Kind of blue

Maybe it's the cold, maybe it's the matter of my head being a few kilograms lighter after yesterday's operation, maybe it's having to do my yearly HR review, perhaps it was the trough I'd fallen into after the elation of running up 14 flights of stairs in 2:15 after lunch, but I felt very blue this afternoon.

Actually, I think it was most likely the HR review. That may be because you feel robbed of an important part of your soul if you have to summarise your purpose in a series of one line bullets, trying to exactly quantify every thing you've achieved this year. Or it may be because when I'd finished doing it, I worried that I hadn't really achieved that much. Was it worth all the stress and the grumpiness, the early calls and the late evenings, when at the end of it I could only listlessly tick some boxes and struggle to figure out whether something had succeeded or not?

If you're finding it hard to decide if something was a success, that may be a good sign that it wasn't.

Or you're a statistician undergoing an existential crisis.

Possibly I should carry around a laminated card with my achievements on it, so at lows like this I can whip it out and remind myself that I have managed to do some things this year, even if the things I'm most proud of don't seem to be intimately related to my day job.

Or aren't they? Perhaps I should make a case for having a shave being critical to the success of the company. Or that time I got out of bed and emptied the cat's litter tray without being asked.

That's just a guess. I think I did that once, but I couldn't say when. You'd think with a daily blog I'd have the wherewithal to record a momentous event like that.

Next year, I think I'd like to take more days off. I think this year I didn't use up all my holiday allowance, and I had five days left over last year too. That's five other days I could have stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling until midday, that I just can't ever get back.

Well, I probably can. I think those days might roll over to 2011. But skiving off is never so much fun when you don't have somebody to go skive with. Damn the full time jobs of my fiancee and friends!

Actually, just damn the economic requirement for us all to have jobs; you don't want to go damning employment while you still need it.