Serial Obsessive

I stumbled across a reference today, that someone had written about themselves. (Sorry I've lost the link, if I track it down, I'll add it here later. )

In this admission, they declared themselves to be a serial obsessive, and went on to explain what that meant to them. The gist of which was that, this person would devote all their waking attention on one thing, then slowly peter out, then in the final stages of the current obsession, find something new to obsess about. Thus continuing the cycle.

This struck a cord.

I have had a quick look at my actions over the last few years, no scratch that, over all my adult life since teenagedom, and I have come to the conclusion that I too am a serial obsessive, although in my case, I think I am a little more "layered" in my obsessional manner.

I tend to fixate on one major thing, but at the same time I am dealing with many minor obsessings. For example right now my primary fixation is pretty much obvious to everyone that knows me (even slightly), but I have an inordinate number of things I am devoting my time to when I am not dealing with my primary compulsion.

I'm pretty sure this behaviour is not good for the soul, certainly it isn't good for my soul, and I'm relatively sure its not helping the people around me in any way shape or form.

Here's a quick example of what runs though my head for a minute or so:

1. BIG - The primary craze in my life right now.
   
2. Kingdom of Loathing
   
3. BIG
   
4. Overcoming Overeating
   
5. Getting Things Done
   
6. BIG
   
7. Looking for a new job
   
8. Fixing my TiVo
   
9. BIG
   
10. BIG
    
11. Cooking
    
12. Eating
    
13. BIG
    
14. Cleaning
    
15. Introspecting
    
16. BIG
    
17. Blogging
    
18. BIG
    
19. Blogging
    
20. Eating
    
21. BIG
    
22. Exercise
    
23. Weight
    
24. BIG
    
25. BIG
    
26. Blogging
    
27. Eating
    
28. Weight
    
29. BIG

Can you see the circular nature of this? That's just what came out when I was typing and not thinking, imagine how I get when I'm focused

Problem is that the major obsession right now, is pretty sure to become harmful at some point. Once again, I'd like to point out that insight into the problem does not help with the rectification.

Oh yes, the self destruct button was firmly pressed.

Unfortunately it was a silent alarm for a while before the explosion!

Today I was given the heave-ho at work, obviously all my self-harming behaviour (read abject lack of professionalism) was noticed.

Although the boss said it was all to do with the project going on hold (it is, I know that much is true), I think he was just using that as an excuse rather than put himself in an uncomfortable situation of having to say I have been carrying on like a highly paid petulant 13 year old.

On the up side, it is far better to be looking for a job now, than to be looking for a job at the end of November, which was when this current contract was due to end anyway.

Looking for a job in December is a waste of time, everyone is too busy having Christmas lunches and Christmas parties to bother interviewing/employing people. Then they have to play catch up at the start of the year in January, then finally they realise that they have some annual budget left which will be taken away in April if not spent, so around February the job market usually hots up seriously.

So all in all, being out of a job now is better than being out of a job at the end of next month.

On the down side, even though I shouldn't, I'm taking it personally, hell I know its only business, and more than likely it is self induced, but it still feels like a personal rejection none-the-less.

I'm trying not to think about it too much.

Anyway I have to work tomorrow, but all the work had been done bar about 5 mins of it today, but since I had just been sacked, I didn't feel the need to pipe up. Fuck 'em. So I'll be rolling in for an hour or so, then fucking off home with a full days pay in my pocket. Naughty I know, and certainly unprofessional too, I'll cry all the way to the bank as I come to terms with my guilt.

Luckily, (no, not luckily, very sensibly) I have a fair few £000 in the bank, so I can afford to be out of work for a while if things don't work out so well.

Gives me the option to spend a little more time on other things too.

C'est la vie.

I'm looking forward to the weekend.

Observations on argument

I'm talking about reasoned argument, not bust up fighting argument here.

I have been (and still am sometimes) guilty of making two fundamental mistakes when it comes to arguing.

Mistake 1: Not choosing your battles
I am no where near as angry as I used to be, but I used to be quite capable of exploding into a white hot magnesium flare of righteous indignation at the drop of a hat. (Especially if it was my hat you were dropping, you bastard!). Such anger would regularly get me in to highly charged arguments with people close to me, or more likely I would hold onto the anger and do nothing, being the meek little young English man that I am. We are of course a breed that never wants to "cause a fuss".

