Ambivalent

I have been ambivalent about blogging lately.  Partly I feel like there's so much to say, so I don't want to start and then lose steam.  And partly I know I have a very small audience, so I'm really writing for myself, which I'm not that motivated to do.  So here we go...

This election season, by which I mean this year, has been rough.  I refuse to be cynical because I think it's the easy way out, a way of disengaging and allowing the negative voices to set the tone.  But it's discouraging to see so much hate and hypocrisy and just utter lack of logic and willingness to reason.  Worse than the ugliness is the ways people justify it with religion - I don't say "faith", because I think there is more human misunderstanding and distortion behind it than an active relationship with God at play.  God is love: there's the litmus test, and it's not that hard to see where the love and compassion are lacking.  Love your neighbor, help the poor, seek first the kingdom of God...none of this, to me, points to an ideology of extreme (and I believe ultimately self-defeating) individualism and letting the free market determine if there's any value in our shared natural resources.  It means listening, trying to understand, and seeking mutual and collective benefit - which is admittedly more intellectually challenging than just trying to yell louder and tell more resonant lies in hopes that we can muscle our way ahead without having to acknowledge the legitimacy of the perspectives of others.

That's all vague, and it's because the specifics are too many for me to deal with right now.  Maybe another post for those...for now I am done.

Frustration

I'm writing in part to keep from continuing my streak of going to bed earlier than the five-year-old upstairs...

The rest of me is writing because I'm struggling with my career once again (or still), and I'm feeling trapped in my current job, stuck in an endless loop of answering emails and demands and never really going anywhere that I want to go.  I don't know if I have the energy to pursue something else for real, but I dread most of what I have to look forward to each day.  The bright spots are the individuals I work with, who are lovely...but I am tired of the tedium of project management.  Already feeling, for lack of a more articulate term, "bleh" about work overall, I got an email from my manager that was a delayed response to a revised project timeline proposal that I sent her.  The proposal takes into account a 3-to-4 month client-driven delay and other complications/adjustments and added 6 months onto the project overall.  Her response was to ask if we could proceed with something more like the original timeline.  I don't even know if it's humanly possible to hit the revised interim deadline with the client, so I am less than thrilled with the prospect of raising the bar further, and I feel frustrated that it's all management and coordination and working really hard during a busy and high priority time in my personal life, on account of first, being verbally committed to something with the client before I can chime in and say if it's really possible and second, not getting a reasonable amount of flexibility due to things outside of my control.  I don't want to spend the next 9 months of my life and beyond on this project.  I would love for it to end on time.  But it just isn't going to happen, and I am reasonably certain that nobody is more disappointed by that than I am.

I don't generally like to gripe about the particulars of my job in this particular forum, but I'm just trying to work through what the reasons for staying are.  I think it's unfair and ungrateful to just trash a job and walk out the door without some attempt to reconcile, especially with colleagues who are generally great, but since there are some irreconcilable differences (like my wanting to work in a sustainability-related role and there being little or no opportunity for that in my company), I see the constructive discussion that I will definitely try to have with my manager tomorrow as a stop-gap, not a real solution for me.  I'm discouraged, because I'm not sure what I really want, and I can see the good in where I am now, but it's ultimately not going to be enough.