Miss_Understood commented today that she misses reading my blogs.  Aww.  Thanks 🙂  That's a really sweet comment to find on one's guestbook.  Sadly, though, I just don't have much to say right now.  Well, that's a lie, I've always got things to say, my brain never shuts up and I never shut up and I drive everyone insane with it – I just don't have much of interest to anyone here to write about.  I suppose I could say, though, that today at work our summer office party thing was confirmed to us, it's going to be this fancy day out in South London, we have to meet at 8.30am, and the message about it was actually phrased as 'we thought we'd do this to avoid hassle and ridiculously early starts to the day for everyone' followed by 'any problems or queries, let me know'.  So I made the mistake of assuming this office manager/director actually was going to allow me to bring it up if there was a problem.  Silly me.  [br][br]

I wrote her and pointed out that half the office lives outside of London, quite a ways north, and that for me to come down by 8.30 it would take me 3 hours, with 3 different trains plus 2 buses, and I would have to wake up at 4.30am and last year, when they took us to Scotland for a day, I had to do that and it was horrible, not to sound ungrateful but how do you enjoy a day when you're so exhausted you feel sick, and you're stuck with everyone for about 18 hours, literally, being FORCED to socialise, and everyone around you is getting totally smashed while you on the other hand don't drink??  I worded it more diplomatically though.  Anyway, the reply?  'It's not compulsory Vrinda – if you don't want to go, you can always stay in the office and man the phones' (my job, reception).  If you knew the woman, and you knew how temperamental and bitchy she is, you would understand just how sick to death of her I am and why this just totally infuriated me.  It was so condescending and also, as is usual for my office, unfair.  Why should I have to stay in the office all by myself for 8.5 hours to work while everyone else goes out and has a day off getting drunk, just because I don't want to wake up at 4.30am and travel for 3 hours and spend a fortune on peak travel, as well??  So i pointed out to her that it was therefore compulsory, and I don't see how this is fair, and I'm not trying to be difficult, it's not me causing a fuss, it's me plainly and simply informing her that 1. I have Tourette Syndrome which really puts me in a lot of pain if I don't get enough sleep, 2. I can't go to bed early one day because I don't get home until 7pm anyway, and 3. I can't just go straight to bed because I'm helping take care of my son and he right now takes about literally 3 hours to get to bed because he refuses to stay in bed and throws fits and bangs his head into the wall and on the floor and it's very scary, and how can I just go to bed while all that's happening?  How can I leave George having to deal with that all by himself?  So I will not get to bed earlier than 10pm as usual, and then I will not fall asleep until like 11 because it is SO hard for me to get to sleep, what with my mind racing (OCD) and tics ravaging my body, so then I have to wake up at 4.30am, undoubtedly waking up in the night, so let's say 5 hours of sleep, then get on 3 trains and 2 buses to go out and do 'team activities' at Hampton Court??  When the only reason they're doing it there is because they all live near it and they're getting the activities free because it's all run by one of their clients?  I mean I didn't go into this much detail in my message to her haha, I kept it simple but anyway.  She wrote back saying it was a very emotive e-mail and therefore she doesn't think she should respond to it. [br][br]

Can someone tell me: what the hell kind of 'management' is that?  I don't hate people.  But I hate several people in that office, and that is very unhealthy.  So anyway, I was furious and I decided actually, okay, so I CAN'T stop working in the City, it's financially impossible right now.  But no, I need to leave, so I went job searching online and sent my CV to 6 different jobs.  Everyone wish me luck please!  Fingers crossed I don't just end up in a repeat of this.  My trouble is, I have a pattern: I work somewhere new, I love it, I'm soooo excited about it 'oh it's so much better than the last place' I tell everyone.  Give it 2 months, I start complaining, give it 6 and I feel like dying every time the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I just can't commit to things, never have been able to, had issues with it seriously in school as well, was always absent, I just…am unreliable at heart, but make a good show of being reliable, externally, and really put myself through hell trying to prove I'm reliable, when inwardly I'm just miserable thinking how much I passionately hate everything. [br][br]

On the happy side though (and totally random, I know), I went on Ebay the other day and ordered some stickers of the Russian keyboard keys that stick on over your normal English keyboard, so now when I switch the computer over to Cyrillic I can see the keyboard layout and type in Russian, yay!!  And I've decided, to work on the Russian, I'm printing out one of my own short stories and I'm going to spend however long it takes translating it into Russian, and any grammar I don't know along the way, or any vocabulary, I will learn it until I can translate it.  Because I'm quite good at translating FROM Russian, with a dictionary, but forming sentences, well there's still a lot I don't know, and I figure this will be a good way of forcing me to study it, because I have like zero will power even for things I love and find it so hard to get myself motivated for anything, and anyway when it's all written out by hand I'm going to type it up and then e-mail it to my Armenian friend to check it over, and when it's 'perfect' I'm going to e-mail it to my old Russian teacher (yet another thing I quit – okay yes, good excuse this time, I moved too far away to continue it, but still, I was waiting for a valid excuse for months, not because I didn't like it, but because the thought of leaving the house sent me into panic attacks for absolutely no reason at all). [br][br]

As always, therefore…half of me is just fuming and fed up and depressed and angry as hell…and half of me feels pretty fantastic.  So…I guess I'm hanging in there.