Ready?

It's weird. I can't seem to get much done anymore. Work has piled up and it takes forever, and despite delaying my departure by two and a half days, I don't feel like I will ever be ready to go to the thing. A lot of time seems to speed by when I'm trying to puzzle work things out or deliberately mark off work tasks without allowing the escape of any egregious errors. All of this is fused and colored by dark and despairing moods. I ask myself why that is. There is zero reason for it. It just is what it is, I guess, but it doesn't augur well for my job transition upon my return.

Considering a shutdown of the Facebook page while I'm gone: Disallow any picture tags, close the wall. Perhaps this will help me quit that toxic habit when I get back within reach of networks. I could put this on hiatus too. But to me that seems a mite melodramatic. In terms of melodrama, this post is already bad enough by far. So we'll just have to see what changes I can enforce once I've spent a week being free of the norm.

Job transition: Normally the old and new managers agree on the transition date. My manager has been overwhelmed by life, I think, and my new manager basically says he never returns phone calls. He has therefore decided to stick with our original plan, the one my old boss balked at, and so my new team expects me right after my vacation. My old boss's boss says no transition without backfill, but he's not officially in the loop, and there's no backfill anyway. We haven't hired nearly aggressively enough and ours are hard positions to fill; and now the CEO has put the lockdown on external hiring, which has a dampening effect on internal hiring, and my colleagues here are just going to have to adapt to being undermanned even worse.

That is undoubtedly one source of my depression: I feel as though I am leaving a mess behind, and it will be difficult to hit the ground running in my new job if the old one continues to tug at me. Another source is the continuing death of my marriage. I ended it in all practical terms when I moved out ten or eleven months ago. But a long and deep relationship like that requires mourning, and in many ways we had a good thing, and so the mourning will take years. Meanwhile I have built some wonderful relationships, better in some ways than I have ever experienced, and I am greatly blessed; but let us not pretend they are stable. I am not stable, and so my relationships cannot be. Indeed, all of us are growing and changing, and the purposes our relationships serve do not last forever. Not for any of us; though for the lucky ones, relationship growth can occur in concert with personal growth. But that is a subject for another day.

So is worrying about the job thing. It's quite possible, even likely, that next year at ratings time I will be hit hard by assessments as to why I had to scramble at the last minute and leave things unfinished. My by-then-former coworkers will certainly have no reason to be kind to my reputation; and though by old boss will get slammed for being so out of control, he will also be in a position to roll that shit downhill. But that's a worry for later, and as usual I will feign a lack of caring, and only half-jokingly look forward to a season of unemployment. I've been expecting my employer to figure me out and escort me off the premises almost since I started sixteen years ago. That says volumes, since it hasn't actually happened. Clearly I have delusions of fraudulence; yet it also wouldn't surprise me.

All that shop talk is a deflection. The despairing and the nameless tears and the ennui that follows are rather more annoying, and as I said, I can't explain them. Things need explaining, you know. Then they can be fixed. That's how it is.