Skiving.

For those of you who don't know, "skiving" is the noble art of "not actually working when you're at work". In the Far East Zen masters refined and codified the practice into the highly-refined, semi-mystical form of "faff-fu". And you thought they were just meditating.

So, my boss is still on holiday (when will the madness end?), and, to make things even worse/better, my line manager-type guy has moved desks so he's no longer almost literally peering over my shoulder all the time.

Enter the sloth.

I've spent most of this week not doing any actual work at all, but wearing my (now well-practiced) "slightly consternated" face while looking up all sorts of irrelevant rubbish on Wikipedia. I also heard a crap joke that made me laugh -

Q - How do you know when the Devil's at the front of the queue in the Post Office?
A - He takes many forms.

Anyway, as I was saying - lately, the Wikipedia has been my playground during working hours, so if I'm not actually working, I am at least finding out new stuff. Been reading a lot about Outsider Art at the moment: I've always been impressed by the Watts Towers and other semi-obsessive projects like that, so I did a bit of digging and came up with some truly fascinating stories.

There's always been a bit of a correlation between art and madness, at least in the popular consciousness (if there is such a thing). Most of the people we consider as great artists were a bit unhinged, but I think that's kind of true of anyone who really throws themself into something: to be really good at something, to be singular at something, you almost by definition can't be what the bulk of society would consider "a well-balanced individual". You have to be single-minded, passionate: or, to use a less positive word that means effectively the same thing, obsessive.

What I liked about the artists I found when I did a bit of digging when no-one else was looking in my workplace was that they weren't creating for an audience. They created stuff because they had to. It almost felt a bit voyeuristic looking at the stuff they'd made, knowing that they'd never saught a public airing for it when they were alive.

I'd better give some examples. Edmund Monsiel was a Polish shopkeeper who, in 1942, hid himself away in his brother's attic fearing arrest from the Nazis. He remained there for years, scratching out innumerable iterative drawings by candlelight. All his drawings feature repeated faces drawn again and again - they do have strange kind of beauty to them, but that's probably not what Edmund intended. Even in darkness or in the folds of a piece of clothing he saw accusatory eyes and a dissaproving face. See what I mean about the voyeuristic aspect? I'm calling them beatiful, but they were probably painful to him. Not sure how I feel about looking at the signs of a mind falling apart.

I will write more about this later (it's really captured my imagination), but I must head to bed now. Do not pass Go, do not chop off your ear and send it to your loved one.

Back to the Toad "Work" Squatting on my Life

I've not had a good week. After my wee week away, I just haven't been able to back into the swing of things at all. I'll try not to make this post too moany, but I've not been the happiest of men over the past seven days.

Can't seem to knuckle down to it at work, which just makes the time drag all the more. Took on some new stuff today (which I shouldn't really be doing) just to see if learning something new would enthuse me any, but it's proved to be another cul de sac of procrastination and over-deliberation.

Don't get me wrong - I do like my job: it's just that lately I don't really want to do it. Between every strike of the snooze button on my alarm clock, the prospect of pulling a sickie lately always looms large. Maybe it's just the nice weather sapping my energy, maybe someone's sneaked some kryptonite under my desk - whatever the reason, I just can't seem to muster up the bluster to tackle the stuff I'm supposed to be doing.

Doesn't help that my boss is away on holiday at the moment. The whole atmosphere at the office is one of lax licentuousness, and I think everyone's kind of just kicking back and seeing what they can get away with. Which turns out to be quite a lot. It hasn't gone all "Lord of the Flies" quite yet, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before someone sticks a pig's head on a stick and we all start lighting fires with spectacles and eating each other.

Gahh. But on the plus side - we're all on holiday on Monday, which means a long weekend followed by a short week. And I've been invited to a barbeque tomorrow by a couple of friends who I haven't seen for ages, so that should be good. And I've secured Monday and Tuesday off the week after that, to help out a couple of mates who are moving house and need a free-coffee-fuelled general dogsbody kicking around to assist them. And possibly paint stuff.

I think I really liked my job when I was learning new stuff every day (it was a bit of a career u-turn for me - or, more accurately, a u-turn into an actual career from a dead-end job), but, while I'm still learning new stuff all the time, the things I'm asked to do get more and more samey, so I get less and less chances to use the things that I've just learned. I find myself doing more and more stuff on my own initiative, just to keep myself interested more than anything else, and it's starting to annoy me that that isn't getting recognised by my superiors.

I really need to lug more stones about. Build more (non-metaphorical) walls. Stop thinking about work for three days and just enjoy myself. Maybe push Piggy off a cliff while I'm at it.