Method to Madness

My posts seem to be getting less and less sane every day, it seems.

I have the feeling that it has something to do with my workload. We're nearing the end of the year now, after all, and the office is in a mad scramble to finish everything before the onset of 2006. What makes things stressful at the moment is that I've had to work with half a staff as opposed to the optimal employee population. (Darn corporate pirates.)

That, and I've spent the last week doing nothing but encoding. You haven't lived till you've had to add little dashes to a listing of a thousand phone numbers, folks.

I suspect that the levels of degradation (if it can be called degradation, that is) are progressive here. The tendency between work stress and blog posts may be proportional: The more frazzled you are, the stranger your writings turn out.

Last November was good to me for some reason; Almost everything I posted then, I think, had a certain modicum of insight that attracted like-minded readers. November, however, coincided with the fact that I had just returned from a three-week vacation in the US, and at that time I was only starting my attack on the piles of work on my desk.

There could have been another factor at hand, though: As I was unable to blog regularly during my October vacation, it's entirely possible that all the pent-up ideas just decided to rush out of my head afterwards. My "less sane" series of posts nowadays could simply be a downtrend; It could be the low that comes after the high, the mundane feeling that comes after the exhilaration has passed, the typhoon that's finally dispersed into the clear blue heavens.

I like the idea that it could be work-related, though. If anything, there's also a certain logic to it: It could be that most of my mind is taken up with all these little project details, and that I haven't had much room to think creatively as a result. Thus, you get a lot of posts on what seem to be a purely random variety of topics. (Plural words? Fashion design? Hand puppets? Monopoly?)

The catch there is that I don't think of the human mind as being finite in this way. There should always be room for one to think creatively, even if it involves conceptualizing an infinite number of rooms in an obviously finite space.

And then there's the idea that I may just be exorcising my inner demons here. I've got a lot of stuff in my head at the moment, ranging from office work to Vin Simbulan's Anthology to book launches to Fully Booked's massive first-prize offering. I could just be working out my frustrations on a bunch of nondescript topics so that people don't notice.

Or, as the Cosmic Joker would probably state, I could just be doing all this on pure whim. Flibbity-floo.

I can do nothing but theorize at the moment, I suppose. When I boil the whole thing down to its base elements, the realization is always the same: I don't know.

It might be best to watch my level of posting over the next few days, I think. I've got to get my head down from the clouds and back into the bounds of sanity. And hey, maybe there's some way to restart the typhoon even after it's already disappeared into the blue horizon.