So, nu, I’ve schlepped my latest piece to my summer advisor, wincing over how rough it is. It’s a personal essay about military language grounded in events during Air Force Basic Training (see the end for an excerpt), and while that sounds intriguing, it needed, oh, say, about twenty more hours of serious work to get to true first-draft status. But That Didn’t Happen. Between dealing with the vendors involved in the system migration for My Place Of Work and being an evangelist for the LITA blog and getting ready for conference… I was overwhelmed.
I am amused at all the folks–librarians, mind you–who share with me their assumption that My Place Of Work is a sinecure that allows me to tap into my job at my leisure for a few hours a week. I guess it’s like any job, barring perhaps brain surgery: it looks easy from the outside. Not that I don’t have some flexibility. On my school days, I start work as early as I can bear to wake up, usually between 6 and 6:30 a.m., so I don’t feel guilty leaving at 4 p.m. to get to class. Though I get up that early on Thursdays to do our weekly publishing and often find that the day would go on until 6 or 7 p.m. if I did not force myself to leave the office, go to the Y, make dinner, and then pick up on my schoolwork. I know many folks who on hearing this would start the I Work Harder Than You Do game. That’s fine. I work hard enough, do a good enough job, and for that get compensation that is lower than what I would get as a muckety-muck who could brag about all the many many hours she worked, but is o.k., for now, for a job that lets me make high-powered decisions while wearing not much more than old running shorts and a torn t-shirt.
I also work as regular a schedule as possible, for several reasons. One is so I am available to work with MPOW’s staff, vendors, fiscal agents, consultants, etc. Just because a job is “virtual” does not free it from chronological constraints. The other is so my day has real boundaries. Work is in one pot, family in another pot, school in a third, and so on. (Church is in a teacup right now, as many Sundays I am worshipping at Our Lady of Perpetual Homework, but I promise, Fall 2006 I’ll be a regular again. I am a little ashamed when Sandy’s congregants greet me like the Prodigal Son, but life only has so many hours.)
I love my job, but I’m realistic about two things. The first is that nothing lasts. If I didn’t have that attitude, I couldn’t survive the annual wait for the grant letter. The first year, after I moved here from New York, I was complacent and made many assumptions, and when our budget was cut, and cut again, I took it very hard and very personally. Maybe everyone was right, I thought. I’m just a wannabe. The next year I relaxed, kept my options open, and things got better. Once I was no longer so needy for this job to be everything to me–which no job can ever be to any fully-formed human–it was easier to accept the inevitable setbacks and irritations common to any work.
There’s a reason the lottery commercials always show people quitting their jobs: no matter what, you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t need the money, and–the second reality about work–it will never, ever love you back. It doesn’t make you who you are; you, instead, make the job what it is. Yes, work can be a Learning, Growing Experience. But it doesn’t scratch the real itches in life.
A couple more posts later today, after the Farmer’s Market and a few other errands. What, you say, no time for family? Well, Sandy’s at her denomination’s conference. (Cleveland is to the UCC as Rome is to the Catholics, and personally I think the pilgrims got a raw deal.) So this is a weekend for writing, filing, experimenting with this blog, food Sandy doesn’t like (calve’s liver, I’m thinking, with broccoli on the side), movies she has avoided (maybe it’s time for The Deer Hunter), and letting the cats whore up to me.
Sorry comments haven’t been reenabled–I plan to work on my Movable Type installation this afternoon.
Excerpt: In a Heartbeat
On the first day, one TI sneered at us, “You miss your mommies?” We rainbows stood at straggly half-assed attention, unsure what to do with our arms or hands, our cheap tennis shoes sinking into the heat-softened asphalt, feeling, at last, the enormity of the decision we had made to join the military. Around us hordes of new recruits jerked and jolted as TIs shouted. It was right out of a B movie. I wanted to laugh, but my stomach also fluttered. Do not mention missing family, I scribbled on my mental notepad.
A tear slid down one recruit’s face, striping her cheeks with dusky black mascara. I tried to ignore her, but it was contagious. I felt my own eyes sting with tears and my throat grow thick with grief, and without looking left or right knew that we would soon be in an epidemic of weeping. I, for one, did miss my mommy right then, even though I was 26 years old, only visited my mother once or twice a year, and often forgot her birthday. More to the point, I missed civilian life, which just yesterday had seemed so boring and dead-end, but now, as my knees trembled and my entire body dampened with flop sweat, was already draped in sepia-toned nostalgia.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t cry,” bellowed the TI, a tall, barrel-chested sergeant with proud duck lips and well-oiled black hair swept high from his ageless forehead. The rim of his ranger hat waggled as he ranted and scolded. “Come on, ladies, get it TOGETHER! Suck it up!”
Suck it up? The crying recruit hiccupped and sniffled, then became quiet. Two dozen brains processed this new expression …
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