Meanderings: March 5, 2000

Sunday,
March 5, 2000

Warning -- serious journal entry ahead. Hit 'n' while you still can.

Heya. Um, I think I should probably explain a little about the last few entries here -- well, hell, maybe about the last month or so.

Okay, maybe the last year, or however much of it I chronicled here.

You may remember that I'm currently doing double duty as a technical writer for one project and a project manager for another. Basically. . .this whole damn job is scaring the crap out of me. I'm being asked/expected to do things that, quite frankly, I don't know how to do, I don't have adequate time to pick up, and if I screw up it means that projects are delayed, money is wasted and I look bad.

I don't like looking bad. I mean, I really, really don't like looking bad. You can say I'm phobic about it -- whenever my brain feels like torturing me, it reruns little memory snippets of truly stupid shit I've done in my life, and I wind up in the emotional equivalent of a fetal ball.

On the other hand, there is nobody else who can do this stuff. The manager who should have been handling WINE bailed on it, and it came down to me or Cay, who is already overworked and has his own problems, so I had to grin and say, yeah, I can find server space, locate a tech to implement the new WINE software, whomp up a financial schedule, meet with PICS to discuss new packages (all of this with Swedish techs, managers, yadda yadda, and you betcha there's a language barrier there). At the same time, I'm redesigning Matilda pages (with the attendant Javascript -- I can just about manage MouseOvers and they want me to do complicated shit like linking to databases and validating forms?), fixing the report pages, keeping the User Guide up to date and writing the WINE Matilda educational packages.

Don't misunderstand me -- it's not the amount of work. That's high, but I'm used to it by now. It's the nature of the work -- once again, I'm being thrown into something midstream without the full complement of background skills, and I have to hit the water swimming or drown. And quite frankly, I'm getting real tired of doing this. I can't even console myself with "it's only a few more months" anymore -- the original plan was that I would quit at the beginning of June so that I could spend a couple of months packing, cleaning, and getting ready to move. Now I have to look for an TBS contract in the States because Lyndon thinks the APZ support team formerly based in Dallas is being moved to Montreal, he doesn't want to go back there (for excellent reasons that I support wholeheartedly), and without an TBS contract we can't ship our stuff to the States and would have to leave pretty much all of it behind. I don't particularly want to abandon seven years' worth of belongings if I can help it. If worse comes to worse, he'll have to extend his contract and stay here while I homestead in San Diego (which was the original Plan A, and if you've spent any time away from a loved one you can imagine just how much it appeals to me).

And no, we don't want to go back to England -- lovely country that it is, it just doesn't have what we want anymore. He can't get work up north, house prices down south are insane, and we both like California, so why not go there?

So in the meantime, I'm stuck doing a job that I don't want to do because I just might be able to pick up a TSB contract this way (looong shot that it is, since I don't see why anyone would grab a contract tech writer when they could pick up someone locally), and at home I retreat to adolescent behavior and daydream about wild rides and crazy behavior as a method of taking refuge and protecting my sanity.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, I'm sorry about occasionally acting like a loon, both on-line and in RL. I'll endure -- God knows I've done it before, and I'll probably do it again at some point in the future. But if I do act a little wacked every now and then, please understand where it's coming from, and just ignore it. Things will eventually return to normal, once we determine just what normal is. . .

Later -- We went to go see Toy Story 2 tonight (very good, but preachier than the first one), and on the way back from Mörby Centrum we had a long talk about my work and where we're going this summer, all that. I feel a little better now -- we can't settle anything at the moment because so many factors are still up in the air, but just getting it all out into the open helped.

And I've decided that if I'm going to have to slog through this crap, I need to do something nice for myself on the weekends as a reward. Food is out for obvious reasons, I'm not really a clothes horse, and I can't exactly spend tons of dosh, but there are some lovely junk shops in southern Stockholm that I need to start visiting on a regular basis.

Not antique stores, mind you -- junk shops. I love junk shops, rubbishy, lovely, dusty old places where you have to squeeze through narrow aisles crowded with the most astounding tack, and the proprietor is perched behind a smeared glass case with a cigarette pasted in the corner of his mouth, perusing an ancient magazine and nodding crankily while you browse. I love the way they contain fragments of other people's history, like faded mysteries behind cracked glass. There's even one place on Gamla Stan that's dedicated to Russian stuff -- old leather cavalry boots, sepia-toned pictures in tarnished silver frames, medals, books, eyeglasses, jewelry, anything a defecting sailor or enterprising black marketeer could pawn, I suppose.

I need to get out there and wander around. I need to touch some reality, some evidence of passing time.

I need. . .something. . .

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