Things have been so psychotic at this place the past few days. Our new, unsuspecting VP of Marketing (who rocks hard and reminds me so much of my dot-com boss-turned-good-friend Aura) is trying to instill some semblance of order, and you should see all these people scrambling around like the sky is falling. And I'm continuing to cover as a programmer until we hire a new one (which my boss just informed me might not happen, because VP Lady might delegate the FTE to another position). So I'm not only fed up with uncertainty and politics, I'm overworked, frazzled, headachy, neck-achy, and violently disgruntled.

So TT, my boss, stretched this big piece of tape over my cubicle door this morning with a sign that says "Do Not Disturb." People can't get in and I can't get out, which, TT pointed out, is not necessarily a bad thing. I feel like the sign should say "Please do not stick fingers inside the cage."

Cracker is fabulous.

I keep meaning to write about things in this journal that are sort of bugging me more deeply than general pissed-off work irritations, but I never quite get around to it. Plus, at night, when I could probably think about it more seriously, I've been doing all this relaxation stuff, like power yoga and trolling stores for self-massagers and taking epsom salt baths. So when I'm done with that, I just need to block out everything and read trashy entertainment magazines.

Actually, I've done something that's making me feel very hopeful about the future of my fiction writing (which is not a future I ever thought I'd seriously contemplate). I started a story recently, the first in a long time, and as usual, was going nowhere with it fast. So I sat down and analyzed a great Alice Munro story, really picked it apart, mapped it, studied the structure. Then I did an outline for the story that I wanted to write: a skeleton of what happens in chronological order, a couple of back stories. That forced me to think about what the story is rather than just the premise and a loose idea of where I'm headed with it. Then I took each piece and mapped them in the order I wanted to tell them. Then I started writing. It's enlightening how creative I can be when I have that kind of direction and structure; it's like I spent so much time worrying about what the story would become that my writing really suffered in the process. So I'm a couple of pages into this piece and actually suspect I might finish it. Amazing.