I've been in a major funk for the last week and a half. It began right after I finished my student movie, when my fatigue whateveritis thinggy returned at full strength. And it's been amplified by subsequent events to leave me at rather a low ebb.

Work, in particular, has been worse than ever recently. I've been filling my down-time by training myself in Java, servlets and XML. It's pretty taxing stuff once you get into the more advanced areas, and, here, the stupidity of my company's organiza makes itself felt. Since our R&D group are pushing our customers to use our java-enabled products, they're no longer bug-fixing our older non-java-enabled products. Obviously, the writing is on the wall - we consultants have to learn the new java-bas ff. Yet, inconceivably, we've been offered no training. So I've been scrabbling around for several weeks, slowly cobbling together little applications in order to teach myself the tricks I'll need if I work on customer projects. But each time I run into road block, I've nowhere to turn. It's deeply frustrating.

It's hard enough to push yourself through such work at the best of times, let alone when you're sagging with fatigue. I've again found myself falling asleep in my chair as if I'm some narcoleptic (which, I hasten to add, I'm not). Not only that, but s a particularly unpleasant atmosphere in the office these days. Our Western Region is only at 8% of its calendar 2001 sales target. So the sales people are running around as if somebody just set fire to their anthill, lashing out blindly at other pe o fasten blame anywhere but on their own desks. Last week alone, I was the recipient of a second-hand unfounded accusation from our district sales manager, and a furious complaint from a project-manager. I went home for the long weekend with a feeling escape.

But the weekend was pretty shitty too. I was dog-tired, and I felt my old depression creeping up on me again. Things were capped on Sunday by my own incredible stupidity, where I thoughtlessly made an extremely hurtful, throwaway comment to a close f Judging by our subsequent emails, I don't know if we'll remain friends. I felt terribly for the pain I caused, but I felt even worse to face the self-knowledge that I could be so insensitive. This, in particular, has left me with some questions abou lf which don't make for pleasant mental fodder.

I may have learned something, though, through all this. I read a New York Times article recounting an audience discussion with Woody Allen recently. He said that he didn't care whether his movies were successful or not, since that's not why he made t he made them because he'd found that only incessant activity kept crippling depression at bay. I've noticed over the last two or three years that whenever depression has galvanized me into an explosive period of activity, I feel great again - and the ssion disappears for months. What happens though, is that though the activity keeps me fired up, the fatigue starts to nag at me to slow down and give myself a rest. So I listen to it, and ... the depression returns. It seems that if I can ignore the fatig then maybe a lot of busy, creative, social activity can keep the depression away.

I don't know if I'd have developed that hypothesis (which remains to be tested) if I hadn't had this journal. It's only in looking back at the cycles I've documented here - of depression, feverish activity and fatigue - that I can get some evidence o ttern. If only I could also learn other lessons from my journal - how to be a kinder person. How to be someone who'd never say the stupid things I said to my friend on Sunday. That's not something you can learn, though, unfortunately. Nor can you take pills for it. About the best you can do is supress the most obvious manifestations of the inner self. In other words, think twice before you speak. When it comes to character, you have to make do with what you're born with.