zeldafitz

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Welcome to My Nervous Breakdown...Pull Up a Chair. Get Comfy.

Question for today:

Is it an existential breakdown or just a fussy cranky work day?

I am having One of Those Days. And I am having a really hard time figuring out if it’s just the usual roll with it, it’s OK type of thing or whether I am finally reaching the end of what has seemed like an endless tether of disillusionment.

You see I am struggling, mightily (as you may have discerned) with this whole “routine.” By routine I mean the relentless 8-track hamster loop of the 9 to 5.

Kids, I hate the 9 to 5. We all do. I know. But I REALLY do. But I am stuck—caught—in its necessitating grasp. It’s eternal vice grip.

You know that Ben and Jerry’s bumper sticker that says, quoting Jerry Garcia, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” It’s a bumper sticker. Made by an ice cream company quoting the wisdom of a drug addled dead musician. And yet that bumper sticker haunts me. Daily.

I have been counseled to honor the mundane in my life. I think that whole Biblical honoring of the mundane and reverence for the lilies of the field and the meek overcoming the earth and the tasks that make up our lives was referring more to wholesome “tasks” that we might find in Little House on the Prairie or something.

Everyone has their dilemma. My biggest dilemma, day in and day out, is why I have not been able to free myself from the rigidity of this schedule. I am obviously rebelling, in the form of this website. Welcome to my rebellion! Pull up a chair. Pour yourself a drinkie.

I am disillusioned.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

This is a good job.

I have finally come somewhere near where I wanted.

I went to seminar at the Mothership yesterday on sexually transmitted infections and the final speaker brought down the house by saying that adolescent girls are more susceptible to STI’s because they have “wimpy mucous!”

It was funny.

But I felt like Zelig yesterday, wandering around the impressive grounds of the Mothership. So respectfully hushed and important, so tended, so architecturally interesting…a collegial idyll with all that ivory tower reverence.

Sometimes I feel like Lucille Ball at work. I try SO HARD. I made one stupid small mistake today and I feel so bad. It went to the boss. At the Mothership of course. And I get crushed about stuff like that. And it’s stupid and so then I ask myself:

Are you doing the right thing? If you were home writing a novel there would be irritations there, wouldn’t there?

Then I start thinking in platitudes again: Life isn’t a dress rehearsal.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

So if you don’t make the move and start heading in the direction of what you would really like to do with your life, what happens?

Are we supposed to just keep accepting the consolation prize? Is the “gratitude journal” the opiate of the people? Are we supposed to keep counting our blessings so we don’t notice that we still want something more? Is it arrogant to want more? Selfish? Is it missing “the whole point”?

I have to be able to discern whether this is really not for me or whether I am just being a petulant spoiled bitch.

I’m being too hard on myself.

I know what the answer is. I just don’t know how to attain it.

I just. Don’t know how to attain it.

I wish I did. I feel like I’ve made “breaks” in the past. But none of them has stuck, you know? I have made “breaks” but I haven’t broken the mold. Being a 9 to 5 worker is like being an addict. You return to it because it’s something you know, it’s a routine. I can do it. I am a high functioning recovering slacker. A very high functioning one. Because it takes everything I have in me to keep the illusion going.

I want to break out of this more than I have ever wanted anything. I am confronting it with the same sort of prayerful tearful dogged desperation that I approached my search for a soul mate. I think about that process, and how wrong you can be no matter how much you loved someone, he still wasn’t the right one. It takes a lot to persevere, to find the Right One. It’s all a journey. I am so fortunate to have found my man. Now I have to apply that same spiritual quest to this aspect.

Thanks for joining me on this momentary blip. Stay tuned…

[Gratitude journal moment update: I sat down at my desk and this one refrain kept coming to me and it made me smile. I think it was A Sign. I kept hearing my 3.5 year old Ian saying, in full surfer dude absurdity: ROCK ON freaky bro! Really, who needs the Sermon on the Mount when you have kids who can quote SpongeBob chapter and verse, eh?]