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aruanNo, really, I at least should have bought you a drink before reading this.
Walked into my apartment today and realized I hate everything in it.
More specifically, I hate all the excess that ties me to this place. The fact that I can't rent a single U-Haul truck and fit everything inside. That I drive by my office every day - hell, that the entire city I couldn't care less about is my office - and am reminded that I'm doing a job I can do, not that I want to do.
Turns out I might not be a career woman, or at least not one who will stay with a single company forever. As scared as I am of it, forcing change on me is really the only way to push me to my best. Staying in a situation that doesn't challenge and excite me is like claustrophobia, just without the actual dark, enclosed spaces.
I understand people who take up hard living, either as a pasttime or full time until they burn out on it.
Do I just need to do my job differently? Possibly. God knows there's a lot of potential in coming up with a large part of your own workflow, but that necessitates being good at what you do. I just walked out of college, with little in the way of reporting experience. But the flaw here is that people have been walking out of high school or less for a couple centuries and doing the same thing, so mostly it comes down to a don't-fuck-with-me attitude and charm that I just don't have. I don't. Confrontation and weaseling are not two things I was ever good at. My strength is experience and depth of knowledge - I argue when the topic is beyond familiar, not when the case could go either way depending on who you're listening to.
The trip didn't exactly help. Vancouver reminded me how much I hate almost everything about this place - the heat, the suburban feel of the whole city, no meaningful public transit, conservative, etc. You can distract yourself with objects, with clubs, with making your life small enough to fit its circumstances, but all it takes is getting out of it to realize the lie you're living. Familiarity can breed contempt, and it has, but it can also breed complacency, which is what unchanneled contempt turns into. I feel like there is this math equation constantly changing somewhere in my head, and that one day it will tip to the side of complacency and I'll do something stupid like buy a house or have a kid that will keep me in a situation I merely don't hate anymore.
I've embraced a recent fascination with cubicle culture, and have checked out almost a dozen books on the subject. Some of them whimsical, others have supernatural solutions to the corporate drag, while others advocate leaving it all behind for some epic cross-country journey. But what I've been looking for, I think, is a book where the characters start out in cubicles, and end up in cubicles on the final page, somehow having reconciled their situation. Maybe they grew to somehow enjoy cubicle life. Maybe they decided what happiness they could derive outside their cubicles made the time spent in them tolerable. Maybe there's something I'm missing, you know? The statistics bear me out - there'd be a lot more suicides if everyone was unhappy in a cubicle.
Walked into my apartment today and realized I hate everything in it.
More specifically, I hate all the excess that ties me to this place. The fact that I can't rent a single U-Haul truck and fit everything inside. That I drive by my office every day - hell, that the entire city I couldn't care less about is my office - and am reminded that I'm doing a job I can do, not that I want to do.
Turns out I might not be a career woman, or at least not one who will stay with a single company forever. As scared as I am of it, forcing change on me is really the only way to push me to my best. Staying in a situation that doesn't challenge and excite me is like claustrophobia, just without the actual dark, enclosed spaces.
I understand people who take up hard living, either as a pasttime or full time until they burn out on it.
Do I just need to do my job differently? Possibly. God knows there's a lot of potential in coming up with a large part of your own workflow, but that necessitates being good at what you do. I just walked out of college, with little in the way of reporting experience. But the flaw here is that people have been walking out of high school or less for a couple centuries and doing the same thing, so mostly it comes down to a don't-fuck-with-me attitude and charm that I just don't have. I don't. Confrontation and weaseling are not two things I was ever good at. My strength is experience and depth of knowledge - I argue when the topic is beyond familiar, not when the case could go either way depending on who you're listening to.
The trip didn't exactly help. Vancouver reminded me how much I hate almost everything about this place - the heat, the suburban feel of the whole city, no meaningful public transit, conservative, etc. You can distract yourself with objects, with clubs, with making your life small enough to fit its circumstances, but all it takes is getting out of it to realize the lie you're living. Familiarity can breed contempt, and it has, but it can also breed complacency, which is what unchanneled contempt turns into. I feel like there is this math equation constantly changing somewhere in my head, and that one day it will tip to the side of complacency and I'll do something stupid like buy a house or have a kid that will keep me in a situation I merely don't hate anymore.
I've embraced a recent fascination with cubicle culture, and have checked out almost a dozen books on the subject. Some of them whimsical, others have supernatural solutions to the corporate drag, while others advocate leaving it all behind for some epic cross-country journey. But what I've been looking for, I think, is a book where the characters start out in cubicles, and end up in cubicles on the final page, somehow having reconciled their situation. Maybe they grew to somehow enjoy cubicle life. Maybe they decided what happiness they could derive outside their cubicles made the time spent in them tolerable. Maybe there's something I'm missing, you know? The statistics bear me out - there'd be a lot more suicides if everyone was unhappy in a cubicle.
