BrainDrain

Sometime last week I had a very traumatic experience. It must have been around 11pm or so and I think I was straightening things up before I went to bed. Everything was all fine and dandy and I had just finished watching Jay Leno’s monologue like I usually do. The show went to commercial break. All of a sudden some creepy music comes on and the commercial for that frickin’ Exorcism of Emily Rose movie starts running. I think I pretty much stood in place as the commercial went through the usual routine of inticement with flashes of clips and the voice over dude giving an intriguing, yet incomplete, summary of the story line. Stupid thing totally played on my curiousity. "What happened to Emily Rose?" Stupid tagline.

I stared at the screen as the characters talked about how there was "no cure for the Devil" and similarly lovely catch phrases that will obviously insure anyone of pleasant dreams of candy canes and lollipops. Of course, these  candy canes and lollipops would all have demon heads and gaping black mouths reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s painting "The Scream" (which, by the way has been STOLEN from the Oslo Museum and has yet to be found).

As the commercial ended I ran around turning on the lights with my mace in my right hand aimed in-no-particular-direction (yeaaaa, ’cause demons’ gaping eye holes are totally sensitive to pepper spray….riiiiight). I had the incessant urge to call mommy. From somewhere, my rational mind broke free and admonished me about how late it was and that I should not let such things scare me. I changed the channel and Sienfeld, or something similarly mundane, was on and I watched a little bit to balance out the fight-or-flight spasm by body had just gone through.   

Yeaaaaa, so that was the frickin’ commercial.  I love scary movies but exorcism ones freak me out especially if they are based on true stories. HELLO….a true frickin’ story, people! Yeaaaa. So, I decided that I don’t need to see the movie. The commercial was enough.

Voice over dude, I don’t give a crap what happened to Emily Rose. I don’t even wanna know.

Work has been insane these past two weeks. I think I’ve clocked about 70 hours one week alone. IN-frickin-SANE. I mean, I like my work but they really don’t pay us enough to do all that we do. And the worse part is that we have to be nice about it to students, our co-workers, our bosses, and the other departments who wanted this done "yesterday." We get props every once in a while and that totally keeps us going, I guess. It’s funny but nowadays I value "thank yous" more than a paycheck. Sometimes I think its like I’m a "volunteer".

People are quitting right and left. Another lady quit last week saying that she didn’t earn a masters to be making phonecalls. "HA", I say, frickin’ "HA". It makes me totally rethink the reason I’m here. I mean, I have a masters too. I think I’ve simply convinced myself that this self-inflicted trial is supposed to gain me experience which, by default, it does. However, it is detrimental in so many ways.

We are so submerged in work that we don’t have time to think of our plight. We just "do or die", so to speak. There is not one person in here that doesn’t shoulder an inordinate amount of stress when they go home. It’s funny because some days I’m so tempted to take up drinking just so I can de-stress at the end of the day. My co-workers tell me that they didn’t have health problems until they started working here. So, it’s kind of li—

(wooooaaah, a hot guy just walked by my window…)

Anyway, ahem, getting back to wo—

(woaaaah, now he’s walking back….what a hottie!…hold on….lemme go peek through the blinds…)

Where was I? Oh, yes, so work is so detrimental to my well-being. Yet, I’m still here. My mom asked me the other day, "Who are you working all this over time for, monay? All this and what have they given you?" And honestly, I don’t think I have an answer that would satisfy her. Or one that would satisfy me either.