lately, i've been having mood swings like that shit's fun to do. i don't really know the cause of it, but i know that it's bothering the hell out of me.

i'll be happy, content with life, content with the things that i'm doing, content with my place at work, just content. and then i'll suddenly be in a horrible state of depression where i don't want to do anything. i'll just sit there, at my workstation at work, staring blankly at the screen. no idea what came over me, no idea what to do next.

then, 20 minutes later, i'll be bouncing off the walls, unable to sit still. i'll be pacing around the room, headset on, calling datacenter after datacenter, getting more work done in twenty minutes that i've gotten done all day. i'll be upbeat, sarcastic, having friendly conversations with the datacenter technicians that are basically breaking our servers just by looking at them. but i won't care, at least they're doing their job, and i'm doing mine.

and i'm not even sure if i like my job. yeah, they're giving me a raise, and promoting me. yeah, i've only been here full time 3 months. but i still feel shafted. i feel like i'm wasting away, monitoring over this or that part of the uber-network, fixing problems as they arise. i attempt to bring my design sense into a world where i get reprimanded and praised for saying that the font that they're using is unreadable. that the displays are each taking up at least twenty too many pixels on each side, basically wasting space because they're too lazy to fix it.

i get pulled into random meetings because apparently i'm the local expert on "flashiness" and "design." my manager keeps saying that things need to be more "animated" and "flashy" and i cringe every time i hear those words. i know they'll expect me to come up with something that will wow all the investors. they'll want flash animations that make south park look like it's drawn by a three year old. not only will they want these things, but they'll want me to do it, and to have it done by yesterday.

then they'll tell me to get back to work, and to keep monitoring those damn servers. which leaves me exactly no time to do anything that they wanted me to do, which makes them unhappy, and makes it seem as if i'm being unproductive. but i'm not. they just don't realize that doing what i'm trained to do on a daily basis is a no-free-time job. no spare time. i spend a hour each and every day weeding through email that people feel the need to cc the nocc mailing list, just because they feel that the nocc should know what's going on. that everyone should know every step of the conversation.

example... the phones that we use in the nocc suck. they're supposed to be good phones, made by lucent, but they're not designed for what we're using them for. they're twelve line portable phones. they have all the features that one would even hope to need in a phone and more. but they're designed poorly. we have like twelve of them in the nocc, each with it's own charging base. the base acts as a receiver. but if you're using a phone that has it's base on the other side of the room, your reception sucks. there's so many comptuers in the damn room that there's interference up the wazoo. the phones also have headset jacks. but the phones were so poorly designed that the jack for the headset is on the bottom of the phone. so, you can't charge the phone while the headset's plugged in.

the fcuked up part about the whole thing is that we are having more and more problems with the phones. someone finally got up the guts (or got annoyed enough) to send an angry email to the staff mailing list complaining about the phones. he made a lot of very important points that everyone had been thinking of, but not brave enough to say. then rest of the staff took the email and went nuts. everyone replied to the email and put in their two cents. everyone had to say something, and had to cc everyone else. each and every time. by the time i got to work at three pm, there were at least fifteen messages in my inbox, all having some intricate email conversation about why the phones suck. did i need to read all that? no. should the manager just have said "thank you for the comments, i will resolve the issue." yes. did he? hells no. he berated the issue along with everyone else.

my shift leader comes up to me around four thirty, asking what i'm monitoring. i told him that i didn't have a clue. i told him that i was too busy reading through the hundred plus messages in my inbox, and hadn't even had a moment yet to even think about doing any normal work. he got agitated, which made me agitated that he was pissed at me over something that i had no control over.

and i'm like that every day. jackie gets depressed about something, and immediately i'm depressed like it's fun to do. but she'll snap out of it, while i'm stuck, in a horribly depressed state that i have no idea how to get out of for the next few hours.

i'll lie in bed, curled up into a ball, on the breach of crying (even though i'm physically unable to do so) over nothing. i don't even know what is wrong with me half of the time. but at the same time, i'm lost for what to do. i can't cry, so i can't release any of the emotion that is inside of me. i can't talk about what is wrong, because, frankly, i don't even know.

i feel like an ass because i'm always egging everyone else to talk to me when they're sad or depressed. and when they don't, i get agitated at them, or at myself. but now i'm on the other side. if i knew what was wrong, i'd talk. i'd talk to anyone who would listen. i'd pour out my heart and my mind until i had nothing left to say. but when i don't know, i have to exits, no where to go.

i'm lost in an emotional state that is inexplainable. my mind is somewhere on the other side of the counrty, being diced, sauteed and served.

i don't know what's wrong with me. maybe i'm over emotional. maybe i just have issues. but one thing's for sure...

it's really starting to piss me off.