Hara-kiri

Bright Eyes said something in one of his songs along the lines of: “The job that just keeps making you want to sleep, is keeping you up at night.”

Some nights, like last night, I find this happens. I have a TV in my room, which wasn’t my idea, but I cant’ seem to get rid of it as it is attached to a wall-bracket which would just look wrong if it didn’t have a TV on it. It’s an impossible situation. I’ve thought long and hard about it and I can’t think of a solution to this problem in fact I think so long and hard about it that I often have to watch TV to take my mind off it.

Now on the surface, it might seem like it is one of those MTV specials that show celebrity nipples (God that was a good show. Did anyone record it?). Or like last night, some novelty like “teenage kicks” which I found very annoyingly watchable (as I just wanted to sleep) that keeps me up at night, but it’s not. And it’s not thinking about a way to get rid of my TV that keeps me up either. It’s the prospect that all I’ll have to do after I close my eyes is to get on my bike (perhaps in the rain) and go to work.

It’s not worrying about the work I do, and it’s not the stress of the work I do. It’s a deep sadness and disappointment about the crap that populates the minds of my immediate colleagues in the civil/public service that I find myself a part of. Crap that comes gushing out of their mouths and unrelentingly through my aural canals and into my sensitive lovely brain. Now some of it is the kind of junk that makes you leave your equanimity at the door and laugh with superiority at its ignorance, but most of it is bitching about other people, treating one’s own inflexibility as a virtue (sometimes referred to as obstructionism), subtle and not-so-subtle bullying and coercion, and outright greed and unprofessionalism. And all of this is done loudly and all day.

And yes, to be honest, it has driven me to television. Late-night television. The lowest of all forms. (Apart from mid-morning television of course)

Still, I only have two weeks left before I find myself in altogether different scenario and then I’ll have no excuses (I mean different excuses).

I just hope I’m not hooked.

Hooray for Max and his new job.

Buckley.