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2000-06-22 Today is the five year anniversary of my company's website. Oh, boy. Can you tell how excited I am? There's some sort of picnic in Golden Gate Park. I have absolutely no intention of going. Between generally not liking being outside, there's far too much work on my desk today to even contemplate taking half a day off. I'm certain that work has something to do with my feelings of premature aging. Maybe there really is this internet time compression that happens in the "new-economy" business -- and when you invest everything you've got in it, then everything in your life gets time-compressed too. Consequently I feel like I've worked here for...um...forever. Living in the Sunset with the roommate from hell didn't help either. Being so far from any nightspots, it seemed so difficult to go into "town". And it's really not that far, except that when we moved they cancelled late night train service out to where we lived. So leaving the bar to get home by two meant the party ended at midnight, or I stayed sober and drove, or I planned to spend twenty bucks on a cab. And let's face it...I was making piss at either the coffee job or this internet job when I started, so $20 was my budget for the night -- on a good night. Then when things started degenerating with the evil roommate, it was really easy (and rewarding) to throw myself completely into work. If you'd rather not be home, but are out of practice being out during the work week, where else do you go? Online, if you're home, or you volunteer for late shifts and extra work. Consequently, I have some fairly ingrained habits around working and leisure -- primarily, that the second only comes at the expense of the first, and should be avoided at all costs. Add in that this is really all I've even known about white-collar work. I come from blue collar roots. Even though my dad is in management now, he was a Union guy for a long time. (I remember helping him make signs for a strike once when I was little -- a very early freelance gig. I vaguely remember being embarrassed by the way mine came out, but Dad carried it anyway, or at least made a show of it for me.) And I went straight from pulling espresso to working on Web graphics at a startup (long before the internet startup was an established thing) with the attendant gruelling hours and demand for complete concentration on the task. Then there are the days when I feel like a charlatan, but that's a subject for an entirely different post. It's definitely with mixed emotions that I watch the Roommate, whose work role has definitely broadened. He's excited about the new possibilities work is providing him. And while that's good, I can't help but think back on several years of gluing myself to a task chair, and what else I could have been doing with that time. Well, enough with the bittersweet remembrances. There's too much to do to reflect too long. The Boyfriend and I saw Robyn Hitchcock and Grant Lee Phillips last night. Didn't mind Phillips, but his songs didn't knock me over like Robyn Hitchcock did; but to his credit, their medley of Bowie tunes and a cover of "Satellite of Love" were hilarious and wonderful. Hitchcock was wonderful and played some of his wonderfully perverse little poppy guitar songs. My favorite between-song quote: "[The disused rail lines in London] are starting to fade into the void. The void below, not the void above." And as the song says, "Being just contaminates the void." Hear, hear. _Casey
2003-03-29 - Moving Notice |
