green to red, machinehead

I had thought that I might be able to quit working around nine or ten, given that I got home around 7:30 after having a quick dinner with my friend Sean - it was half work, half fun, given that we had fun (of sorts) while discussing work at Amarin Thai in Mountain View. However, I instead worked until now. Boo. I'm trying to get through stuff so that I don't have to work over the weekend and can instead focus my efforts on my romance novel, but we'll see how it goes.

Today was fine, but I've had a stomach ache for a couple of days. If nothing else, I need to take time off so that I will start taking better care of myself, and perhaps (no promises!) break my intense diet coke addiction. Only time will tell on the second part of that dream, but I think I would naturally take better care of myself if I wasn't stressed all the time (thus stopping my stress-eating), and if I got enough sleep (which will only happen when I stop working and having stress-nightmares).

This isn't to say that my job is all bad, however - there are projects that I rally like, and I love the people I work with, I just have about twenty more projects than I really should have. I described it to someone tonight as the same feeling you get when you eat too much ice cream - it's fun and tasty and you keep piling on more, until your brain freezes and you feel sick to your stomach.

Then again, perhaps the better metaphor would be an abusive relationship - I tend to respond well to praise (which I've been getting a nice quantity of recently, in addition to getting promoted), and so even though I know this job is bad for me and I need to follow my other dreams and escape to freedom and look out for myself and my health and sanity, I keep having the typical abused/dependent thoughts of 'How will they survive without me?' and 'What if no one else wants me?' and 'They're really not so bad, it's my fault for not setting limits' and 'I should just suck it up for the kids' (in this case, my coworkers/team). Ugh.

I think I'll go to bed, where I hopefully won't have any nightmares. The four-day weekend starts tomorrow night! Yay!