Kraut-shock

Phew - I'm tired today.  We got back from Berlin yesterday afternoon and I've been in a coma since.  This is strange and unhelpful when you consider I've done nothing but eat and sleep well since touching down in Blighty.  We weren't late or anything.  We got home at 5pm.

I am really spent however.  I think it's a combination of physical fatigue and boredom.  I really really really am bored.  Screaming ab-dabs self-harm bored.  I know I am the master of my own ship and should apply my talents (such as they be) to changing matters for the better.  But I can't be our-souled.  So there.

I have another day off tomorrow.  Missus O and I have to attend to matters with a couple of friends of ours that I'm not at liberty to discuss until this time tomorrow.  The cloak-and-dagger miasma makes the whole episode sound vaguely sinister and sordid.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It's a joyous and sober event.  You'll just have to read tomorrow's entry for full details.  Actually, I might not get the opportunity to scribble an entry tomorrow, but I will do soonest.

All I can think of at the moment is going home, curling up into a ball and sleeping like a lttle pigeon.  Not the stuff of which legends are made, is it?  I don't have the energy to argue the point.  Perhaps some modernist poetry would help?  No, I thought not either.

That was the year that was

Right, Christmas is done.  It's over.  Let it go.  It really didn't touch the sides, Christmas, this year.  Not a festive thought scudded across my brain the entire time.  We didn't watch a Bourne film, or Bad Santa - not nothing.  I used to love Christmas so much.  I really did.  Now that's gone.  Is this inevitable?  Perhaps.

I think I may have fallen for that idiotic trope of reviewing myself that people tend to do at year's end.  I'll be honest with you: I didn't like what I saw.  I have a boring, alienating job.  I don't work nearly hard enough at my interests.  I'm not thoughtful and/or dutiful.  And I drink far too much.  So, what to do?  Well, the drinking is easy to remedy.  The trouble is it then leaves a big old hole in my schedule, which is likely then to be filled with boredom.  I dread boredom, really really fear and dread it.  I've always run from its shadow.  This no doubt explains the drinking.  But I know I can't carry on as I am, so I'll just have to suck it up a bit, as they say.

Why am I bored the whole time?  Anyone?  What is boredom anyhoo?  I'll look it up.

This is interesting:

"To be bored, some scientists reasoned, 'is to be in a state of longing for activity but unaware of what it is that one desires and to look to the world to solve the impasse,'" - http://www.livescience.com/23493-why-we-get-bored.html

That's it in a nutshell.  But what to do?  It appears I have to pay attention to my thoughts and outside stimuli more.  It doesn't say how one is to do this though.  Should I take up meditation again?  I did a bit of this during the summer but packed it in as a bad job.  You guessed it: it was boring.

Shit.

 

The path of least resistance

If I'm honest with myself, then I've settled into an early middle-aged, petty-bourgeois rut.  I earn a comfortable living, live in a nice house, go on holiday six-dozen times a year and have savings in the bank.  And yet...and yet I'm bored, literally to tears on occasion.

The idea of making a major lifestyle change is hatefully discombobulating, but I don't feel I can continue in this slough of...well, despond is overstating it; it's more of a dangerous world-weariness.  Even cycling, my go-to passion and distraction from all life's ills for the last 25 years or so, leaves me cold.  I'm jaded.

I remember Hugh Laurie talking about something like this in an interview a few years ago.  He said he only realised he was depressed when taking part in a car race.  He used to be quite into motor sport.  He said he didn't feel anything as he raced around - no adrenaline, no fear, no joy, no angst...nothing.  And that is what depression is - a total disconnect from the world of human interaction and emotion.  It's not the presence of despair, so much as the absence of joy.  After a while, this lack of simple pleasure eats away at you.  It's difficult to countenance 40 years or so of that.  That's when the problems begin I guess.

So, what to do?  My usual mantra (to others at least) at moments of indecision like this is "the prospect is always worse than the reality".  I do believe this to be true.  But I'm much more compelling when you're not privy to the neuroses and manias that habitually fly around the inside of my skull.  I all too familiar with them, which means I take my own advice with a pinch of Saxo.

When the going gets stuffed

The pressure's on chez-work at the mo.  One of my junior colleagues has gone on a pre-nuptial bender with six-dozen of his closest male friends.  They've jetted off to eastern Europe for this sojourn - naturally.  Haven't the huddled masses of Slovakia suffered enough ferrkrissakes?  So while he's away chugging rubbing alcohol and getting his chin tattooed, I'm having to perform his duties.

