Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of. You know, there’s a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own? I […]
Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of.
You know, there’s a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own?
I have a gift – it’s the thing that turn up on my work reviews, even when I’ve otherwise completely screwed the pooch, work wise; a knoack for debugging things, for seeing the root cause. Well, THERE’s your problem, and Jaime Hyneman might say. I’m just good at knowing, through some combination of intuition and observation, what makes a system work and thus what’s making it not work.
So I find myself forever in that role; the better I get, the more constant the need.
I don’t mind, you know? It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. It’s what I enjoy. That lightbulb moment, when seemingly un-connected points of data suddenly assemble into a picture, and I can see the point of failure. It’s the tiny highlights in generally drab work days. And more, at home, in real life, when I say, this is the failure point and can apply, or help apply, some solution, it makes me happy.
There are points, though, load exceeds structural resistance and I want to simple give in, let the crushing weight win.
There are the points when I need time away from every single ounce of need, want, issue. No one saying help me or this is broken or can you fix.
This is, of course, the kind of blog entry I usually don’t post. I’ve written it a couple times a year since I started blogging, and rarely does it see the light. Because as much as I don’t want to help, I don’t want any help.
I need a vacation from the universe. And it makes me understand why people find the spike to appealing; let me go away from myself for a bit. Only then there’s another need to manage, and the cycle gets smaller and tighter.
The list of things I need to do gets longer only – never, ever shorter, and the list of what I want to do is almost forgotten under load. I was trying to recall the other day the last time I felt free enough of pressure to cut loose and create, and I cannot recall; it’s lost on the blur if the last year and a half. Even on my last vacation, never did I have a day where I could say, this is my time, forget what other people are doing or want to do.
I feel the edges of a crazy sort of rage at the edges of things. Sadness and anger are lurking at the back of my skull all the time now, and I need someplace to put them.
A good friend asked me the other day if I was ok – really, really ok. And I had to think back a long time to the last moment I felt really ok; moments of time, too soon gone.
I need to be back there, in those fleeting, warm, soft, truly happy moments. And I don’t know how to get back there.