So the entire month of March was, apparently, building up to a complete nervous breakdown.

I started a second job, didn't want to, but not paying my own rent for the fourth month in a row seemed like a bad idea.  It's yet another production job, where I (and pretty much, I alone) make all of the products for a li'l store.  That in itself is fine; I like making delicious goodies.  In my heart, I think that feeding people is one of the best and purest ways to show love.  In my oh-so-few-and-far-between Buddhist-y moments, I think about all the people I made happy with those little goodies, and it's almost worth it.

But most of this work is kind of tedious.  Monotonous.  Dare I say....boring?  Yeah, it's fucking boring.  Sometimes I get to create my own shit, and those days are glorious.  I glide around the kitchen with a dumbass smile on my face, listening to the food talk to me.  And it's great.

But mostly, yeah.  Boring.  And sadly, when I do boring shit, my mind goes a mile a minute.

And then reality sets in, and I think about all those people I made happy, how much money my boss made, and how I still (goddamnit) can't pay the rent and have enough to live on for the rest of the week.  Buddhist-y moment: gone.  Joy taken in making people happy: gone.  Anger at the inpenetrability of the wage system: skyfuckinghigh.

This, of course, is a terrible way to live.  Anger breeds more anger which breeds rage, and when you feel stuck and are raging, the only place to put all of that energy is into yourself.  These are not the kinds of jobs where you have the opportunity to air your grievances to a manager, boss, or HR person, because they'll just go out and find another little pseudo-foodie who they can pay a dollar less than they were paying you to do essentially the same work.  Your successes, (like pulling a thousand pieces out of your ass for a catering they decided to tell you about with less than a day's notice, even though they knew about it for a month), merely enable a cycle of more of the same.  Your failures get stockpiled for future reference.  It's a lose-lose.

I know, I know, this is pretty much the same old story anywhere you go.  I don't know anyone who doesn't hate their job.  Or....you know....jobs.

But I realized that the problem with this system is that all of the exhaustion, all of the rage...it keeps me from the things I'm meant to do.  It keeps all of us.  Too tired to pour our energy into our true passions.  Complacent.

Now, I don't think there's some great conspiracy to keep us all down.  It just kinda works out that way. Unchecked, the 'way things are' have a way of turning into a bigger, uglier version of themselves.  And we--all of us, now--get so caught up in the day to day that we forget to keep track of how the day to day is making tiny little shifts into the fucked up system of tomorrow.

So I'm challenging myself to not lose my shit to the day to day.  I might be exhausted. I might feel completely stuck. My voice, in these dipshit little jobs, might be completely unheard.  And you know, I may not be able to pay the rent.  But that doesn't mean that I'll also succumb to the bullshit.  It doesn't mean that I have to be silent in the rest of my life, and in fact, if I am, it means I've given up.

And that ain't happening.