The end result was that at least an hour of every day, I was ramping up my blood pressure and freaking out, but hardly ever releasing anything.

I am now far more relaxed, I have observed, that in the vast majority of cases my anger is wasted, there are just very few situations that one person can change.

I know that in any one week there will be people I want to change the opinion of, I want to engage them in reasoned argument, but frequently I know from the attitudes or the emotional state of the person involved, that I would be wasting my time. Lets face it, if you are dealing with an arrogant person, the likelihood of you changing their mind is very low. Analysis is a wise time investment before full fledged war.

There are many situations I have been in over the years, where it has dawned upon me that the problem is not the topic of the argument, but the emotional state of the persons arguing. To give an example, as a teenager, I used to regularly get into arguments with my mother over something I had done or not done, and it did not occur to until many years later, that no mater what I had(n't) done, the problem was that my mother was upset. There was genuinely nothing that could be said or done to fix the problem, trying to apply logic to the situation would just make her more upset and in the end, even if I knew I was right and could reason it to her, I would still end up more upset.

I'm sure you can imagine the fun we used to have, bearing in mind that my mum is ultra-stubborn and I inherited the same gene from her. Oh how we laughed after we had torn holes in each other's psyches! (Not.)

In those situations, I would have been wise to shut up and listen, then apologise, but hey I was an arrogant teenager, so what did you expect. Luckily I am more contrite now. :)

Mistake 2: Mistaking bickering for arguing
Bickering isn't about arguing to resolve anything, its about arguing for the sake of arguing. This is always a waste of time, and to be avoided at all costs.

Hell that was more of a ramble than I anticipated.

Conclusion
Only argue about stuff that is:

1. Important enough to argue about,
2. Where you are likely to actually change the mind of your opponent, or are open to such change yourself.

And if you ever catch yourself becoming emotionally embroiled and becoming upset, you are perfectly at liberty to call an end to the argument or to call a "time out".

If I get time later today, I shall entertain you with one of the more amusing failures in my argument strategies, one that applies to my ex-wife.

Anyway, must push on, I have work to do don't you know!

Lethargic, oh so lethargic...

I think I may have overdosed on the Radox last night, by the time I got out of the bath I had managed to relax the living bejesus out of myself.

I only drank a couple of glasses of the red, but that was enjoyable for a change. I'm not one for red wine normally as it tends to give me a headache, but in this case, it was a present from a friend, and obviously cost a bit more than I usually spend on a bottle of wine. (After careful empirical analysis, I've found that anything above £7/bottle or so, means no headache, go figure.)

Add that to a whole six hours sleep, which for me is like having an extra hour or two lie-in in the morning, and I have the muscle tone of a jellyfish(1).

Work has been hard this morning, the project manager has started to flap a little (with reason, see posts passim). As a result, I am working hard at the moment.

I'm looking forward to the pub tonight.

(1) A jellyfish who is considered by his jellyfish friends to be REALLY relaxed.

An early night

Spoke to my dad this evening, got a lot of stuff off my chest, I'm feeling better for it, I've decided to wait till the weekend, when I'll get to have a day or two off (two, two, please let it be two!) for the first time since I came back from my holidays five weeks ago. I soooo need a day off and some time to relax.

If I'm still feeling really down on Monday, I'll make an appointment with the quack.

Right, I'm off for half a bottle of red wine, a hot bath with plenty of relaxy-herbal-bubbly-smell-nice and this week's Time Out.

If all else fails, try pampering yourself, you never know.

I'm hoping for a good night of sleep as an encore.

[Edit: Arse, Nearly half twelve, had a bath but still here... :( bugger!]

Abject lack of enthusiasm

My manager had a word with me today regarding my timekeeping, and asserted the need for me to be little more committed to the project. "In a bit earlier, and out a little later", seemed to be the message, it was a very low key "asking" rather than a more aggressive "demanding". I'd better pull it out of the bag, or I don't think I'll be staying here much longer. Not to mention that if I do stay longer, renegotiation of rates will be somewhat more problematic, to say the least.

Obviously it was coming, I've been expecting it for days, hence the sudden ultra-efficient me for the last couple of days.

Guess I'm actually going to have to put in eight hour days and everything!

The joke is, that I have done most of the work that I had to do, so it will be finished and the hours won't be needed. How's that for irony? Its certainly a better definition than Alanis Morrisette manages.

