work
Dispatches
When whale sounds emerge from the cube across from me, it means Elib is listening to Coldplay. I keep trying to find something likeable on their CD, but all I hear are Chris Martin’s “soaring” vocals, which from across the row sound a lot like whale sounds. I feel as though Coldplay is Michael Bolton for the alternative crowd – seems so substantive and credible now, but no one will own up to owning them in a decade or two. I could be wrong.
My dreams have been the same for a week now. Each night I revisit some previous point of my life. Some nights it has been like Quantum Leap, in that I seem to be viewing the scene through some otherwise unsuspecting body. In one dream I flirted with my first grade teacher while first-grade-me was packing up his bags from across the room. I’m not sure whose body I was in; hopefully not my mother’s.
In case I haven’t mentioned it to you personally, Tracy Bonham’s new record is fantastic. It’s pretty much all I ask for out of a record: smart, playful, great harmonies, killer hooks. The fact that it will not sell a million copies is criminal beyond my comprehension. I saw Tracy just a few weeks ago and, other than my gushing at her like a mutant afterwards, the show was wonderful. She’ll be in Philly again at the TLA with just her bassist on September 30th splitting a bill with Aqualung. It should be mentioned here that her bassist is utterly fantastic and a great singer, so the show should still be terrific.
I’m finding it hard to focus on anything after a week of work – just sit here and stare at the screen. I don’t want to be that person.
All We Owe, We Owe Her
Work was as productive today as work can be with Ace of Base’s hit single “Don’t Turn Around” lodged in your brain for eight hours.
My title changed as of yesterday to better represent the incredibly intangible, incredibly invaluable project management service i continue to provide for our company. What’s funny is that i thought my job change would actually reduce the ridiculously large scope of my projects by honing my attention onto more specific, more completeable projects. In fact, I’ve actually tripled my scope just in the last day, and it looks like tomorrow will add some more scope to the pile.
In the wake of the change, i am left wondering if I love what I do. I loved what i did when I started this job, and i still love what my department does. But, do i really love being a project coordinator?
Regardless of the answer to that question, i definitely stopped loving what i was doing sometime between Autumn and Spring. Everything about my job and the people i did it for became twisted so that it was completely unrecognizable. Suddenly, work became the null-time that it is for too many of my co-workers – nothing remarkable or exciting or energizing. i liked what i was doing, but not the reasons i was being made to do it.
Now that’s all been resolved, and i’m doing project management for good, healthy reasons – and learning more about it every day. And, i do enjoy project management – it’s something i have a natural bent towards, to an extent. Yet, it’s so far removed from what i went to school for, and what i came here intending to do, that i am beginning to wonder if i’ll ever love it the way i want to love a job.
What am I interested in anyway?
Bless Me
As i sneezed my eleventh consecutive sneeze on the 57 bus this morning, i wondered why i am so intent on suffering this allergic martyrdom.
Yes, there are a scant nine pills left in the same little orange bottle i’ve been refilling with allergy medication since 2000. One is a renegade percocet still in hiding after my tonsillectomy, so in actuality there are only four days of relief to be found beneath the cap, inscribed “push down and turn.”
Why there are only eight pills is the question. I have medical insurance, as i work for a company which excels at selling medical insurance. I have a long, well-documented history at sneezing at just about anything than can be found in the outside world. So, why no refill this year?
No refill because i haven’t actually used the medical insurance, which is costing me plenty per year to have its plastic calling card simply fill space in my wallet. I brought myself to go to the dentist, but the doctor… something just doesn’t sit right about it. Nothing’s wrong with me, other than the sneezing. But every attempted appointment, whether canceled by me or the mysterious “them” of every general practice i’ve tried calling, always has my the specter of my mother’s control looming over it – how she would have me go to a doctor only after she had seen him for something herself, and how she would come right into the room with me – right into the damn paper-gown room, because she was a nurse and it was all clinical and she needed to know what was going on.
Well, in my intense desire to not let her know what’s going on i have developed an altogether aversion to the doctors, any doctors, even doctors she has never met. And so in my futile quarter-life attempt to take back the meager amount of privacy and control i’ve never had until now, i’ve just doomed myself to sneezy commutes and snuffly workgroup meetings.
Ah, the price of independence, perceived and actual.
Mom would never let me go a day without allergy medication.
We’re moving on Friday. I’m not sure how many times I’ve moved that I can remember.
Moving out of 64th Street was a novelty – having never moved before in my conscious life, the idea of categorizing and packing things seemed fun.
Moving from Reed Street to college was a move of efficiency – the dorm room was only oh-so-big, and the hurricane was oh-so-bad. Two carloads would certainly be all that we could manage. I reminisced at length about it previously.
Moving from Kelly Hall to Calhoun hall was my first introduction to desperate, anxious, nerve-rending, nail-biting moving. The orientation leaders hoarded carts and monopolized elevators for each other. Where were my belongings supposed to live, if i was to be out by noon and in at… four? Five? We sat in the piano lounge on our collective piles of stuff and waited.
Ahh, now we come to moves i’ve documented on blogger.
Moving out of the dorm to my first apartment (with a half-week stopover back at Reed Street) was pure misery – i was sick, my future roommate was being less than helpful, and at one point i didn’t even have a lease to prove the apartment was mine. It was also the only time I’ve technically lived with my mother since 1999. A wonderful example of our uneasy alliance can be found here.
Next comes the move of legend: me from Spring Garden Street, and Lindsay and Erika from Race Street. This recap makes it sound rather pedestrian, but it still inspires only-slightly-hyperbolic stories from the five of us whenever anyone moves.
(in here i help Elise move from dorm to Melon’s to 3216 to Baring to here)
Moving from The Grotto to here was disproportionately easy, considering it involved more possessions and stress than ever. How i managed to get all the stuff from there to here, i’ll never know. The day was honestly a sleepless blur.
Six moves in seven years, and also in twenty-three (if you don’t count when i was three).