Pending Deletion
It looks as if I didn't update at all last week. This is only partially true. Every entry that I wrote I deleted shortly thereafter--or didn't upload until my common sense kicked in. Besides, I'm not sure how interesting people find my job, anyway. I'm not sure how interesting I find my job ... and that, I think, is part of the problem.
Lots of things have been going on here--lots of big, important projects, lots of meetings, lots of confidential information that I'm not supposed to talk about--and I've been feeling sort of ... meh. I can do this work, and better yet, I can do it well. And that I have a job that requires me to sit in a well-lit room with a lot of quiet and solitude, writing and researching various projects some days seems well-nigh miraculous. But ... employability skills? [content omitted for reasons of confidentiality]? Sigh. And to make matters worse, sometimes it seems that for all the deadlines and meetings, nothing actually happens. Going from concept to reality is so ... very ... slow ...
And as the days go on I just care less and less. This is not good. This is what usually happened to me at the end of a school term when my brain was just a week or two away from rebelling totally and shutting down.
Part of the problem, I think, is that I haven't had a real break in far too long. (I remind myself to not be such a whiner, as I'm not in a situation like Sarah, who has three jobs ... but still.) Christmas, to be exact. The weeks that I had between the end of classes and the beginning of work were still filled with final research papers and a long string of illnesses. I did not find lying around for a with a high fever relaxing, and though entertaining, research papers are still work. I have been trying to get every last bit of goodness out of each weekend, and long weekends seem like a gift, but Monday always arrives far too soon.
I'm also very aware that I have not been to my cottage at all this year, that I have been swimming only once (and that was in an indoor hotel pool), and that it is already August. There's no way that I can have any time off in the next two weeks, and probably not the week after that. But maybe the beginning of September...? Oh, how I hope.
Of course, I act as if I still have a job in September, and nothing is for sure. My contract ends at the end of August. I am told that they'd like to keep me longer, but at this point it's still only talk. The wisest thing to do, I think, is to be open and looking for a new job, new opportunities, and take things as they come. And stop blogging at work.
See? I should just delete this, too.
Posted by Karina Sumner-Smith at 10:25 AM
2 Comments:
I feel compelled to apologize before you get any farther: I'm sorry to sound so cynical and world-weary.
Unfortunately there are a statistically significant number of people who are unhappy with their jobs. I'm one of them. Some people get lucky and are merely apathetic about their job. A very few really like what they do.
I think the feeling of apathy or unhappiness is more common to people who know what they want to do, but aren't doing that. As a wannabe writer, any job I have that isn't Author is, at best, a close second to what I'd really like to be paid for.
You may find the same, but I hope you fare better. It's frustrating to have your mind on your own writing instead of whatever ad copy/report/technical manual you should be working on.
Mark
By 
Mark Ladouceur, at
12:53 PM
Hmm. True enough, Mark. And you don't need to apologize--I do know when I'm being a hopeless idealist. :)
And yet I'm not at a point where I'm feeling world-weary. I just graduated; this is the first full-time job I've had since school ended. I'm not ready or willing to "settle" and resign myself to a life of tedium while I wait to start selling novels. Not yet. Not when there are jobs out there that I'd like to try--jobs that I think I'd enjoy more than what I'm doing right now. And, to be honest, there are a lot of things about this current job that are fantastic, and if the *subject matter* were different I'd think I'd have the best job in the world. Problem is, I'm not interested in the service-delivery world of a Career Centre, not really. And I can't even tell myself, "Well, at least the pay is fantastic" because ... well, it isn't.
And this doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge that a tedious day job is not a possibility (or probability) for me in the future but ... but ... why give in to that already? Without even trying to make things different?
By Karina Sumner-Smith, at
8:54 AM