Onward, there's work to be done here. I guess I shouldn't be blogging here either. To quote V, with one of her more amusing verbal inflections, "Ooops!".

Long time no see

"Hello libido, nice to see you're back, where the hell have you been for the last few weeks?"
"Oh you know, here and there, around"
"You didn't think to come visit me?"
"Well, you've been such piss poor company lately, that I thought I'd avoid you for a while and see how you got on without me"
"Makes sense, so why you back now then?"
"Just thought I'd swan into your life, give you a little hormonal overdrive, make you all super-extra libidinous so as to make you feel extra lonely, then fuck off in a day or two's time"
"Yeah sounds about right, any particular reason for doing this to me?"
"Nah, I'm just fucking with ya as usual"

Yes my libido has returned home, more aggressive than ever, not sure why. Its not like I don't enjoy the sights that the fairer sex put on display, but over the last few weeks I have totally lost all interest, other than long distance viewing.

And yet at about ten yesterday evening, suddenly I'm a raging ball of ultra horniness, with no outlets other than those provided by my friend the magical electrical interweb.

I don't think there is much point in trying to act on it, I'm not in the mood for taking onboard other people's needs at the moment, so a relationship is right out, lets face it, no woman wants a mopey fuck like I am at the moment do they. And by the time I've found a willing partner, the chances are that my libido will have sodded off back to wherever he has been for the last few weeks.

In other news, no dreams that I remember from last night, but not too surprising, I didn't get to bed till gone four AM, and I was up for seven, I must try to get some exercise tonight and an early night to boot.

Mental note to self: YOU WILL GOT TO BED TONIGHT AT 11PM LATEST

Keep your fingers crossed for me, all prayers and thoughts gratefully received.

What's the deal with work then?

Ok, so I've mentioned work a few times, and by now you should have worked out that there is a teensy-weensy problem-ette or two.

Hmmm, I think I'll come clean, there is an absolutely fucking huge problem, and most of it is my own making.

One of the by-products of my depression, is the lack of enthusiasm ("no shit", I hear you cry!) and a total lack of motivation ("We've gone beyond no shit, where into negative shit here!", yeah yeah, shut up will you, I'm speaking!). When you couple this with a lack of work to do, but what little I have is very important, and has a very hard deadline, I'm sure even the thickest of readers can see where we are going.

I'm pretty sure that I do this deliberately, in my usual fuck up way. Certainly, I have to accept that at some level there is a plan to do this which is being executed. I have displayed this behaviour at too many jobs and seen it happen too many times for it to be coincidental.

I seem to be very deliberately courting being sacked from a position, by openly doing nothing for weeks at a time, whilst lying about my progress, then I manage to pull my thumb out of my arse and catch up, but only after putting myself under unbearable pressure for a few weeks.

Obviously, I'm pretty lucky, in that I have the natural talent to do a good job, whilst catching up several weeks worth of work in a couple of days. Truth be told, I am extremely lucky in that regard, I have never had much in the way of motivation to do anything, and I think my education and career path are entirely down to quick wittedness rather than hard work and careful application.

I used to feel sorry for the kids on my degree way back when, here was me, doing fuck all for months, then getting in gear for a week or two and getting way better marks than those poor bastards that had worked like absolute donkeys for all those months. Bad luck for them, but I guess my IQ gets its own back when I get into anxious-circular-thought-hell, I'm guessing I can get round those circuits far quicker than those other kids, yay!

But I digress, the point of this post was to explain what I have been up to at work, and why I have sat on my backside and done nothing for an age, and how come I am now ultra focused and working way hard.

As a direct result of my actions, I will probably have to work on Saturday, I'm sure you can imagine the guilt I feel at having caused this mess, then having to work overtime to catch up, whilst charging my client for my cock up! Ah well extra cash to spend, I suppose. Still it's not doing much to help with the guilt I'm feeling over breaching my personal ethical standards.

On the up side, I weigh myself on Tuesday mornings before I head off to work, and I can happily say that I have lost another pound since last week's weigh in. That made my day.

And as a final note, the dreams are getting stranger, last night I dreamt that I had been in an accident and broken my leg, but that none of my insurers would pay out. As a result I still needed to go to work, and ended up employing V to drive me around and help me run errands. Not sure what that meant, although V seems to think it is all to do with me inventing a job for her. (She doesn't do the "work" thing.) Me, I'm tending to think that I need to do some more of that linear thinking stuff... If only I could find the time!

