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Location: Home.
Listening: "Miserere Paraphrase" ~ soundtrack for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

I quote Zack de la Rocha, although I'm listening to Michael Nyman. Both are appropriate--the Nyman to calm me and the de la Rocha to sum up the emotional state I've been in for the past few days since the party at Lisette's.

My manager, Jeff, flew into Long Beach on Monday and was on-site for the entirety of this past week. During that time, I watched my job function rapidly devolve from hardware distribution and customer relations to warehouse dock worker and lackey to abusive employees from HBO, ESPN and Disney. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem--the company is suffering hard times and I have never had a problem pitching in and doing my share in situations like that--except for the fact that I wasn't consulted prior to these changes. I was informed that I would be taking on extra responsibilities without a raise in pay or even acknowledgement, apparently, that I'm doing more than I signed on for. To top it off, Jeff cut out at noon on Thursday after lying to Lucenda and I about meeting with Disney (he told Hitoshi later that he wasn't meeting with them but not to tell anyone). Hitoshi, being more loyal to the team than to Jeff, promptly told us. We were all stunned.

Menawhile, the rest of the company is rapidly going the way of the British schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. Morale is nonexistent. Directors are hitting on me during fire drills, others openly flirt with the secretaries and drink on their lunch hour. The dress code is rapidly loosening to include jeans everyday. Free soft drinks are being hoarded in anticipation of a supply cut-off scheduled for later this month. Wednesday morning, someone loudly referred to our ex-CEO as the "king rat jumping ship" . I'm waiting for the head of Space Systems Acquisitions to walk in with a conch shell.

All of these conditions have tripled the amount of stress I incur on a daily basis and I haven't been handling this well at all. When my job atmosphere is unbalanced, my whole life gets thrown off-kilter and every little setback becomes a source of intense frustration. I've been simmering for months and these past few days turned up the heat higher than I thought possible.

Last night, after Peter left for Los Angeles to meet with the executives at Masini (things on that end are going very well, but I won't say more about it until it's said and done--I'm a little superstitious that way), I broke. For about three hours, I let myself fall apart--sob over the keyboard, punch a few walls, consider breaking a few glasses (the only thing that stopped me was the issue of shards in the carpet)--and finally settled in to drink myself back down to some sense of calm. This happens rarely--it occurred about once or twice a year when I was in school and dealing with my parents' and my own expectations for my future in the midst of the absolute chaos I was living in at the time. Post-college, it's happened about twice.

When these instances do occur, I try to confine them to controlled spaces where I can ride them out alone--not necessarily because I have or would hurt anyone else, but because I have no desire for anyone to see me this way. I don't drift apart in flakes, like snowfall--I explode--and it's never easy for myself or anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. There have been some who have delighted in provoking me when I'm in these rages--but more have been either terrified or deeply disturbed by them. They're hard for me to explain, so I often don't even try unless it's absolutely necessary. They're a side effect of always trying to stay on the surface--internalizing everything that causes me pain or distress--while I paddle like hell underneath. Sometimes, as in this case, I just can't keep paddling and I have to release everything that's been comfortably tucked away before it overwhelms me.

So I broke down--and, by the time Peter returned around 11 or so, had managed to put myself back together into some semblance of Leigh.

Something had to give--and apparently that something, at that moment, was me.

Peter returned with news of the meetings and I told him about my evening. We talked and determined that it's time for me to revise my timeline for leaving my job. It was also determined that I need to begin working on something I truly care about--a project that will help me get through the next month or so at PAS without ending up committed.

That project is called Jupiter. But more on that later...