why is it 2.30am

[thene]

-what's worse, I sent a work email at 11pm. I would say I had become one of those people but I am sure as fuck not being paid for it, yet.

I am so freaking tired that being able to sleep ought to be a gimme, but noooooo. Okay, so I jumped, inside three weeks, from being an unemployed loser to working a scheduled 56 hours a week for two different companies in three different places, and I am finding it hard to shift gears when I get home. That slithering shell of words won't go away. I've tried concoctions of cocoa, art, whiskey. I know what represents sleep and I can't reach it any more.

But I'm enjoying this? Knowing it's not forever helps, and at the same time keeps me on that pleasurable kismetic bender where I am thoroughly obsessed with how wrong everything is. I spent this evening looking up treasury regulations on wikipedia and reading a significant court judgement that contains the line 'Petitioners also owned books about ponies'. I am both hooked on this shit and also massively skeeved by it, legally, culturally and ethically. I keep thinking of that thing that guy said about the pre-recession years in Greece, when 'the lights were off' and everyone saw the government, so he said, as a money pinata. I can get paid comfortably well to be employed for 56 hours a week as a stick. I swear I see more fraud in Boston than in Atlanta. I keep seeing awesome people on the internets take part in the Up-Goer 5 job description meme and hating myself for getting paid for something this thoroughly unspeakable and for enjoying it this much.

It is all weirdly, weirdly different environments, too. Quietjob, I am the demure (over)paid intern who gets patronised with monkeywork, pretending to enjoy the largely meaningless tasks when really I am just starting to appreciate that calm grey fogbank of numbers writ on paper; then I go over to bouncyjob and am suddenly the magical fixer of all things and catcher of balls dropped, sometimes from on high. I am also paid markedly less per hour, although my commission this week is so out-of-sight obscene I had totally given up on keeping track of it by Tuesday afternoon. I am not even yet sure how to quantify the Wednesday Thing, which is on West Broadway in Southie, where management is at loggerheads and Boston is showing me her bones. An older Peruvian coworker told me about being a child in Louisiana in the 60s and having to stand on the bus because she wasn't black and wasn't white. I listened to AA members engage in unsubtle codeswitching, played nice at a belligerent young widow, and I heard the harp busker on the way home; I don't even know, but I'm learning. I might be starting to get it.

oh fucking fuck it's 3am

I am too absorbed in processing all the numbers and things and people, and there's that theory that we sleep - we dream - in order to forget the minutiae of our waking days? I don't want to forget, or to lose time. This is not the XVIII any more. I want to hang on to all of them; the girl from Mississippi who's as happy as I am to be up here, the happy new father, the wanderer with the lisp and the unanswerable question about 1040NRs, the Obama fundraiser.

Especially the Obama fundraiser. because i don't need dystopic fiction.

Comments

[khronos_keeper]

I love the way you describe your place in the world, and the people inside of it. The way you were just sort of jerked sideways into this slightly tilted new world that shows you another facet of everything, but leaves the rest of it maddeningly opaque.

Reading this makes me want to talk about the people in my life, how they're placed, and how I drift among them. Like the sweet Chinese immigrant girl called Fefei who chirped a greeting at me on the bus last Monday and who's never without a broad smile.

I love hearing about people's worlds, and how they work inside of them. I love understanding what people think about it; there is such a easy, muted cast on your take on all of it. Like a swatch of grey tweed in the watery light of a rainy afternoon, behind old rippled glass.

Okay I'm leaving before I get more pretentious and abstract.

Last note: I'm impressed by your cohesiveness in the face of the lack of sleep. Golf claps, ma'am. Golf claps.

[thene]

WRITE IT, even the people who don't seem important. THEY ARE.

thanks! lol, my problem is the opposite - I suck at finding the off-switch, especially for verbal detail. Sunday is sequestered as my weekly day off at present, and I've spent it lazing, baking cookies, and quietly talking nonsense to myself in the hope that the verbal memory reel will eventually run out. It kinda has. I need more sleep than I'm going to get, though :P

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

With all my commitments, I don't expect to have time to write until after Easter. (And remember, Godilocks, a few weeeks ago you were "complaining" you didn't have any work. :P ) I keep trying to give up programming because the problems do take over my brain and fill up the space I need for writing. Even when I'm off the clock, the gears of my brain tick round incessantly. (30 hours, pah.) And, as I said, when it comes to sleep, Radio 4 is my friend - it focuses my brain on something else; I imagine an audiobook would have the same effect.

I was going to say, "it gets better with age", but I didn't used to need the radio to get to sleep. It's worth putting in the hours to close a problem - that way there's less of a hangover; I worked an extra 10 hours on Saturday for that reason. The balance is coming. But soon I will be able to integrate story telling into my daily life, and then what wonders will the world behold...

[thene]

hahahaa IKR. I honestly like working as much as possible - I just forgot how to sleep last week. I'm doing much better at that now, thankfully, although Thursday nights are destined to be one of the fiddlier ones.

I've never tried sleeping to radio or audiobooks but I can't abide hearing TV while I'm trying to sleep, because spoken English is the thing that I can't blot out. Back when M and me lived in one room, my rule was that if I was trying to sleep he was only allowed to watch TV or movies if they weren't in English. Fortunately that was back when he still mainlined tokusatsu shows; if my brain couldn't understand something, it couldn't be kept awake by it. Like a lot of fangirls, I have daydream-stashes for falling asleep to; I think one of my problems last week was getting distant from that part of my head.

I hear you on closing problems - that was why I was sending out 11pm emails, even (and there was a happy ending to that, for us; two days later, my boss asked Mr and Mrs Obviously-Fraudulent to show us some further records of their business's income and expenses and they suddenly decided they didn't want us to work for them any more!) It helps that everything is a little less frantic this week, thus there is more space and time for problem-solving and we don't need to leave them to linger.

Ooh, how is storytelling going to fit into daily life now? Do tell. For my part, hopefully stuff calming down will mean I can get back to writing. ;_;

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

Oh, I love hiding in work, too.

The "not being able to blot out English" is kinda the point: instead of focusing on your problems you focus on the Radio, and that's enough for tiredness to take over. (And if I don't get to sleep, I learn something.) I used to be able to escape to, um, other places, but the surrounding pressures have been too great. I will try and wean myself off the radop because I bet the quality of sleep is worse. But it will remain a tool in my arsenal, for those situations.

Learning to set a side a problem is a skill, I think. I've just discovered the iPhone can do multithreading and it's like Christmas. But I'm saying to myself "that can wait till next week". Ditto the half dozen emails from my client. I signed off for the weekend and, as much as I want to avoid it, I have evidence to sought out.

I said "storytelling" because I got to myself to a point where I hated writing. And I grew up role-playing so I'm quite happy orchestrating stories like that. Anyway, I want the strength to be able to escape into an hour or two's writing every morning. I've even had an idea for a novel... And ignoring my client/boss for a weekend will be an important part of that.