Seated on my favorite corner of the sofa with my legs propped up on the table, laptop resting comfortably on my legs, I finally dare to put ink onto paper or, as in this case, fingers onto keyboard to try and summarize the events that have unfolded over the past couple of days and left me wondering if the direction that my life has been taking recently is really where I want to go.
"It's been Monday all week along"
The headphones can barely drown out the cacophonous laughter of my flat-mates, all smashed, watching a movie for what seems like the quintillionth time as I try hard to latch onto the multiple streams of thought coursing their way through my hyper-caffeinated being. Every now and then someone leans over to see what I am doing, but only for a moment, and then getting bored by my indifference to this intrusion resume their merry making.
Beastie Boys can only take me so far and the endless cups of coffee punctuated with intermittent shots of nicotine are not helping. I worked my ass off this week clocking in close to 60 hours over the course of five days and get a break tomorrow only because the server will be down for maintenance. Sunday morning will find me back at my desk hacking away at code trying to make some sense of the mess that disguises itself as the "design". All I get in return as I leave office is an admonishment from one of the seniors who complains of my slow rate of work and how he expected the work assigned to me to be over aeons ago. Those words haunt me on the return journey home and I keep wondering if a smart-alecky answer would have been out of place just then, there and then. But as always, I simply move on.
The cold wind brushing against my skin numbs most of my external senses - a perfect twin to the deadening feeling that's been eating away at my insides like a cancer. The question that haunted me for most of my under-graduate days returns and I am once again forced to ask myself - what am I doing with my life? Where am I taking it, or more importantly, where is it taking me? Fate is something I have never, of for that matter, ever will believe in. The thought that something or someone else controls my life and how it unravels is something I find very disconcerting. Just giving myself completely over to the telly is so much easier, lesser energy is expended in flicking across the channels than trying to confront the issues dodging my mind. Furtive attempts to try and make something out of this wet lump longing for a shape to justify the nothingness inside.
It had been a dream of mine to travel across the length and breadth of this country once I graduated, but pressures and mounting financial problems along with a family that wanted me out of the house meant that I would have to look for a job. I hadn't to look far and picked the first I stumbled across - a job that primarily concerns maintaining legacy code and developing banking applications on technology that should have stayed in the 20th century. Needless to say, I am not exactly dying to get to my desk at 0900 hrs every morning but it does keep the home fires burning(quaint ain't it). Reality Bytes.
The sad part is that I know that the only one who can help me get out of this mess and make something out of my life is me, but that seems a responsibility I am not quite ready to take on.
Fortune was right - It's been Monday all week along and the weekend seems no better.