The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. This is the third straight weekend worked through, which is something I don't really mind terribly -- I've gone months and months like this before -- but which I recognize as questionable in effectiveness over time. If all you do is work, it's easy to slide into a mode of semi-constant semi-production: there's nothing to look forward to at the end of a task but the next task, so you don't really dig in and focus the way you might if, say, you had a big fun trip planned once work was done.

Yeah, 12 hour days at 66% productivity; belly up to the desk and stare into your pint of workahol, rummy. This is how so many "professional" people end up with broken relationships and no social life, I think, and it's frightening to see it might be happening to me.

Life is contrasts, a holy waltz of experience. Change is the only thing we can perceive. I believe it's true on a literal/micro level, and more importantly at a philosophical meta/macro level too. The feeling you get from moving fast isn't the speed itself, it's the delta, the change. It's physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, the difference in the velocity-vector over time. That's what we feel.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I've been more than a little rut-stuck lately, and rolling with the dayjob 24/7 isn't helping much. I feel numb and restless. It was a convenient distraction at first, a nice excuse to shut out petty personal problems, but now we're down to the grind, and the pressure is throwing all my psychic flaws into sharper relief than ever. I'm struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

Things I'm spinning my wheels over:

• Ambition, the hungry dynamo within, is starting to give me heartburn. How is all this leading to global salvation again?
• Having lived here for a year and a half, and still feeling like a social retard, not fully alive in my own skin.
• Faces from the past, squandered love, etc. Don't ever let a girl tell you she's yr only chance at happiness, even in jest. Those statements have a way of sticking.

I suppose I'm questioning my whole situation, struggling through a particularly un-fun couple of weeks and feeling especially confined by my environment. This temporal crunch will pass, and I accept the fact that existential crises are persistent, that we don't ever really answer these questions. But still. The journey may be the purpose but I also want to feel some goddamn progress.

I want to feel. Change. Acceleration. Shifting vectors.

Progress. I want to believe in the divinity of my forward momentum. I want to make for that light at the end of the tunnel. I want something more than cliché catchphrases and bittersweet memories to cling to.

Fuck.

Oh well. Back to work. Next week I'll get my ass up to Oregon, see my mom, see some good friends I haven't seen in years. Perhaps swimming back upstream will help me renew myself.