Playing Nice And The Collateral Damage

Yeah, I know that the title sounds a little bit unhappy (heck, any title with the words "collateral damage" has a tendency to spread the burnt marshmallow goodness of unhappiness around), but the events of the past month have gelled together to affect everything in my tidy little cyber world/real world in ways that I wouldn't thought possible.

Well, maybe I did, but that's beside the point.

The point is that because of what has gone on in the past month, all of which I've alluded to in a roundabout way here on the blog (and in-depth to friends behind the scenes), I have been forced to pursue a course of action that I'm not too thrilled about, which in turn has caused a nasty reaction elsewhere, which I'm also not too thrilled about.

Course of action: Playing Nice

In order to get through the upcoming weeks with as little grief as humanly possible and to also partially offset what punishment that I'm being hit with next month, I have been "playing nice". "Playing Nice" is simply the art of being civil and polite when you don't really want to, but have to in order to stay out of further trouble.

In my case, its basically only speaking when I'm spoken to, doing my job and keeping to my own devices to the best of my ability. It's also keeping the body language down to a minimum as well. I do what I need to do, I do what I'm told, and that's about the bottom line.

Course of reaction: Collateral Damage

As you might've guessed, there is quite a bit of collateral damage associated with doing what I have to do at work, and just like in a military offensive or a natural calamity, it has touched all aspects of my life.

1} Health. Because of the stress that is my job, it has started to affect my diabetes. I am getting way above average fasting, early morning and afternoon sugar readings, which in turn can (and has) cause noted personality/physical changes that can often make themselves known in the worse ways possible. It's wickedly tough when you're trying to get a grip on a permanent malady to begin with, but adding unwanted outside influences just makes it doubly hard to live a normal life.

2} Writing. Writing remains the only outlet for getting rid of the stress and aggravation that my job has created. Whereas the last time something like this happened and I poured out my anger in my writing, it had grave consequences (see the post "I Done Do'od It! My 200th Post!", specifically the part written by my good friend Gumby The Cat) that took me about two years to fix.

This time around, I've been able to funnel it towards my latest project, and let me tell you, it has not been pretty. And when I say "not been pretty", I mean that it's gone way far and completely beyond my personal comfort level. I would also say that my current spurt of writing could be called "the initial climax", simply because the level of conflict has been ratcheted up to where it needs to be in order to get to the finish line.

3} Blogging. Not only has this crap affected my writing, but it has also affected my blogging as well, be it writing blog posts or commenting on your blog posts. Let's start with writing blog posts. A good example on how this has affected my blogging would be not only to look at this past Monday's post and the previous Monday's post, but this post as well. Not very pretty is it?

Even less prettier is the fact that I've been sort of missing in action on a good chunk of your blogs as well. I've mentioned before that whenever I get into one of these state of minds, in which I'm wired a little weird, I make a concentrated effort in not inflicting myself on you and your blog until I can get back to a comfortable degree of normalcy.

4} Facebook. Yeah, this has even affected the way I do Facebook now. No longer do I have my privacy levels set in such a way that people can get to know me (like friends of friends reading my status updates). Instead, I have my privacy levels set in such a way that you can't get to know me unless you're my friend, or if you happen to follow/read my blog on Facebook (yup, if you can't get your daily fix the old fashioned way, my blog can be found through Facebook's Networked blogs). As for friends, I've actually binged and purged my list of everyone who is a co-worker of mine at my current job (mostly for the potential of other people spying on me), so all of the people in my list are people who I've either used to work with and remain good friends, people who I've met in the chat rooms, people I've met in the real world and some of the people I've met through the blog world. And as for status updates, they've been reduced to basically my blog feed on Facebook. Not very pretty at all, but it is what it is.

So there you have it, a scientific theory applied to the real world and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Because I don't want to be all doom and gloom on a Friday, I will leave you with a music clip.

The Eagles, Take It Easy