i am Raskolnikov

Catching up seems a hard task these days. Work is demanding. It was my day off today & I went in for five hours, & this coming on the tail of working ten days straight. I've also resigned myself to working over my coming weekend. & this has been par for the course at Capella since I started there in March, what seems like a very, very long two months ago. The hours aren't necessarily wrecking me {I've been choosing most of them}, nor am I disgruntled about it but they have been stymieing my life outside of work a bit. Of course, what I am comparing this against, my four months of unemployment before I started working at Capella where all I had to be concerned about was if my guitar was in tune & my girlfriend was happy. Or even before that, when I worked at Wild Oats & was living alone, only working thirty hours & my sole concerns were baking & sowing my wild oats. The difference is that now I actually have things in my life that I give a damn about, things that I want to give serious time to. Now there's this girl, this band, my roommate, español, James Joyce, writing, my family, my friends, my future, & it's tough finding time for all of them.

Like a few nights ago when I split a sixpack of tall boys with Tony & we played a few games of chess. I know I took him the first game. By the second I was a bit hazy off the Oly & not thinking ahead; lost that one. The third his inebriation had caught up & surpassed mine like the tortoise & a game that should have been his became mine.

Also, there's the issue of what I get paid for the time I put in. & as is with my view of how my time should be spent, my conception of what I should be getting paid is heavily misguided by bias. This isn't your typical employee feeling they are worth more than their employer feels they are, no this is much more serious. Right now I making just over eight hundred dollars a month; in 2003 I made 1200 a month, on unemployment. For eight months I was ignominious, I debauched & debased, I was capricious & callous, I didn't care about anything or anyone & for that I was paid by the state a handsome wage. Now I'm clean(er), I do give a damn, I work my ass off & I'm currently trying to figure what to cut from my budget to make rent.

balls.