As is always the case with office work these days, his work is exacting and emetically tiresome.  It's a real test of character getting through eight solid hours of nip-picking when you have total responsibility but zero power.  The very best that can happen is that you're ignored by the great and the good around the office.  That means your mistakes are sufficiently meagre to have escaped their notice.  It's like being a toaster; the only time anyone pays it any heed to it is when they're beating it with a pool cue for having carbonised a breakfast muffin.  Other than that it goes about its duties invisible and unmolested.

The trouble with nooks in the corporate cliff-face like this one are that it requires a Herculean effort to move upwards.  You're beavering away full-bore just to get through the days; this leaves scant energy for weaselling your way into the affections of anyone powerful.  It also means you leave the office every night with a cracking headache and a desire for self-immolation.

The wise junior functionary placed in a thankless situation like this self-medicates to get through it.  The ones that refuse to (Mammys' boys or health nuts for example) end up taking hostages, or obsessively filling their homes with newspapers and perishing in the inevitable and tragic inferno that follows.

I've managed to bypass becoming the office Aunt Sally by being silent and sarcastic.  Bosses tend to mistake this as a sign of prodigious native intelligence and give me plenty of slack as a result.  The upshot of all this is that I'm left to my own devices for the most part, and have managed to carve out a pivotal role that I can perform standing on my noggin, but which to the untutored eye looks impossibly technical and demanding.  Onwards and sideways!

Black sabbath

Sunday's an odd day, isn't it?  You have a day off, unless you're a priest or a work in Homebase that is, but it's not one of unalloyed joy and carefree jollies, is it?  No, there's always the spectre of Monday looming ever larger on the horizon to spoil matters.

I've always hated Sundays.  My earliest memories of this day of alleged rest are of recurring nightmares.  I used to dream I was having an out-of-body experience in the assembly hall of my school.  My...well, spirit, I suppose, would float around for a bit and then shoot up a corner of the rafters and just sit there.  At this point I'd be overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety and wake up in a panic.  I was five years-old.  

Although these nightmares don't sound scary per se (You'd certainly have your work cut out trying to pitch a film treatment of one), I used to dread them.  They were relentless in their regularity.  Looking back now it's rather sad that a child as young as this should have been beset by nightmares.  The upshot of all this is that I developed a phobia about Sunday.  Actually, it's Monday that prompts the real fear, but Sunday is his sinister hand-maiden.  She pretends to be benign, but would betray you at the drop of a fez.

I thought for years that I had an especial and irrational hatred of Sunday, but talking to most seemingly normal adults, it turns out to be a very common malady.  This does rather beg the question what the fcuk are we doing with our lives.  If we all find life by turns boring, dreadful and workaday, then what's the point of continuing?  We should all resign en bloc an take up tightrope walking, or whatever perverted pastime we feel might afford us some fulfilment.

T D M

I'm bored today.  It's a much underestimated affliction, boredom.  It really lays one low.  It generally gets short-shrift from high profile head-shrinkers and dramatists because it doesn't come equipped with the usual eye-catching mental and physically flailing normally associated with mental maladies.  But make no mistake - it's a dangerous foe.  It really takes the joy out of life.

I've been a sufferer for as long as I can remember.  Shortly after I learned to speak, I started haranguing my mother.  I would complain incessantly at her about being bored, and demand satisfaction.  I always had this semi-formed notion that they was a clever workaround to avoid it, like paracetamol for the ego.  But apparently there isn't.  That was a lesson hard-learned.

I don't ever remember my little playmates being like this; they all seemed content enough with a combination of Playschool and Fuzzy Felt.  The sufferer becomes an island in situations like this.  You feel divorced from your peers and polite society as a whole.  They seem to be enjoying themselves, which makes them the enemy.  And this just makes the sorry business of getting on with the rotters and with life itself even more tiresome.

The funny thing is I've always held on to that youthful belief that there is a salve for boredom; I just need to continue the quest for it.  I've worked through umpteen hobbies, drugs, careers, body-modifications, religions and esoterica during this fruitless journey through life.  Nothing yet.  If I should happen across something, however, I'll let you know.  Perhaps half a dozen espressos might do it?

Thierry Ennui

Blimey, I am getting lazy. It's been five days since the last update. I'm not likely to win any literary prizes with output like that.

I'm still beavering away at the new role, you'll be pleased to here. I tried a different tack yesterday: I decided to apply myself to the task at hand - much like a properly socialised adult might in fact. It worked to a certain extent. I did feel better about myself - so much so that I went home and got pissed.

I'm so bored to could evaporate, I tell you. How do ordinary people cope? Answers on a carte postale please.