Skipping

Thank God it's Friday. Today has been another topsy-turvey bipolar sort of day. Not that anything happened particularly. Just one of them days.

Started out with some vague discussion with my manager about my goals for the upcoming year, a discussion I always find both useless as well as terrifying. Quite frankly, my only real goal is to still be working for the same company at the end of the year as the one I started out with at the beginning of the year. It's not much to ask for these days, but there it is. My goal. My aim. My motivation. To have a job.

The trouble is that in any meetings with managers you have to appear to be enthusiastic and keen and 'on board', because we had 26 people laid off only two weeks ago and I don't want my apathy and disinterest to shine through and become #27 on the hit list.

All of this means that I have to act enthusiastic, to act like I care about 'looking for opportunities', to care about 'growing the team', to care about 'empowering our colleagues'. The truth is I don't really care, I just want to work on a project and be left alone doing it. I'm a good worker, my customers are happy with what I deliver. Why can't we just leave it at that?

The meeting left me both anxious as well as angry. Anxious because I have a feeling I'm about to be found out for the fake I really am, and angry because I just went along with everything he said, like so many of the sheep that work there. I want to be rebellious, to tell him, to tell them all what he can do with his acronym bullshit bingo, but what keeps us in our place is the fear of losing our job.

So today I was trying to capture all that anxiety and fear and anger in a Blip, but that sort of feeling is hard to capture on the second floor of an office block in the middle of a not altogether unpleasant industrial estate. So instead, today's blip was taken in my back garden when I got home.

K. is my youngest daughter (you met R., the eldest yesterday) had B., next door's kid over to play. K. is the one nearest the camera. The day was bright and sunny, the weather warm and the mood just right. Laughter, happiness and the world before them. Skipping rope without a care in the world.

"what are you doing dad?"
"nothing, just watching. Mind you don't hurt yourself"

But I don't think she heard. She was too busy enjoying herself to worry about getting hurt, or getting angry and anxious about the things in life that don't really matter.

{snap}

(taken with VintB&W on an iPhone4, post-processed with PerfectlyClear)