a note on real life.
So far at work, I have the entire floor to myself.
This means I walk the floors barefoot, and I also get the water machine to myself (people who know me would know this is heaven). The gurgle it makes throughout the workspace as I refill several times a day is practically the only sound in the office, and it sounds like wet thunder. After I refill several times a day, I also have the restroom to myself, where I switch the lights on and off and contemplate which cubicles to occupy at my disposal. The only thing I have said out loud today is “Please don’t jump into my glass of water”, directed to a tiny spider jumping across the restroom.
The people I work for are on the floor upstairs, and I talk to them online except when they ask me to print things and come up to discuss what I have to write next. They use some kind of text-message speak for their IM conversations and it seems jarring with my replies, and even more jarring considering how these people are several years older than me and probably think I type in full sentences to convince them of my (non-existent) professionalism.
The title for this is misleading, this probably isn’t real life. But it’s a new thing for me, and I’ve been here almost a month. Since my holidays started, I’ve been coming in at times that I could almost call ‘regular office hours’, staying for ages, thinking about lunch hour, cursing future traffic jams as I key in the alarm and leave the office. I need to learn regularity, because the only discipline my previous jobs have requested of me is that I get things done. I have never been asked to stay here for hours at an end, to make familiar with the same computer, to sound remotely corporate in return for pay. I can’t imagine yet how some people do this everyday for the rest of their lives, and I don’t know if I am brave enough to trade my state of mind for this sort of regularity to feed me in the future. Is this why starving artists seem happier sometimes than those collared folk?
If I learn regularity, if I perfect this new mundane, it’ll be easier for me to one day reject it.
May 22nd, 2007 |
I’m messy. chaotic. down to my hair. but that’s it really.
May 20th, 2007 |
Nah, I didn’t go in during the day.
What is this supposed good that regularity will do for you?
May 17th, 2007 |
do you go into the office after-hours to spend more time there than you should? my life is mostly still but in no way neat. Many may argue that some regularity would be a good thing for me. Which is fine as long as it doesn’t proliferate and take me alive.
May 17th, 2007 |
I used to come in after hours to get the office to myself. I would walk around barefoot and stack soda bottles on my desk. One day someone made a comment to the effect that Important People come here.
We all said that we would learn regularity, only for the time being. But you can’t learn regularity, put it in a book, and stock it on a shelf. It oozes and seeps onto all the other books.