Signing off, its stupid late, and I need to get my half hour beauty sleep for the night, laters.

Treadmill My Arse

I spent most of today feeling nauseous. Due to the previous night's lack of sleep and my ever-so-strange dreams.

So much for my planned mental and physical exhaustion though hard exercise. That never happened, but I did manage total exhaustion anyway, as you'll see.

I hit the ground running hard at work, trying to make up for lost time and keep the self destruct thoughts out of my head. I'm definitely going to have to speak to the doctor about upping my dosage, I spent a lot of today fighting off thoughts of self-harm.

Around lunch time I agreed a truce with V after Sunday night's bust up. That alone caused a hell of an improvement in my mood. A good thing for sure.

Spent the rest of the day working hard, there's a lot of catching up to do. (More to come tomorrow on that subject I think.)

I managed to finish work at around 5:30ish then popped home, had a shower, changed clothes and collected a few computery things. Then at last managed to move onto a pleasant night round at V's home.

Most enjoyably went on to spend an evening fighting to fix a computer that didn't want to be fixed, whilst having good conversation with a great conversationalist, watching telly and eating curry. All good.

Got home at about 2AM, avoided sleep for another hour or two (afraid of a recurrence of last night's dreams I think), then fell into my pit exhausted for about three hours sleep.

Last night's sleep

I was right, I was plagued all last night by circular thoughts.

To add (self) insult to (self) injury, those few times I did manage to get to sleep, I managed to dream fucked up dreams, where I was rushing to the aid of my ex-wife, one of the few people I hate so much I feel physically sick and revulsed every time I see her.

I'm not sure what that was all about, but I'm guessing that I have to do some serious (non-circular) thinking.

I plan to get very fucked up tonight on endorphins, maybe an hour of exhaustion inducing exercise on the treadmill will help with the sleep and mood. Although I'm prepared to bet that my current self induced stresses are causing my blood stream to be awash with the same chemical cocktail anyway.

Right, now that I have got that off my chest, I'm going to attempt to generate some enthusiasm for work, on a project which I have prevaricated on for so long, I have almost done nothing and we are meant to deliver at the end of the week.

While I'm at it, I'll try not to eat like a fucking idiot, what with having a weigh-in day tomorrow.

Everything was going too well

Things seemed on the up, now they seem not.

Once more I have managed to fuck it up.

I feel nauseated.

I love my daughter too much, I hope she never as to go through this, I want this genetic bullet to miss her completely. Time to up the dosage I think.

I'm off to bed. I don't expect to sleep much.

Nice weekend

So went away with (A) my daughter, to visit my brother (MC) and his girlfriend (T) for the weekend.

It was great fun, on Saturday morning we all went to a pub that had a huge kids play area, A had tones of fun throwing herself down slides and into baths full of rubber balls so she was as happy as can be. Being a sensible parent, and both MC and T being sensible types too, none of us partook of the alcohol (just in cased you were worrying about mixing kids and pubs), lots of tea was drunk.

Once A had run her self to semi-exhaustion, we all retired to the restaurant and had our meal...

Woo, was it bad, I had a minted lamb chop with peas, spinach and mashed potatoes. I'm sure the lamb was pork, it certainly wasn't minted what ever the hell it was! The spinach had been boiled until it was tasteless, the peas were practically uncooked and the mash wasn't terribly well mashed. Apart from that is was great. (Not one to be repeated I think. The kids play area was good, the cups of tea were fine, but no eating there any more.)

Then we made out own pizzas in the evening. Unfortunately A, in her excitement, checked on the dough so often it never rose, so the first pizza came on a base so solid it would give concrete a run for its money. Luckily we had bought some extra bases from the supermarket for just such an eventuality, so the rest of the pizza was good.

T and her friend went out for the night to the pub so my brother and I stayed in and watched some TV until bed time.

This morning we got up breakfasted, watched the new Starski & Hutch film, which while entertaining, was only as entertaining as a "one time only" deal.

Sandwiches for lunch and then myself and A headed off home, dropping by a couple of friends en route.

Dropped A off home, she was quite tearful, she'll be OK. It was upsetting. I'll cope, I have to.

Right, I'm off to research those special lights used to combat seasonally affected depression, since the autumn equinox had been and gone, its time this year to see if we can head the winter depression off at the pass.

Onward, ever onward.