I shouldn't be writing, I don't have the time and sharing this just feels lame but I'm tired and distracted and I'm gonna see my guys tonight so no smoking.

Work is frustrating, it's irritating, it's stressfull, depressing and, as has been noted many time by many people, will suck the soul right out of you, if you're foolish enough to bring it into the building.

Really at the moment, what's brought it on is my own failure to be as nimble as can be. But I'm still frustrated. There is no bell curve here (well there is, it just doesn't matter). Average is middle-performing right? That doesn't matter, because top-performing is top-performing and here *everyone* has to be top-performing if they want to keep their jobs. Not a bad theory, I guess. It's just stupid if you actually expect it to work in practicality.

Fear and stress have never inspired large groups of people to perform perfectly, creatively and with abundant energy, especially not in a dot-com.

So I'm supposed to go from getting dressed down by someone who was hired after me for not being able to guess the minds of our quality team (essentially) to working feverishly to finish on time, eventhough I got my work several hours late, and do it all without the mistakes that pocked my last review.

Well first I had to spend an hour and a half fighting tears and talking with friends to keep from throwing my computer at someone, and then every order I opened I was so paranoid it took me twenty minutes to complete instead of the usual one and a half because I was asking other people. As if I haven't been doing this very thing for nearly 20 months now.

So I'm working on it during my lunch break, except for this entry here.

I really, really REALLY need to look into grants and working independently on creative endeavors. *sigh* If only.