Tired and a bit queasy Walls come tumblin’ (carefully) down Work
I'm surprised your stress counsellor didn't tell you " have you tried knocking down a few walls? Checking they had no asbestos first - of course". I did find my holiday improved my stress outlook a little - before then, it was shuttling between home-induced stress and work-induced stress for months at a time - I thought of going to a stress counsellor, but just the thought of taking time off work AND home at the same time stressed me even more.
Ah, well, you see, I didn't have any problenm whatsoever taking time off work...
I was reading an article on "The Economist" as I do and I saw this article mentioning Iraq and Star-Trek gadgets in the same article and I immediately thought of you. I emailed it because I have trouble doing these link things sometimes.
Monday, October 18, 2004
I’m a bit under the weather today after the weekend’s exertions, about which more below. My condition isn’t that surprising – I spend the entire week doing not much more than sitting in front of a computer, then come Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon I labour mightily until I am wont to be sick. And then I am. QED, really.
Fi and Alastair and I demolished the wall between the kitchen and dining rooms over the weekend, with a quick cameo by Jimbo as ‘guy who devised the smashing-in-the-plaster-wall-with-a-crowbar” demolition technique, which was less effective than it was cathartic…
Apart from Al’s concerted scaremongering campaign with regards to the electrical wiring (which appears to be old-fashioned, but not as immediately life-threatening as he insisted), everything went reasonably smoothly. We extended the job over two days to make absolutely sure we weren’t about to pull out anything with keywords such as ‘critical’ or ‘structural’ or ‘load-bearing’. Once we’d got a look at the whole arrangement from above – necessitating an uncomfortable series of forays into the roof cavity – and determined what all those bolts and things were for, it was pretty much a case of “saw this/sledgehammer that/pry the other” until the whole thing came apart.
I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to be granted an opportunity to destroy something to useful purpose. Somebody should get together an adventure tourism concept, where jaded thrill-seekers are given hammers and crowbars and hardhats and pointed in the direction of a sturdy-but-unwanted dwelling. It’d be a winner, I tell you.
I’m not so sure the next phase of our little project will be as satisfying or (I hope I’m wrong) as successful. We now have to resheet the ceiling in the dining room with gyprock panels and plaster over all those holes and gaps we made. I hear it’s just like icing a cake, but to be perfectly frank I’ve never been as good at that as I should be. Hope this isn’t going to really, really suck… (As an addendum, other skills it looks like we will have attempted to learn by the time this project is done included concrete rendering, tiling, air conditioner installation, window frame building and elementary bookshelf carpentry. This is a fun new hobby).
So, having endured years of beating myself up for feeling bad about not wanting to work, I finally went to see a stress counsellor last week. Her disappointing but hardly unexpected advice was to try an assortment of stress-lowering and procrastination-eliminating exercises. I don’t know what I was hoping – maybe that she’d sympathise with my self-imposed morose insanity and advise me to get another job or hit some idiot with a plank. No such luck. But I have to admit, actually making a conscious decision to just do something about how bad I’ve been feeling about work has had a marvellous effect. My capacity to feel productive and actually do some work is slowly crawling back up towards average, which at this stage is probably all I need to keep going. Long-term, I’m going to need to find some other career, but at least at this stage I can probably make it through to the end of this project (Feb 2005) without the need for confinement in a mental institution…
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(especially since it's a free service provided through work, introduced as a desperate measure to cut down the appalling attrition rate of staff here).
