i am a headcase

I really have this problem that I am addicted to going to work, even though it's so annoying. I'm scared of my days off. Lately I've been so miserably ineffective at using my free time fruitfully that I get anxious about having any. I mean, I do things, but generally the things are web-surfing, writing (but more often deciding what to write), editing, re-editing, editing-system-crash-recovering....stuff that is so solitary and navel-gazing that it seems to take place outside of real time. My work is the only place where I engage the world, for better or for worse. I get to be around people, a lot of them horrible, some of them my favorite people in the world. And I don't have the constant anxiety about "what should I be doing NOW to further my filmmaking aspirations" because a) i instead focus on doing my regular job, which i do about as well as it can be done, and b) there are people screaming all the time and it's hard to think about stuff like that.
....It's kind of like the reason I watch sports; because it's always actually happening. It's not a prefab experience like all other forms of entertainment, including live TV news. It's not rote and absolutely unvarying like many of our daily routines including paying bills, eating, drinking, going out to random anonymizing places in LA in the attempt to be "social," and putting self to bed. It's.....hard to explain. It is REPETITIVE, often agonizingly so, but because there's gambling involved, it is by definition not completely predictable. With each hand there's a cycle of preparation, anticipation, and resolution, which has a very satisfying rhythm for goal-oriented freaks like me. I suppose that has something to do with why people get addicted to gambling. It lets you live out your life in little repeated narrative trials instead of the long open-ended one. But I'm getting too abstract. Basically it's a cushy job that takes my mind off the other b.s., and doesn't allow for the same feeling of existential horror that results from being a Windows-based office zombie. And all that would be great if I could get back the feeling that when I'm not at work I'm actually living a life instead of re-reading an unfinished memoir I wrote about myself in high school.

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