At work, one of the worst possible things to happen has happened.

I was assigned the IAM PAM project.

For non nerds, all you need to know is that this a terrible project. It was passed to me by my co-worker <name> who is a manager but is not my manager and he will boss me around on it.

It also has had some input in the past by this guy B.Sav who I think of in my head as The Human Time Waster. As such the project is needlessly complicated. B.Sav talks too much and writes too much and cannot focus on paring things down to manageable levels when it comes to enormous and wide-scope projects. He lets the complexity wash over him, then he amplifies it, and sends it out again, a little like a wireless repeater repurposed to make life more difficult instead of merely increasing the reach of communication.

I am trying to find my calm. I have known all day that I had to write but I have been avoiding it because – and I guess this is my excuse - the work stuff has tired me out.

I'm stoned and tired now but at least I didn't smoke. I am remembering from the last time I really quit for a while. It only took about a week. And today, Monday, is the worst day. I didn't exercise and without the cardio to make me feel better about life I just want to fucking smoke in the shed and angrily think thoughts like this job can go fuck itself and I am wasting my life and that sort of thing

I'm not saying that voice is wrong. I may be wasting my life and this job can certainly go fuck itself.

But I cannot be smoking while I am thinking those thoughts. It's better to write about them here.

I do hate the job at times. Today is one of those times.

Part of me suspects I am being given this task for the wrong reasons. Wrong reasons could be one or more of the following: I am being set up to fail. I am being assigned this project purely because S.Tal doesn't want to do it. Or because B.Sav is retiring soon. Or because M.Pur wants to overwork me as a passive aggressive response to the HR escalations I've made over the last four months.

I was just settling into this nice reality of working 3 hours a day or so – fixing something, pushing my main project forward a little bit by a little bit, without too much urgency.

And I was writing some. I've been writing more consistently over this period. It's difficult but at times it has felt good. Having some of my work headspace freed up has helped a lot. Imagination has been creeping back in.

I just have this overwhelming sense that time is running out and I am .. I don't know. Wasting it on work. I'm turning 50 in April. My weight is good but my overall health is not wonderful because of all the smoking. I've been medicating really heavily to cope, unhealthily, with the stresses of : shoulder recovery after surgery, Penny and her mom, Penny and her tendency to conversationally repeat, the demands of my own mother, work stress, contractor stress, and generally hating myself for not having a life outside of this very narrow strip of work and family and house.

I watch videos about people quiet quitting and I'm just kind of in awe, though. I don't know how to get out of the way of this project when it was just assigned to me as essentially the sole owner. I am going to be asked for updates and that sort of thing

I think I'm going to have to take this project at a slower pace. I don't know how I am going to do it. S.Tal is an asshole. He will corner me and push me harder than M.Pur. I say sometimes "Yeah sure me and S.Tal get along great and have good history" but in reality what I want to say is that he is a domineering subhuman prick and I don't like working with him.

I don't like working with most people on the team. I try to fight this feeling but it wins, over the long haul, every single time, because they are aggressive. They have a drive to serve my enterprise that I simply do not. They are likely more insecure than I am too - they are deathly afraid of being seen as lazy or ineffective.

I am more afraid of working myself to death at this point.

And I am more afraid of being unhappy than I am of failing to deliver.

I am hoping to find some space in the middle where I can deliver, but slowly, and everyone is OK with this.

The best thing to do is not start out too fast from the gate.