A late start to the night. Got home late, had to meet someone to do this thing for someone else. Dinner, at a rather continental 9:30. Now I've just been reading the news, another daily comfort ritual. And suddenly it's 10:30. I have this entry to write and some of that work, yesss the dreaded work, to do before sleep. I had wanted to finish my taxes, but I lugged home the steel-framed laptop for some good reason so I ought to use it. Considering that I got less than six hours of sleep last night, the list of tasks still before me tonight at 10:30 p.m. is a bit devastating. If I project into tomorrow night, I see the unvoidable exhaustion and the unattainable states of keenness and feeling rested. So sad. It's only Monday.

The really frightening thing about continuing with my current job for an indefinite period is that I can feel myself losing hard-won knowledge. The neural arrangements that form the way I think are being slowly optimized for the job, and my mind, like a corseted waist or a lotus foot, becomes less and less able to take any other shape.

Right now it's the money. Until the need for a stable and substantive income subsides, I'm stuck here.

This morning, I thought for a moment about quitting and what that would be like. Just then I realized that I've been in this job longer than any other job I've ever had, and that leaving it would be a rather profound change. I felt an unexpected anxiety at all that effort abandoned or lost. That strange clinging to something that was just because it existed.

That's when I understood how it is that people can find themselves in a job for so long that they can't ever leave until they retire. It's how they convince themselves to postpone their desires for the immediate demands of a job that is indifferent to their existence. It's because, eventually, the way you think and the work become identical. This is something I'd anticipated for myself and why it was I originally pursued a field I was willing to be shaped into. When I changed my mind, this job was ideal because it demanded very little of me. I worked 30 hours a week, from home, when I wanted to. Sometimes there was a lot of work, sometimes there was not much of it. But there was always an ebb and flow to it, and it was always hands-off: I worked on my terms. Now, and everyday for the past two and a half years, I feel as though I could work constantlly and never satiate the demand. More responsibilities roll in before I can adapt and meet existing ones. The company has grown so large it makes its own culture that is difficult to see beyond. And gradually, I have come to think of the company culture as gluttonous.

The narrowing of my intellectual experience is painful. I grieve the loss of what I once knew and the loss of flexibility in my perception. I wait impatiently for the courage to reclaim it.