February 19–May 19, 2005 — Waiting for sleep

I guess things are going alright at the office. We made it through our first year, but we’re still not out of debt. It always seems within our reach, and it always manages to slip away. Such are the problems of trying to pay ourselves.

We end up taking on a lot of strange projects hoping to make enough money to escape debt and become self-sufficient. One of the bigger ones was a Flash-based web site for kids with a particular skin disorder. It was surreal spending days working on putting together a site hosted by a girl with a rash and her imaginary friend (the latter in the form of a talking key chain). And I guess we made fun of kids with skin disorders a lot in the process, but I think it was sort of okay since I have the same skin disorder as the children who are our site’s target market.

When we decided to do this web site I’d never done anything with Flash before, but I thought I could probably figure it out. And I guess I did, but it was one of the most intensely frustrating work experiences I’ve ever had. Not because it was particularly hard, but because there were so many inexplicable bugs and quirks to sort through that working on the site in a deadline-induced panic made me much more irritable than a normal case of deadline-induced panic.

A few weeks later we had another project to do that involved Flash (this time advertising a loyalty program for casino goers — I’m really picking clients I believe in these days), and it went much more smoothly. My panicked and aimless crash course in Flash had taught me something after all.

Despite our best efforts, though, we’re not making very much money. Some months we’re barely able to pay ourselves above that month’s rent, so no amount of budgeting can help.

And I guess I’m there a lot; friends keep telling me that it seems like I’m at work all the time. And maybe I am. But sometimes I really don’t think it’s in the way they mean, that I have so much work I couldn’t leave. I think being at work is a way for me to avoid thinking about how little else I have to do. If I wasn’t at work I’d be at home wishing there was something I could do or someone I could talk to.

My family still worries about me. I couldn’t go home for Easter, and my dad talked to me about it a bit. He wasn’t upset; he just thinks I need to give myself more breaks. And I probably should.

He was a lot less rambling about it than I’ve just been, though. And then he summed it up with a quote from Charles de Gaulle, the one about graveyards being full of indispensable men.

I need to learn to say what I mean. Having a few more good quotes to throw around wouldn’t hurt, either.