THE GREAT GADFLY:

No More Wimpy Chips

I am adamantly against "always" and "never" statements, because it seems to me that the golden rule of these statements is that, as soon as you make an absolute statement, something will come along which will force you to retract your statement, and you come off looking like an absolute flake.

It's the same kind of phenomena that guides you into thinking your hair has become tragically dumpy and in need of hacking off completely, and then the day of your hair appointment, you look in the mirror and you realize you have the sexiest hair of your entire life and so you wind up canceling your appointment. And the next morning you wake up with the dumpy hair again.

Well, here's what I'm getting at: I'm taking a little hiatus from Gadflyland. Hopefully it will be a VERY small hiatus, because there's nothing I love more than giving my all for you kids. And chances are, as soon as I post this, I'll come up with 1,001 things I want to rant about, and the urge to write will press NOW, NOW, NOW!!!! against my fragile skull, and oh what the hell, it'll be business as usual and I'll feel awfully silly for what I'm typing right here and now.

But it's like this: My whole job thing, I'm telling you, it needs to change. For the past six months, I've been working in a place where I haven't been comfortable since day one. Sure, the pay's decent and the co-workers are relatively non-psychotic, and these are good things, but in the half-year I've been here, the only things that I've become accustomed to are alienation and dull dread.

And, well, that's kind of normal for a job, I know, and I should probably just get used to it and join the hoardes of miserable working drones who trudge to work everyday and don't bitch about it, but, erm.....No. I won't do that, thank you.

It's taken me over two years to say this, but...well...I kinda like living in Chicago. I really like taking trips out of town and getting away from this place, but I always like coming back home just a little bit more. Everything is good right now. I'm still madly in love with my apartment, despite the fact that my oven doesn't work and I live above heartless alien criminal warlords. I like walking around in my neighborhood, and I like the places I go to eat, to shop, to get things done. Faces are getting familiar, and those faces are actually starting to smile at me when they recognize me. That's weird. I'm starting to feel more connected, I'm starting to meet people, I'm starting to feel like this city isn't the closed-off, oppressive, alienating concentration camp of a midwestern hellhole that I might have considered it to be in my darker moments of the past 28 or so months in this place.

And the zoo here is really, really cool.

But one thing is absolutely True: I cannot abide my job.

As I hopped on the bus for work this morning and it sped past my block, my eyes itched momentarily and I felt a lump in my throat. I realized that I very much wanted to cry. I felt that leaving that beautiful, comfortable block in my neighborhood for the unforgiving angles and scowls and asymmetry of the downtown Loop area was a betrayal of my very soul, of the definition of who I am and what I'm about. Recently, I have achieved the state in which days occur when I need to call in sick because I literally cannot bring myself to go to work. I feel very strongly that, if I don't find an alternative soon, my body is going to absolutely refuse me to attend another day of this job, and I will be forced to simply quit and then scrape for some kind of income in a state of complete emergency. And, you know, I'd rather not have it come to that. Very unattractive.

In the six months I've worked here, I've gotten to know exactly two co-workers who I've come to really like. Neither of them are working here anymore. One quit to travel in Ireland, then became a waitress and started working on her writing. The other quit to work part-time in a bookstore and, um, to get back to work on her writing.

I'm sensing a pattern. I'm also sensing destiny trying to tell me something.

I would absolutely adore a job in a bookstore. I miss dealing with the public, even at their infuriating worst, and I miss coming into regular contact with things I actually care about, even if that means stocking a pile of fucking Harry Potter books. The pay would be crappy. The public would make me disgruntled. I'd most likely have to find a second job. Or I might actually be FORCED back into freelancing regularly again.

That's another thing about this job - I make enough per paycheck that supplementing my income with a second job or freelancing isn't as necessary a practice as it used to be; furthermore, I work hard enough that when I come home, I don't have the energy or desire to take on anything more than surviving the day. That's not good.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just the act of grinding my jaw and gritting my teeth for eight hours a day that wipes me out. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't simply the dispassionately violent orgy of rush hour commuting that saps me of all my energy by the time I get home.

Yet I don't make nearly enough money to do the things I'd really like to do. I just make enough to survive, to eat, to maybe buy a few CDs or hit a concert or two, to pay the cable bill for the one or two hours of TV I watch per week. Maybe I get to afford a weekend trip here or there. I am sustained but I am not fulfilled. Meanwhile, I don't come from the kind of stock and/or I don't have the life experience to create a lifestyle in which I'm just "getting by". There need to be challenges, there needs to be stimulation, I need to feel a part of something or a creator of something. I need to feel like the people around me are alive. I need to feel like I'M alive.

And those necessary feelings have not been synonymous with my experience in Chicago thus far.

And I don't think it's Chicago's fault...anymore. Certain past influences had me believing that way, but those influences have fallen away and I'm still in the process of shedding a bitter grey skin and enjoying the novelty of allowing a new, baby pink flesh, to enjoy the fresh summer breezes of a particularly merciful July in Chicago. The feeling of possibility has returned. And possibility is a wonderful thing.

So.

It's time to figure out what color to dye my parachute. It's time to revamp the resumes, it's time to get off my ass and hit up every store in which I'd want to work, it's time to break out the writing clips and figure out how to make 'em pretty again, it's time to fill out applications, and it's time to get out there and infiltrate the permeable membrane that is this city.

I have nothing else to say these days, really. The recent breakthrough that the only thing wrong with my life in this city is where I spend my waking hours has been taking up quite a bit of my headspace, and the idea of finding a workplace in which I will be happy - however modest it may turn out to be - has thrown me into a state of frothed-up tunnel vision.

What my current job gets from me right now is a wraith, a ghost, an automatron who goes through the motions and punches the buttons and makes the donuts. I'm starved for a connection between me and work, even if it is something as silly as alphabetizing DVD titles. I would love a job in which I am alphabetizing DVD titles, by the way. I can think of nothing more pleasantly zen.

If anyone has any ideas for me, please do drop them my way. I'll still be trolling around in Diarrhealand and Blogsville in general, and I plan to be every bit as much the guestbook whore as I've ever been - I'm just far too preoccupied with this latest thing to let loose with any heartfelt blatherings or donkey pie recipes of my own. It's all I can do to squeeze out a halfway decent haiku for you people these days. But I'll see what I can do.

And like I said at the beginning of this oversized mewl, I'm sure just as soon as I post this, I'll be thrown into the ravages of hacking out some epic rant on why people who like their toilet paper to roll outwards should not mate with people who like their toilet paper to roll backwards.

For now, though, all I know is that it's time to show HotJobs.com a bit of love. Wish me luck.