the midnight struggler

as it turns out, the money IS in the toilet


when i was a kid, i used to have these dreams about getting things that i wanted, but that never ended up being quite what i wanted. i often dreamt about owning a pool table just like one that my neighborhood friend had owned. except, without fail, my "dream" pool table came with hollow wooden balls that never bounced or rolled right. and they never made that satisfying noise that pool balls can make upon impact with one another. they just made these tinkly underwhelming lincoln log type sounds instead. the other regularly recurring dream/disappointment that i had was getting a ferrari just like the one in magnum p.i., excpet mine was this awful ford probe tan color. i think the idea i was trying to convey to myself was either, "careful what you wish for", or "sometimes the things you want aren't what you expect them to be", or possibly "you can't have nice things".

all of which is to say that, in a lot of ways, i've been preparing for my recent job change for most of my life.

in the months of worrying about my impending layoff, i spent a lot of time wondering about what my dream job would be. still without a clearly articulated passion after 32 years, i came to realize that what i really wanted out of a job at this point in my life was the most amount of money i could get for the least amount of hours worked, the least amount of responsibility shouldered, and the greatest amount of stability offered. the idea was something that meets my fiscal goals and engenders a modicum of financial independence, that doesn't require too much effort or worry, and that frees up a bunch of time to explore other interests and lines of work.

i suppose it's the average dreamjob for people who don't really know what they want to do when they grow up. but could such a beast exist? if it did exist, what would it look like? and perhaps more importantly, what would it eat?

as it turns out, it does exist. what it looks like is a three-day-a-week job doing more data network bla bla bla stuff, offering relative stability, comparatively low stress levels, and slightly more money than i made at my last job. here's the kicker: what it eats is my friday, saturday and sunday nights, between 7pm and 7am.

after having one weekend under my belt/down my throat, i can honestly say that this schedule is not as bad as one might think. there are definitely some side effects. for instance, i generally no longer have a solid idea of what day it is or what time it is. also, while i don't find myself particulalrly tired all the time, i do find that my general internal clock being suddenly imbalanced makes me think that everyone else around me is tired all the time.

by far the hardest part is being at work twice in the same day. that saturday morning/saturday night and sunday morning/sunday night thing can feel a little strange. i imagine it's something like filming a scene where someone was going to menacingly dunk your head into a toilet a few times, bringing you up for air every so often to see if you're now willing to cooperate. but it's not like it's actually happening to you. it's just like pretending that it's actually happening to you because that's the scene you're shooting, and you have to do multiple takes.

i'm pretty sure today is thursday.