The Prodigal WebStress Returns

It has taken me just over a month to write my 101st blog.

Not to say that its actually taken me an entire month to write the blog itself, just to find my way back to my blog.

I did think at one stage, in the murky weeks within this post and the last, that I might never write in it again. Something in a time that had past, a part of my life that had concluded, like my never cared for and much neglected MySpace page (of which I apologise to all those people who send me messages demanding some vague acknowledgement of my virtual presence and remain reciprocal comment/message-neglected).

In The Exhaustion, the few weeks directly following my last blog, where poorliness fused with exhaustion effortlessly to allow puppy wee to wash over and consume me (not literally), I couldn't imagine ever managing to scrape back the time I had once taken for granted in writing my blogs. As Newfy grew, so frustratingly did my workload and, sadly, my backfat as my once rigorous and almost commendable exercise regime deflated and sat neglected in an uncomfortable position not exactly at the back of my mind, more in-mind-just-enough-to-enduce-guilt-but-not-enough-to-get-up-at-5am-to-fit-in.

Every second became a precious commodity. Every moment of my time calculated and assigned to a specific task, whether I was willing or not. My day became like a Rubix Cube - slide one event here, slot another in here. Newfy's toilet and exercise breaks were fitted in and around angry Skype faces and verbal abuse to my long suffering Project Managers about various clients clients and unsavoury feedback that triggered yet more angry Skype faces and verbal abuse, sleep was fitted in and around Newfy's night time excrement escapades.

Despite my exhaustion, I look back over the last month and fondly regard it, now in the comfortable and safe haze of complete night's sleep and non-ammonia smelling floors, as the happiest month of my year so far.

Newfy is now roughly the size of a small car (if a small car were the same size as a Labrador, but it all depends which angle you're looking from). She urinates only in the house now when she is desperate or over excited (much like I imagine my bladder will go as I imagine incontinence will welcome me with open arms like an old friend in my advancing years) and sleeps beside me during the day, waking only to eat and humour me and act vaguely puppy like by playing with various bits of foliage in the garden. My boyfriend and I are the overly proud and doting parents who say ‘I know other people say their dogs are clever but Newfy really is’ in sycophantic tones that even induce nausea in me on occasions.

Gradually my life is resuming, she is moulding around fragments of a life that I once had, or rather they are fitting themselves gradually in and around her. Work is subsiding, or at least sheer exhaustion and overwhelming despondence has finally reunited my overly zealous working attitude with a healthy dose of remembering that I don’t actually like being a web designer, especially not one that has to pander to the ever changing, continually erratic and constantly unfathomable ideas of agency clients.

It is at least a position that I am familiar with, a bed of nails but a bed nonetheless, selling my soul as a creative whore, legs in the air, yes I’ll make that rollover in pink and orange, yes I’ll put an unsightly flash across a once beautiful banner, yes I’ll change that back to the version I originally designed despite introducing several stages of ill conceived redesigns commissioned by your oh so misguided selves, lie back and think of England, its only a job, its only money.

A brief engagement with inciting passion, commitment and enthusiasm in my job was swiftly rewarded with the reminder that I don’t really like my chosen vocation after all and once reunited with my former WebStress self, after a short deviation into the un-chartered territory of entertaining the notion of career potential, I began this morning to, well, not so much as relax, but start to sow the formerly nurtured but now sadly neglected delicate seedlings of understanding that if I work every conceivable moment the work still won’t get done so a few mislaid time fragments to return to a fraction of the normal abuse of time that most workers harness throughout their day isn’t such a bad thing.

I didn’t get it quite right today. But I did finish bang on time, if I’m honest a good 10 minutes before hand (but my conscience wasn’t happy about it, I had some serious negotiation to do). The fact that I had started an hour and ten minutes earlier than normal somewhat overshadows this achievement, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

So in recapturing elements of my former life, I have gained back the ability to sit at my computer out-of-hours without feeling physically sick, and tonight, after a dry-run writing a few severely neglected correspondence yesterday, I have been able to type, Flash’s Actionscript panel folded neatly away, Photoshop hidden out of view, work email closed and almost-kind-of-not-really-but-it’s-a-good-first-try forgotten.

Returning to my blog has been like the awkward meeting of two once inseparable, dependent soul mates. Over the last month I have laid in bed at night, seeing the paragraphs trickle into formation, an endless conversation with myself, like I would have done with my stories if I had been writing my blog and filtered out these thoughts that I was so used to exhaling during stolen moments during my day.

It hasn’t been effortless. It is strange to see my uncensored words, my fingers typically only escaping from their design confines during the day for restrained, polite work emails. I have said nothing. It is rare when I write I write anything of intention. Paragraphs will appear sailing away from the vague area of concern. But it is also rare that I sit down to write without knowing what I will write about, without knowing where to start. I wasn’t intending to do a catch-up, but it has unfolded that way, in uneasy chunks, a fragment and then an abrupt turn, too many thoughts, too many lost over this last month.

Tomorrow I will attempt to at least in some way talk about something vaguely topical.

Perhaps a witty and informative discussion on the recent revelation that pasties may not, after all, have originated from Cornwall, and may be a conception of our smug Devonian neighbours as cited on the BBC news website today (I was not too concerned at this revelation as the Cornish have a somewhat tentative evidence of cave paintings indicating their presence in 8,000BC Cornwall).

Perhaps.