It’s so easy to hate my job

What can I say about it? I don’t actu­al­ly hate it, but I’m very anx­ious to leave. It’s been frus­trat­ing and it does­n’t pay par­tic­u­lar­ly well, and I’m ready to move on.

I haven’t writ­ten here in a while because the last time I wrote, my com­put­er crashed and I lost the whole entry. That dis­cour­aged me. I sup­pose it’s my own fault for not installing the soft­ware and always post­ing from the Web, but it was dis­cour­ag­ing anyway.

So much has been going on that I don’t know where to begin. That’s one of the draw­backs to not jour­nal­ing in a while; a dai­ly post means there’s less ter­ri­to­ry to cov­er. Now there’s so much to write about that I can’t pos­si­bly get to it all.

When I had my surgery I remem­bered what it was like to live life. I got to be out in the sun­shine and it became very clear to me how much of the vital­i­ty of my life is miss­ing when I spend all day every day indoors and work­ing for some­one else.

I have to go back fur­ther to explain this. When Vik­ki threw me out at the end of last year (last mil­len­ni­um) an entire house of cards fell. I no longer need­ed to sup­port a house­hold, and I had no rea­son to stay at the job I worked at the time. I blamed a lot of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion on burnout, and a lot of it was. But I also need­ed to make some changes and put myself in a place of easy struc­ture. One thing my con­sult­ing job did not have was structure.

My new job has plen­ty of struc­ture. I have a super­vi­sor who taps his watch when I arrive at 8:40 instead of 8:30 in the morn­ing. While I used to take lunch­es of any length, go to the chi­ro­prac­tor and vis­it the coin shop, now I am per­mit­ted an hour and receive lec­tures if I over­shoot that mark. For a while, this job was exact­ly what I need­ed. I need­ed to come to work, go home and do live in a rou­tine for a while as I sort­ed out the loss of my partner.

As I heal, that struc­ture seems less and less use­ful. there is still pain in my life around Vik­ki being gone, but it’s pret­ty far from the kind of blind­ing & over­whelm­ing despair I some­how sur­vived in Feb­ru­ary and March. I went on a date on Mon­day for the first time since when­ev­er the last time it was that Vik­ki and I had a date. Nice girl. We had a lot to talk about. We did­n’t seem to have much spark, but I had a good time and I think it would be nice to see her again. I’ve also been to a cou­ple par­ties recent­ly in my neigh­bor­hood and enjoyed some attrac­tions to some sin­gle women. This has been great! I’m very much enjoy­ing the heal­ing that I did­n’t believe was pos­si­ble a few months ago.

Today I’m think­ing about the future and try­ing to reassem­ble my goals and not liv­ing just for dai­ly sur­vival. So the ques­tion of what I’m doing at a job that pays me half of what I used to make does­n’t have the same char­ac­ter it once did. What am I doing here? What is the future for me in this job?

I want to return to school. I need more time in the day away from employ­ment in order to make that a real­i­ty. Per­haps once I have my degree I can look back and cyn­i­cal­ly say it’s worth­less, but until then not hav­ing com­plet­ed my bach­e­lor’s is just a fes­ter­ing fail­ure in my life. I need to know I can com­plete this, and I have so much to learn from an aca­d­e­m­ic envi­ron­ment, espe­cial­ly one like my school, which is very focused on the process of mak­ing artwork.

So I’m tak­ing steps to move on from my job, but i haven’t giv­en my notice. right now, both my super­vi­sor and the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny are on vaca­tion, so there’s nobody to whom I can give notice except peo­ple I don’t real­ly work with. I’ve had a few nib­bles on the free­lance front, and I’m pret­ty opti­mistic about mak­ing con­tract­ing work again.

EXCEPT: it’s very dif­fi­cult for me to pay atten­tion to devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with my new poten­tial clients while I’m still occu­pied full-time with my cur­rent employ­er. I tell myself that it’s a catch-22 and that I can’t get the new clients with­out leav­ing my job and I can’t leave my job with­out get­ting the new clients. The real­i­ty is that I’ve got to make it hap­pen or else it won’t hap­pen. Grip­ing about unsolu­able predica­ments won’t pro­vide me with an answer.

And the answer is actu­al­ly clear: I need to enforce my pro­fes­sion­al bound­aries. I’m behav­ing here as though I were try­ing to impress every­one at this job and try­ing to get a pro­mo­tion. It’s admirable for me to try to do a good job, but there’s no rea­son – I’ll write this again – NO rea­son for me to make sac­ri­fices for this com­pa­ny if I don’t want to stay here.

So what am I doing here at work on a Sat­ur­day? Well, I’m jour­nal­ing and read­ing email while I watch my machines make posters. I real­ly should­n’t com­plain too much. Week­end days there aren’t so many peo­ple around to add work to my list, so real­ly today is a lot less stress­ful. But I did walk in with a pret­ty big chip on my shoul­der, most­ly because I was­n’t asked to work this week­end, I was told that I would be work­ing both Sat­ur­day and Sun­day by some­one who was going away on vaca­tion the day he told me that. He may nev­er know how close I came to telling him to count four­teen days on his cal­en­dar right then and there, but cool­er heads prevailed.

When I’m done work­ing here this evening I’ll stop at the gym and work out some of my ten­sion. That’ll feel real­ly good. I’m look­ing for­ward to it. My next check with the over­time pay will be good too.

Well, I’ll find more to write in a while. For now, I’ve made a lit­tle bit of progress on my jour­nal deficit. I don’t believe that there’s a such thing as catch­ing up, but at least it’ll be a bit eas­i­er to write about myself next time I decide to.