Topic

I can blog with my mobile now. I got this fancy-smancy phone that has internet and the works (my previous mobile was a 6-year old hand-me-down). I should have no excuse for updating my blog. But, I still need a topic.

Depression

“We can easily be talking about a world economy that is depressed until 2011 and maybe beyond… If there’s a safe place I can’t see it.”

Those are the words of this year’s Nobel prize winner (in economics no less), Paul Krugman. His pessimistic outlook is making the rounds in the business news, which is needless to say, also mostly pessimistic.

I am not so cheery these last couple days either. A task at work has been dragging on to what seems to be infinity. I tried to avoid this for over a year, yet it’s still dogged me. Now I am trying to promise myself that if I just get it done and out of the way, I can go back to the things I really enjoy: programming and thinking up new ideas for our system.

What’s so bad about the current task? It’s writing, ugh. I really hate academic writing now. I am not sure why I have such strong feelings against it. I don’t know why it feels so painful when I do it. Lord knows, I done a lot of it by now. And actually my writing is usually well-received. But it seems the more I write, the more painful it gets. It seems more and more impossible as I go along. And my self-imposed deadlines get pushed back a little further each day. I procrastinate more and more.

So I finally understand better what people feel when they say they hate their jobs. Although I surely can’t say I hate my whole job—since there will be an end to this eventually, I do hate the work right now. And it puts me in an utter funk.

Oh, the economy. Yeah, it looks pretty miserable according to the news. But frankly I don’t understand why I am supposed to feel so bad about it. So maybe I am going to end up taking a job for less pay, doing work that I didn’t really aspire to do, and living on an even tighter budget? That sounds pretty much like life. And actually I feel better at the thought of “trimming back.” We got way too much crap in this small flat anyways (ok, Goldie might take offense at that since her stuff way outnumbers mine). Actually, I am ecstatic at the idea of the whole world trimming back, especially the disproportionately well-to-do part. Let me hold myself back from wishing for an outright doomsday, I am not trying to be that extreme here.

Still, I don’t really get the fear and pessimism going around these days. It’s not like I am just lucking out of the bad luck, right? My plans for job hunting are looking increasingly dismal too. Immigration plans might get put on hold. Hell, I may end up facing separation from Goldie if things get really bad. But—at least for today—I just feel apathetic. Life is like that. It can really suck. *shrug*