from the trees, as they say, very slowly, but violently at the same time, by force, as when I fall out of bed, hurting my head. To start a new day, a new week, is painful. I cover my eyes and my ears with a pillow, and realize someone, out there, is looking.
Current Mood: Worried
Current Music: We Came Down from the Trees - Kathryn Williams
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::..THE GROUND BENEATH HIS FEET..::
Stand-Alone Dreamer | 2 September 2004, 9:18pm
Current Mood: Bored
Current Music: Macy Gray - A Moment To Myself
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