I've been very stressed this week and last. I'm starting to reach combustion point with my job. Anyone who's had the patience to follow my journals for the last couple of years knows that I've had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with my job. I periodically reach the point where I'm totally fed up, and then, at the last minute, a project comes along which keeps me interested for a while.

But this time, it's different. This time it's not just sheer boredom that's getting me down, although that's bad enough - I get to work jazzed up after a great, busy, fruitful weekend, and then it's like somebody suddenly slammed on the brakes. By lunch time, I've run out of work activity, and my speeding spirits scream to a stop. By mid-afternoon, I'm sitting drooped in my office chair, fatigued with boredom, staring out of my floor-to-ceiling window, calculating the speed I'd reach by the time I hit Sutter Street beneath me, 34 floors down.

I do manage to fill some of my empty time with my extracurricular stuff. But there's only so much of that I can do without feeling extremely guilty. Part of the problem is that I have to fill out a daily time-sheet. The idea behind the time-sheets is not to keep tabs on us, but rather to know how much money to bill the companies in which I'm engaged in projects. We have various designators to put into the time-sheet indicating either the company we're working with, or the non-billable activities we're engaged in. Unfortunately, there aren't any designators for such activities as "Writing my Online Journal" or "Researching Job Opportunities Elsewhere." So my choices are either to lie about it, or to spend at least part of my time doing real work.

And there's the rub. In the absence of customer projects, there are really only two types of work I can do - either spend time learning new software, or seek out our sales-people (or "account executives" as they like to call themselves) and get them to take me out with them on sales calls. The former activity is deadly dull, and quickly sends me into a stupor. There's nothing less fun than trying to absorb some new software for which you have no real use.

The latter, meanwhile - the sales-work - that's repulsive to me. I hate sales-work with a passion, and cannot put my heart into it. These people may call themselves account executives, but they're out there basically trying to convince people to buy what they don't need. I can't be a part of that. So that leaves me with doing my own stuff for a large part of the day, and feeling guilty when it comes to filling in my time-sheet. I'm rapidly reaching a point where I just don't feel very good about myself - that I'm just wasting my energy, intellect and self-respect.

So I've redoubled and broadened my job search. I'm no longer looking for the "right" job, but more a job that gets me out of this one. So I'm considering contract jobs, for the first time, as well as jobs which pay a lot less, but are more interesting. These latter jobs are usually in research departments at universities. But, right now, there's not a lot out there. It's a lot harder than I expected. Hence the stress. I'm captive at work, and I can't seem to find an exit. And I'm worried that either my lack of motivation is going to start showing, or that I'm going to say or do something I'll regret.

Big sigh. I just wrote and then deleted a long paragraph of boring exposition, which explained why I dropped my film-classes at City College and enrolled in an alternative class at the nearby Film Arts Foundation instead. But there was no way I could make that story the least bit interesting. So - it happened, and that's that.