Why I'm dying little by little each and every day...

Every morning I somehow manage to wake myself up enough to drive an hour and fifteen minutes to Indianapolis where I then sit for 9 hours pretending like I do "real" work. After an internal battle with myself every day about what is an appropriate time to leave (I think taking off as early as 2pm should still count as a full day), I then drive another hour and fifteen minutes home. Once home I generally sit and veg for a couple of hours before I pass out and sleep until I have to go through the whole routine again.

I could probably handle this schedule if it weren't for a couple issues. It is most difficult to cope with the fact that I am doing absolutely nothing with my life during the 9 hours that I'm at work. Even if I was doing something for this company I still wouldn't be doing anything meaningful. We make gas stations - who can find a passion for this? I'm no civil, but I can at least understand a certain attraction to designing a bridge or a skyscraper. But a fucking gas station? The hardest decision is where to put the condoms... the bathroom or out by the potato chips? What's even worse is that there is a standard for this stuff anyway. My group doesn't even do design work, they pass it off to other people (and they get paid less). No, instead we project manage - make sure all the work gets done on time. FUCKING BLOW ME. How is this supposed to keep me awake when all I got was 5 hours of sleep and had to drive over an hour to get here and you make me sit on my ass in my cubicle and NOT play freecell or use photoshop.

Along the same lines is how I feel so different than the people I work with. Somehow they manage to come in every day and treat their job like its the most important task on the planet. Somehow if they don't get gas station XXX done then the pope will send all the good people to hell and Bush will find a way to get a third term in office. How are these people in such good spirits and what's wrong with me that I have no appreciation for this job?

To answer this question I have started to re-read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. If anyone else has read this then you know why. This book makes you feel like there is something important and special to be done that no one else can understand unless they realize how feeble and simple they are. I want to design and to create, to dream, but not about gas stations and not about pipelines. I can't sell out to some company for a paycheck if I'm not doing something amazing that I can be proud of. A heap of shit that leaks pollutants into the ground while making fat rich men fatter and richer is not my idea of a dream. I really want to quit...

And I swear to god that if they take my stapler I'm going to burn the fucking building down.