Beyond the disembodied female voice and the superheated, shifting desert sand, there is nothing but a breakbeat and a handful of grimy, coke-coated change on a subway train.

—

Now. Go. Down.

We live in a world normalized for discrete functional units whose boundaries are congruent with those of financial units. And personal identities are generally problematic for those functional units that don’t traffic in identities as trade.

What I’m getting at is that once again, I am getting the definite sense that my personal web site may be about to conflict with my professional life and my income potential. That’s not okay; I am unable to be one of the people who sublimates my individuality entirely for decades in order to participate materially in the capital economy just to be self-sufficient.

Cash and bodily survival are not good enough reasons for me to commit identity-suicide; but unless I commit identity-suicide, I may not have cash or bodily survival to enjoy the sense of moral superiority that comes from taking such a principled stand.

Oh well. I speak. I will continue to speak. If that makes me unemployable or unfit for public appearance without escort, I suppose I’ll have to transition into the identity industries.

In my first three weeks on the job since arrival, I have handled 796 incoming email messages and sent 407 messages by email. That means an average of 66 incoming issues a day and an average of 34 answers or resolutions a day by email. That’s in addition to meetings (of which there seem to be an endless stream) and phone calls.

No wonder I don’t seem to have time to do any of the work that the emails, meetings, and phone calls are actually about. Especially since I’m new and still only have a half-baked idea of what’s going on a lot of the time.

Heh… There’s an element of amusement to this. (But I do also want to do a really good job, at anything that I do.)

—

Today has been very, very busy. Probably the busiest day since I got here. I haven’t had much time to attend to my email today. That’s bad, because there are currently 18 of them red-flagged “for follow up,” some of them left over from yesterday, and they’re all things that are gonna take a while, so I’ve sort of put them off.

Guess they’ll have to wait until after the weekend.

It may be time (and I may be “old enough” now to get away with it) to start telling people “no” a lot more than I have been, or “you’ll have to wait a week” or things like that.

Stresssssssssssssssssssss, aghhhhhhhhhh.

I miss the days when I had a big huge video gaming / video editing rig and a superfast Internet pipe and a massive SCSI-3 RAID and enough gaming horsepower to run games at 1600×1200 2xFSAA on my 19″ monitor.

I have to get back to that point again.

—

In the meantime, I hope today is a nice, calm, steady Friday in which I can simply crawl gradually through my work and get it all done.

Probably not, but I can hope.