It's Thursday night. Tomorrow is my last day at the newspaper, and then Saturday morning I'm getting the hell out of Dodge City for a while.
It seems that whatever I might have been thinking recently about being more stable isn't exactly true, my moods seem to be as oddly erratic as ever.
What I don't understand right now is why working 40 hours a week behind a bar and working 40 hours a week in an office seem so drastically different. What I mean is, suddenly I feel like I don't have any time at home. When I worked in the pub I only had one day off a week, which must mean that I worked less hours per day than I do in an office when I have two days off. The social atmosphere of working in a pub may also have affected how I viewed it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suddenly thinking tending bar full time was a good job -- not for me, it wasn't, anyway. But all the same, it's really depresses me how suddenly my life seems to be only spent in an office. I guess what is needed is more variety, and perhaps more of a feeling that I am able to do the job.
All the same, I'm not happy. I'm not miserable when I'm at work. If I'm working on something I find interesting, or even if what I am working on feels like it is going well, my mood is generally pretty good. But as soon as I find myself at a dead-end, I feel I change dramatically. And somehow feeling I am barely at home for any length of time before I go back again really is not helping anything.
So what am I going to do? Right now, there's not much that I can do. I finish work experience tomorrow and I seem to remember that going to lectures is more varied than is going to work every day in the same place. When -- or if -- I find myself in a real newspaper job, I will have to see how I feel then and reassess things. Maybe it's procrastination, who can tell.
But at the back of my mind is a small, quiet voice that is telling me that maybe this isn't what I want at all. Not journalism, specifically, but this life. Work, rent, bills, all that sort of thing. Watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing gameshows on TV. Pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned you replace yourself.
There's got to be more to life. Journalism is important, I uphold this. Maybe local journalism is less important, but it's providing a service. Maybe I should aim higher if I want to feel like I make a difference? Or maybe I should find a job where I really do make a difference?
Maybe I should be doing relief work in war-torn countries, or the many disaster-ravaged parts of the world. Would I then feel resentful that more of my life is spent at work than it is actually living?
Or maybe there is more to life than just life. There's a lot of maybes, but maybe I really should take that time out to spend in a Buddhist monastery somewhere like I keep saying I want to.
There's a lot of thoughts to be going on with here. Which is just as well for you, kids, since I don't know when I will next have internet access to be able to update. It's technically feasible that I could update via email, using WAP on my mobile phone. But I imagine that typing a diary entry out on the keypad of a mobile phone could take some time...
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