Meh.

*curls up in fetal position and bleats like a little lamby*

As things go, I've got it great right now. I'm not pregnant (or afraid that I might be... or afraid that I might NOT be). I have my job. I LIKE my job. I'm not injured. I don't have a test coming up. I don't have homework, or school, or an impossible schedule. No dumb bitch has decided to ruin my life. I still have my boyfriend AND he loves me. So why do I feel like I want to wring someone's neck?

Let's start with the fact that I didn't get a chance to eat breakfast this morning. Own fault, but still. It's probably the root of this morning's bad mood.

The major stressor I think is work. Funny, since my job really isn't THAT stressful. Just in the past week a number of minor annoyances have cropped up. First, three people I work with got laid off last week so now there's that lurking worry in the background -- what if things don't pick up? What if my hours get cut or I get laid off too? How will I be able to afford my living expenses? How many jobs would I have to work to pay my rent? What about insurance? Should I be looking for another job now? From what my boss said this is our slowest time of the year, and this happened last year -- five people got laid off and four of them were re-hired after the new year. I'm not REALLY that worried about my job security but nothing is ever certain. The atmosphere at work isn't quite as relaxed as it was before.

Next, is the fact that for the last two months I've been working on this project that I'm really NOT that interested in... I mean, not that it's HARD really, or even like it's something dumb... my boss wants me to make a catalog/shopping cart system thing, "Amazon caliber" he said, lots of features, the works. But the catch is that I'm not designing it for a specific seller or anything, mine has to be really general so we could sell it to any kind of business who'd want to sell things on the internet. Clothes, lawnmowers, maple syrup. Do you see the issues? In generalizing it so much it has to lack some of the coolness it could have if it was specifically tailored to one type of product. Big retail websites -- Old Navy, Wal-Mart, ThinkGeek.com, Amazon -- have the advantage of knowing exactly what kinds of products they're selling. Even if they're selling a bazillion different types of things, they can break it down into sections, and tailor each section to the types of products sold there. Whereas I have no idea what's being sold, so I have to break it down to the most general case, which limits a lot of the cool stuff that could potentially be done.

Besides, Amazon is awesome, but only Amazon can be Amazon. That site wasn't built bottom-up by a single person. It would take me years to reach that caliber, even disregarding the fact that my catalog thing has to be dumbed down to accommodate whatever kinds of products anyone could think up.

And on top of that... it's a good idea... but doesn't EVERYONE make catalogs? I mean... isn't this the most overdone thing in existence? You can buy better ones than the one I'm working on. But, I don't have any ideas of better things to be doing at the moment. Joe has a bunch. ;) But I'm just a worker bee for now.

Speaking of new ideas (and specifically, Joe's ideas), over the summer I was working on something for my sweet: websites for teachers. Easily adminable, so they can post homework, announcements, whatever... eventually grades and progress reports too, if I could figure that out. A nice-looking, easy-to-maintain, inexpensive website for a teacher... further, for a school, even a district. Whatever. Point is, it's really a good idea, and I didn't have any other projects at the time so I asked my boss if I could play around with the idea, and he said sure. So THEN, last week I come to find out -- we already HAVE this. BuffNET does, I mean -- we already have a school website system, and one school is even using it now. AND it was put into place before I even started working here. That's cool and all, but really... you'd think my boss would have mentioned that to me when I first brought the idea to him, rather than letting me just work on the exact same project for a month or more, completely oblivious. That just irked me.

