Greetings from da hood

Well it's been a while since I got online and wrote here. I have been thinking about it, but a flurry of wintery craft, and a rush of finishing up work (with varying degrees of actual completion) before taking some leave, took priority.

I am taking a few weeks off, and boy did I need it. I had started to get to that cranky pants phase of needing a break, where you start to resent people you work with for all sort of unreasonable things... like you know, talking to you, or asking you to do things. Never a very good sign about your reserves of patience or resillience.

I suspect that some of my energy for work has also been sapped by the trends of the last few years - the last few years of working somewhere fabulous with lovely smart committed people, and a coffee machine, and good pot plants, and good, reasonable, useful work.. but not being very good at boundaries - feeling both responsible for everything, and vaguely terrified that I never know enough to be good enough at what I'm doing so overcompensating by never saying no to anything. Ho hum. Sure it's only taken 2 1/2 years to realise that therein lies the rocky road that leads to the slippery slopes of job burn out and crankiness. So, part of this break time is rethinking my role there, what kind of work I want to do (like doing, am good at and feel confident doing), and what kinds of things I actually want to say no to in future. (Note: we are unnusually unstructured in terms of topics and roles - essentialy if you don't say no to things and seem to be able to do them, you will find yourself doing very diverse work, in very diverse topics where it is important to know about teh topic area. I can't say more without blowing the semblance of bloggish coyness about my RL, well life, but imagine that my workplace was a school, and when the physics teacher is sick you get asked to take their lessons, even if you're the music teacher, or canteen lady, or French teacher - and the Physics teacher finds herself another day pitching in making sandwhiches, and all of you together come up together with the school's strategic plan, and make lamington's for the fete. And if you did well at taking the Physics class, you might find yourself doing it as a permanent stand in when enrollments grown and they need a second class. That kind of thing. Which is fine if you're the happy go lucky 'physics, sandwhiches, xylophone, whatever - I'll give anything a go' kind of person, but can be stressful when you're the slightly anxious, yet often high performing 'oh my god what do I know about physics, I can't even remember whether I turned the iron off this morning' self doubter). God that was an awful analogy - let's just let it die there!

Anyway. So there's been that, and also this bigger / deeper question of 'why am I even working in an office job and not doing something more creative?' question, which is not an idle musing, but rather seems like a burning issue that needs addressing in my life. I know that creativity can be expressed in many forms, and certainly there is an element of creativity in analytical thinking and planning and written expression (even of the 9-5 kind) but I do find all in all that there feels like something missing, something kind of dried out, something kind of stultifying and dead in my ongiong experience of the well behaved, rational, ordered, sequential, moderate world of the office. Even with a great coffee machine and nice people.

So. Some time off to do whatever I feel like doing (oh, and some work actually, but at least at home, and on things I want to do - preparing presentations - things that would usually get squeezed into the cracks around everythingelse and I can now do in a bit more of a relaxed way).

I had a few moments of doubt in booking some time out and lpaning to spend them at home. As in 'OMG that's not very exciting - what if I am the world's most boring loser?' but have passed that phase and now feel very happy with tooling about. Today I arranged a knitting project on the couch to check colours and plan next steps, read, wrote, had cups of tea, ate the lentil soup I cooked yesterday, spoke to a friend on the phone, picked up my dry washing from the laundrymat and the woman who runs it introduced herself and we smiled a lot through the fallnigdown fence of our different languages, took photos of the beautiful sky and leaves combo out my window, had coffee in a cafe and shamelessly eavesdropped and daydreamed while I knitted, visited the library and borrowed mystery novels, a knitting book and a how to draw crime noir for graphic novels book. Bliss! Heady goals for the rest of the week include - cook vegetables, buy more wool, get a copy of old Nirvana album (I know - CDs - how old skool), see amovie and go to fabric printing course. Sleep enough. Smile. Stay warm. Daydream & muse lots. Think up great projects.

I hope to recooperate enough this week to begin being a bit more social next week - there are lots of people to visit and catch up with. And next week I might draw some more.