all the nobody people

I can do this new job. It's doable. Bits of it I'm actually good at and don't loathe. So far, though, my ability to come to terms with 9-5 admin is being severely compromised by two things.

1. Traffic. Having been a hedonistic part-timer or home researcher for fifteen years, I have a deep resentment at having to spend an hour of every day in traffic. I'm going to have to leave the house indecently early to avoid rush hour, and it bites that the lack of sleep is more desirable than the traffic experience. It seriously makes me doubt the worth of the salary.

Rush-hour traffic is the absolute epitome of everything that is wrong with twenty-first century humanity as a species. It's a selfish, narcissitic, time-wasting, annoyance-causing unnecessity, to sit stewing in our individual chunks of metal as a bracket to our daily activities. It wastes resources, causes emissions, pollutes, clogs and clutters. It's unaesthetic, but worse, it's inefficient. Anyone could design a more rational system, but we're too snarled up in the complexities and status quo of capitalism, metropolitan living and gosh-darned habit to actually implement it.

And traffic brings out absolutely the worst in human beings, who manifest extreme selfishness, impatience, pushiness, stupidity and whatever the opposite is of civic-mindedness. Traffic sucks, blows and festers in exactly the same way that human culture currently sucks, blows and festers. If a wave of a magic wand could turn all commuters everywhere into orang-utans, I'd be waving 'til my elbow cricked. Bleah.

2. Over-emotionality. I'm good at bits of this job because I fundamentally like students and empathise with their problems. Empathy can be a bugger. I've just had to lock myself into my office for ten minutes in order to cry, having heard the story from the incredibly sweet Zimbabwean student whose curriculum is a disaster area. His widowed mother committed suicide last year, leaving him the sole adult in charge of two younger siblings. He's not sure if her death was the result of the Zim situation, or family issues. He's doing his damndest to get on with life.

Actually, the traffic's not so bad.