truvy
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
The Next Thing
I spend so much of my time goal-oriented (or possibly procrastination-oriented) - thinking about The Next Thing.
Yes, it's good to have goals & plans, but I think it sometimes gets in the way of appreciating the present.
Right now I'm thinking about a possible trip to Colorado RJ and I might take with E & J, who live in Chicago.
Well, flight possibilities and schedules and prices and cars and shuttles and ...so on, have taken up untold hours already, and I'm jonesing to make a close on this deal - like if we don't plan it now, make it happen, settle on the details, then it will begin to unravel like some sort of loosely woven fabric.
Frankly, I haven't been very inspired lately (*sigh*) - to blog, to work, to interact.
I had my review last Friday, and although the "rank" was okay, the comments were annoying and frustrating, and make my situation here at work seem so fucking bleak. As everyone here says, the longer you stay, the harder you're fucked. They're reducing Everyone's bonuses again this year (I find out how much of a reduction this week), but they have the money somehow to hire 2 more people in our department, who will, of course, make more money than my current co-worker and I do because this rat trap lures you in with a matching salary and THEN fucks you over in later years.
The worst part? Some of the annoying comments in my review were that they want me to do more work on independent projects - bullshit makeup work that will appeal to the ass-kissers. Okay, so you want me to do More work for Less money, right? Fuck off.
Even worse, I probably will do it.
Why? The job market for corporate attorneys sucks really hard right now. I wish I could afford to just quit and figure out what I want to do with my life - just tend bar or wait tables or apply for some arts organization position that would still pay me enough to live (oh yeah, and pay my school loans & mortgage). Golden handcuffs, right? Although they're more like bronze, or maybe some cheaper metal like pewter.
But it's better than no work at all, which would rapidly bring my current life to an abrupt halt . . . Let's face it - faced without a paycheck I'd have to make some very rapid and difficult decisions. Yes, I have a loving domestic partner and a bit of a safety net in that, but I can't rely on that as a means of support. Ours is emphatically a relationship where no one is going to be kept or supported - we're both expected to contribute equally, or as equal as possible, which breaks down to the house for me and the apt. for him, just in case you're interested, which I'm just so sure you are. Thank goodness if faced with true emergencies I could charge the GNP of a small Latin country on my various credit cards.
But I digress - I think I was talking about The Next Thing.
So, mainly instead of focussing on how much I hate my job right now I focus on how I can get away - on trips, vacations, plans, the house, menus for meals, details, to-do's, contacts, steps, processes.
And of course how much each of these will cost. It's a vicious circle of fantasy crashed with reality - of escapism mixed with the quotidian and mundane.
Is it just too much to ask to be free of financial worry? I guess so. I guess not that many people truly are, and that's just one of those nifty things about capitalism and a semi-free economy and growing up in America goddammit, land of the free and the home of the debtor. whatever.
I know this has been a common theme in my occasionally rambling posts in the past several months, but I can't help it - it's what really eats at me and takes up my energy, my spirit, my will. I just wish it weren't so fucking common, because that somehow makes it seem all the worse - that everyone has these worries and that there's NO FUCKING ESCAPE FROM ANY OF IT!
Gee.
Pretty throw-yourself-out-the-window-Great-Depression-era pessimism, huh?
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