Further on that comes the newest headache, courtesy of our company prez. He thinks we should pretty much give away these websites to schools, which is cool -- it would definitely make schools more apt to choose our product over somebody else's. But how will we make money? Advertising. He wants me and the other PHP guy to implement this impossibly complicated scheme so that companies could pay us to advertise on these school websites. Maybe they only want to run their ad for 15 days, to all public high schools in Buffalo. Or 30 days to all high schools in WNY, central TX, and southern CA. And some schools might not want ads, or might not want ads from certain companies, or might not want ads on certain pages, or might only want certain ads on certain pages. And the advertisers of course will want to see statistics -- how many times their ad was viewed, how many times it was clicked on, which day of the week, what time of day, etc etc. Get the picture? This thing is monstrous and ugly and the more we try to break it down the more complicated it gets. And on top of that I'm really not sure I like the idea of advertising on school websites anyway. I mean, the one school who actually has a site through us now has advertising and I guess they're making money off it so I guess that's good. But I dunno, I liken it to putting up billboards in the hallway or something. I mean, there are advertisements in my high school yearbook and that doesn't bug me, but those are all local businesses... I don't know where the line gets drawn... there's just something about the whole thing that I don't like. But whatever.

We don't get Christmas Eve off. We do get a half-day, and I can take it off if I want to but I'll lose the holiday pay... how important is it to have breakfast at McDonald's with the fam on Christmas Eve morning? If I work half a day I'll be home in time for dinner and church, I guess those are the important things. I'm not sure what I should do.

I will miss all of Christmas season with my family this year. I won't decorate the tree or see the house all decorated or watch the presents pile up or watch our Christmas tape or any of our other Christmas movies. My ornaments won't be on our tree, I'll have my own tree and the cat will probably knock it over and eat my memories. Christmas has always been my favorite season, my favorite holiday, but it just isn't the same this year. If my sister gets a new job by then she probably won't even be there. What's Christmas without my sister? Who will wake me up at 7 to open our stockings? She'll be home for Thanksgiving it looks like now. I won't. Should I? I could. What's Thanksgiving without my family? Where should I be? I don't know how to handle this... someday I'll have a family and we'll make our own traditions but now, it's just me, I live 3 hours away from my family and I have to get used to the idea that I've grown up, I can't cling to our traditions the way I always have because it just isn't possible. How important is breakfast on Christmas Eve -- more important than work? What about church? What happens when I want to go to the midnight service but I know they'll be serving Communion? Do I sit it out? Do I just stay home and avoid it altogether? When do I outgrow Mickey's Christmas Carol and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? What's so important about opening stockings before breakfast... making homemade cinnamon rolls... presents after breakfast with Grandma? Gifts before lunch at my grandfather's? Christmas isn't the same since my grandmother died. Will I miss brunch at Brae Loch this year?

Holidays will be tense because of my cousin this year. I don't even know which cousins will show up, anyway. We don't have anything in common anymore.

I'm not sure what to do about all that.

My cat's out of food and needs a new box of cat litter and a scratching post. I have 2 loads of laundry to do and my house hasn't been vacuumed in weeks. Tonight is supposed to be an orientation meeting for my health insurance... I missed last month's because we went to see Steve Almond read. I'll miss tonight because I want to spend the evening with Joe. My paychecks this month are short because they neglected to charge me for my first two months of coverage so it's all coming out this month. I haven't made an appointment to get Asher fixed, and I haven't taken my car anywhere to get checked out before winter. I started Christmas shopping but there's still a long way to go.

I FEEL like I just want to go home and forget that the rest of the world exists. I don't want to worry about religion or family or work. I want the cat to curl up on my lap and fall asleep, or at least behave. I want to lose myself in playing the Sims, in the magical imaginary world where I am God. Maybe I just want to sleep. I don't know what I want. Time off of work. A three-day weekend, or four-day weekend, or how about a five-day vacation somewhere far away? All expenses paid. I don't really know what's up with me but I'm getting to a point that I don't think I can handle. It's not like it's all that bad when you look at it. There's no big huge thing sitting on my shoulders like there is on the shoulders of a lot of other people I know (or know of). It's just little things. Feathers. The proverbial straws. I think it has a lot to do with the impending holiday season. I think I will eventually be fine. I think if everybody else was fine I would be too, but everyone else's shit is piled a lot deeper than mine. And that's okay, you're entitled to your dung and I'm entitled to mine... but doesn't anybody have a shovel?