crunch. grind.

I've been feeling a bit down this past week. This isn't the crisis it used to be: now I just feel crabby and down for no real reason, and I just make room for it. I see myself when I try to pin it on something (small apartment, future spouse with different taste in music), and just let myself feel down. It comes and goes, moment by moment: let go, laugh, feel sad, let go, laugh, feel sad. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's refreshing, in a way, seeing the endless dance of impermanence and contingency and cause-and-effect playing out just in my thoughts. The fact that everything is contingent and transient is what makes us free to change anything we want, from one moment to the next. I can be a new person! I can be someone laughing, and then I can be someone sad, and then I'll be someone laughing again.

At times like this, my job is not much help. From most jobs I get a sense of productivity and accomplishment, and with this one, not so much. That's really about me, though. If I start thinking, "Wow, I'm a really bad sysadmin, this is horrible," I can calibrate with reality:

• I told them repeatedly, in every interview, that I was a bad sysadmin, don't like being a sysadmin, didn't want to be a sysadmin. They said "Come do this job that's 50% sysadmin," and I said "Sure, why not?". Nobody was hiding anything.
• In 7 weeks no one has come to me to say I should be doing more stuff, or doing it differently.
• People seem generally happy to have me around.
• My boss and team lead both friended me on LinkedIn.

So, whatever. Clearly my perception of myself at my job is crap, and I have to trust things outside myself. Because that's not terrifying at all.