Morale has not improved, so I guess the floggings will continue. It's a shit time to work for the government. As morale dips, everyone else seems to put less thought into what they're doing, which in turn means I spend more time cleaning up others' messes. So today was definitely a day of frustration. I would be more annoyed about this if I gave even a portion of a fuck about my own productivity, but meh. My best-case scenario right now is to stand still, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen with us specifically and the civil service as a whole.

My shrink said something a little while ago that has stuck with me. She said (paraphrasing) that it seemed like I was walking in circles in the snow, but couldn't see my footprints. In other words, I struggle to have any conception of my effect on the world, and the result is that few things are especially satisfying. This in turn means I spend a lot of time frustrated and restless. But identifying the problem is the first step, so progress has been made.

I'm looking forward to the holiday break, and I think the time off will do me some good. We'll be spending Christmas proper with my family (as we do every other year), and I think it'll be easier than last time, since my daughter is a good 2 years older and so is much lower maintenance. We don't see my family as often since they're not local, even if they're not far, so that'll be good too. Mostly it'll be nice to just hang out and not have to think about work or the rest of the world. I have my reading list all planned out: more Greek (I asked for a Greek edition of the NT for Christmas), more Dune (Children of Dune, specifically), the odd foray with the Dao De Jing, and I think I'm going to take my copy of the Kuen Kuit, a book on Ving Tsun written by my sitaigung (great-grandteacher) Moy Yat. I'm of course also taking my laptop with as many games as I can cram onto it. As an aside, can any of the Linux folks on here recommend some good resources in that regard? I already have Steam installed, and have as much of my GoG library as is cross-platform installed too.