I am so fucking frustrated at my job it makes me want to hit things. There's nothing inherently wrong with software, I used to find my work interesting, but doing this shit eight hours a day, five days a week is making me insane. I feel more and more like I'd kill for a job with any kind of human interaction - a bookshop clerk, cafe waiter, therapist, whatever - but staring at a screen with the only moving body parts being my mouse hand and my fingers is really starting to suck.
All I can hear in the room most of the time:
I am still at this job because of money, which is partially a factor of lifestyle. In other words, I need the salary because I'm living in Dublin, which is an expensive place to live. I could go get another job, but then I would lose my investment in the company, which might be worth a few thousand euro in a few years time. So I need to wait another few months. If I leave in October 2002 then I get to keep 50% of what I invested as shares. That's 5 months or so. I can last 5 months, surely?
Clacking of keys, droning of traffic. I don't care about this work. It was interesting, once, when I was eager to learn new things and being challenged every day. Now I'm doing the same thing every day, mindless reproduction of code in VB.Net and C# for a seemingly endless production line of user interfaces, for a company that is never going to do any good for anyone except already-wealthy businesspeople. I am a code monkey. I have no pleasure in my job any more, and I don't see how anyone could have. This work fucking sucks.
I have my illicit pleasures. I surf, I node, I chat, sometimes I write. But I can't distract myself from the growing feeling of frustration - this isn't what I'm supposed to be spending my time doing. Surely I can wait 5 months?
Not so long ago, my friends and I used to think that we should be paid by the government just for being as damned intelligent and cool and artistic and good-hearted as we were. In the few years since then, I've been watching friend after friend trade in their energy and their intelligence for security and routine. They're slowly losing their creativity, probably not even realizing what's happening them, as their lives stagnate and become totally familiar. I know that's never going to happen to me, but the same internal restlessness that keeps me creative also makes it almost impossible for me to keep a steady, unchanging job. All my energy dams up during the day and I start to feel incredibly frustrated, and I know I can either just give up and shut down my energy, or leave and go do something new.
Just 5 more months. 5 months is nothing, isn't it?
On a lighter note, I got very nicely stoned last night - my flatmate's brother brought around some skunk that someone posted him from England, and e v e r y t h i n g j u s t s p a c e d o u t for a while. Maybe that's why I'm so wired today. I can see the sun on the trees in the park, and I had lunch with Lindsay and we talked about Japanese and Chinese and African literature, and I felt really peaceful, and I would rather be anywhere than in my shitty little office. Something doesn't fit.