Your boyfriend slams into people while walking! Oh, wow! Talk about "playing high" - I don't think I could go that far. Though, sometimes, I've just *stopped* and stood still. For some reason, people who aren't willing to move out of the way for a moving target will avoid you if you're just standing there. It's usually me just freezing and not being able to figure out which way to go when there are too many people all over the place. Ugh, people!

When I (regularly) stay away from sugar/carbs and do weekly cheat days, I do OK. I can overdo it and feel sick, but I feel like it's self-correcting, I try to not go crazy and make myself sick, and I tolerate some sugar just fine. Even if I do go a bit crazy, it tends to make me happy/eager to get back to eating healthy for the next 6 days. I think that the "delay" part was working well for me and helpful in sticking with it (i.e. "Yes, you can have your cheesecake/chocolate... just not until Saturday"). But, I'm so far off course, I'm out of the habit of not eating sugar now, and trying to stop again is pretty tortuous! I think it worked better before because things in my life were less awful. It's hard now, because work is just dragging me down.

So, we had a meeting earlier this week to talk about the future of our group. We're doing more external consulting, and our leadership loves what we're doing and is super excited by it. But, right now, it's all kind of superficial - we go in, figure out what's going on, and come up with a bunch of cool concepts for what they should do. Our graphics folks sketch them up, and we put it in a power point and present. The idea is to win business with this, to get them to say yes so we can build out the concepts.

But, part of this discussion was how my boss doesn't want us to do all that "stupid IA work" (of building things out) - he wants to just do concepting (yes, this is SO him), and if we win business, to hand it over to another team to design/build. That "stupid IA" work is WHAT I DO. Right now, I'm getting pulled into stuff like (as you know) - taking notes, putting together the power points, and writing up the copy for the presentations (because "wow, Guilloche is SO good at writing copy!").

This was pretty offensive, as I'm sure you can imagine. The team was actually a little worried that if we hand things over to another team, they'll screw up our concepts. I stopped him and suggested that we might consider building to the first release then handing things over to someone else to maintain (since that's the thing we really want to avoid). I pointed out that, "This way, those of who DO the 'stupid IA' will actually have work to do, instead of sitting around putting together power points". It's like he didn't get it at all. His response was basically, "everyone at this table is way too seasoned to be bothered with this stuff, I hate to have you guys waste your time on it, maybe we can hire new IAs who are 'greener' who can do this part."

I just wanted to put my head through the table at that point. Really, why do I bother? Talk about in one ear and out the other. I wanted to jump and say, "Dude! Do you really not get it? Did you not just hear me say that that's the stuff I do well, and want to do, and can do, and am happy to do, and you're talking about hiring other people to do it? What the heck is the matter with you?"

Nobody gets it. One of the women, who I like and get along with, said something like, "oh come on, you did more on that project than just take everybody else's graphics and put them in a power point" and I wanted to say, "not really - a good secretary could have done this!"

Oh, and my boss talked about how everybody on the team is creative, EXCEPT for me and the other woman who does research. Because you know, researchers can't be creative... I actually stopped him there too and said, "Excuse me? You don't think I'm creative?" and he said, "well, you know what I mean."

Ugh, it's so horrible! The only good thing was... I had therapy that day, and it's really the first therapy session in a long time where I had something going on in my life to talk about, and it was so fresh that I was able to just blab and blab and blab. My therapist actually said, "wow, this is the most open I've seen you be in here" - and I said, "well, duh - this just happened a couple hours ago! Usually my life is boring and there's nothing to talk about, but this is something!"

So, yeah, I need to put together that portfolio and start focusing in on what I want to do and where I can go do it, and see if there's any way to network more at my job and meet people from other groups. I so much wanted to ask my boss what team we plan to hand these concepts off to (to build), because I'd really like to go work for them instead.

Phew. Thanks for letting me rant. Today's been crazy, because suddenly there are 17 different things people want me to do. One is actually a cool project that I think will be great to get back involved in, but I need to get my software upgraded to work on it, and that's turning out to be a nightmare, of course. Everything is just stupid stuff, but it has to get done.

Oh, and nope - my mom's visit is sometime in July. I'm not sure when (!) - I need to double check my emails, or ask her. Her bday is coming up, so I'll talk to her then and maybe try to get clarification. At this point, I'm not planning to take time off, so it will need to be dinner. Since she'll have her friend, I don't feel guilty at all about that, they can go out during the day and see the town, I'm sure they'll have fun and find plenty to do. Limiting to just going out for dinner doesn't stress me out as much as her staying here would, so I'm not worrying too much.

Anyway, I'm glad you got to have fun at the event and that it was such a clear reminder of what you want to be doing. That's really great! It's nice to have that sense of clarity, when everything usually feels so muddy!

And, glad to hear that your job is at least bearable, because it sounds pretty awful! So, video-port-guy's complaining isn't causing you problems (I hope!)? That's good to hear, it sounded a little worrisome. Glad your friend was validating what you're feeling about the company, but it still doesn't sound like the best place to be!

Ugh. Work is just so frustrating right now. I need to figure out a way out. I wish I had gotten out earlier!!!