Brown Grass All Around

I had so many grand plans for things that I was going to do once I was free of the strictures of corporate America: devote my life to music and practice my drums for hours a day; get in shape and lose some weight; try my hand at writing a book; develop relationships with people; deepen my walk with God by long periods of contemplation, study, and Bible reading; play video games until my eyeballs dried out; see a bunch of things that I'd never seen before; spend much time at a coffee shop, especially late at night; spend time reading books while smoking a nice cigar; catch up on movies for cheap at matinee prices. Now that my time of unemployment is coming to an end, I've done a little bit of some of those things and most of them not at all. What happened?

I learned a lot about myself during this time. One of those self-revelations was that I don't like to spend as much time alone as I thought I did. There have been so many people getting laid off these days and yet none of them were people that I really knew well. I didn't have any other unemployed folk to pal around with during the day and several of those things on my list of to-do's are a whole lot more fun to do with someone else. Consequently, I would spend most of my days on my own and then look to the evenings to be with people and hang out with them (my evenings were the one part of my busyness that didn't go away when I lost my job). The trouble is that none of them had free days - they all still had jobs and so whereas I was fresh and ready to interact with people in the evenings, most of them were just trying to make it through yet another activity so that they could go home and rest. I felt completely backwards from everyone else.

Another facet of my personality which was revealed to me (and yet, I believe it was something I already knew if I were honest with myself) is that, left to my own devices, I'm just kind of a lazy, sedentary person. I would go to bed extremely late and get up equally late the next day and unless something had to be done, it was a rare occasion that I got up enough initiative to actually do something of import (the trip down to the AMOA being one notable exception). My F-14 model has been sitting on my table 3/4 of the way finished for almost two months now and my coffee table is littered with books which I have borrowed and yet still not read. Some of my ambitions were thwarted due to weather; it is quite uncomfortable to sit outside reading in order to enjoy a cigar at the same time when the mercury in the thermometer is somewhere north of one hundred degrees, and reading at night with a book light is more trouble than it is worth. With seven months to look back upon, I must come to the conclusion that, when reporting to no one but myself, I am more apt to park on the couch and watch television than I am to go out and do something. The empirical evidence would confirm this in spades.

I then found myself in the odd position of being somewhat bored (even with a whole city of distractions at my disposal) simply because there was no one dictating that I do anything or requesting that I do things with them (the aforementioned pal that I was lacking). I think I've mentioned this before, but I was struggling with spending money while not having a secure future in view which sometimes made me feel guilty about doing things which cost money to have fun. I just felt mainly and wholly unmotivated.

And now it looks like I have a job. The prospect of going back to work, however, has put me in a different head space because I am dreading being back in the same burnt-out place that I was last year at this time, hoping and praying for a respite. I don't want to go back to being a rat in the maze, a person who's life is constantly lived just this side of exhaustion and where weekends become craved bastions of free-time that never relax because they're crammed too full of "relaxing" things or errands. I'm relaxed now; I don't feel high strung and I'm certainly not stressed out. When I was working, I wanted nothing more than to not work so I could do what I wanted when I wanted; when unemployed, I wanted someone to tell me what to do so that I would do something instead of nothing.

I'm not sure whether to consider the past seven months as a success, a failure, or a wash. While I didn't do a lot of those things on my list, I did get to do some pretty awesome things - I played SXSW, went to movies and the AMOA during the day, went to Galveston to help rebuild, got a lot of relaxation, re-read almost all of William Gibson's books, and spent a lot of time at the pool. I am de-stressed and ready to return to work - so much so that I'm even ready to return to the place which I left. I do love the fact that for the past seven months I have not been held to a clock; meaning, if I get on a writing jag and want to pontificate on the BrainDrain until 2:30 in the morning, I can do so because I don't have to be up and focused for work at 7:30 the next day and I can just sleep in to whenever I feel like it to always get at least 8 hours of sleep.

I find it hard to stay out of the classification system of checklists to determine if a given activity or time frame is worthy of being called "successful" or not. My idea of success, I suppose, was that I would take some time off to decompress, then spend some time with God where He would gloriously reveal my vocation for which I was created and start me on a whole new career path in which I would be happy and fulfilled for all the remaining days of my life. And with that as a definition of success, it is no wonder that I am asking myself whether or not this time was "successful" or not because it is an unrealistic definition on my part. I'm looking in the wrong place, as I am wont to do, and I must constantly refocus my attention on who I am now as opposed to who I was then, regardless of what I have actually done. I'm a better person for this layoff, for sure.

So, as being one who has gone from one side of the fence to the other and back again, I can't say which one is better. They both have their advantages, and they are both able to be mismanaged and misused. We would all like to be our own managers and be on our own time schedules, but I would wager to say that most of you are not much different from me. Oh sure, you might start out doing things you've always wanted to do or start new projects or hobbies but I daresay that most of you wouldn't finish them and eventually ... eventually ... you'd find yourself in the same place I find myself now. If you're employed, do your best at the job you have, be thankful that you have it, and try not to let the job rule your life. If you are unemployed, enjoy the time you have to not be under someone else's thumb, get some rest, and do whatever you want to do (whatever that is). I've come to finally realize that I always want what I can't or don't have and this time has served to start me on the road to being content in whatever state I find myself. I'm much more open to things now from an employment perspective than I was a year ago, that being contract or temporary positions, and that is most definitely a good thing and a "successful" outcome.

The last thought that this time has brought to my mind is that the much-praised and touted "American Worth Ethic" (AWE) has gotten totally out of whack and out of control. I believe that most other industrialized countries have it right when they mandate vacation - sometimes an entire month at a time (e.g. Italy and Germany in August and October, respectively). I believe that the AWE causes many of us to work too much (either due to our personal interpretation of the AWE or the twisting of it by so many corporations which yields the misguided equation of AWE == workaholism == company loyalty) such that a weekend or a vacation day here and there - or even a week or two of time off- is just not enough to combat the burnout. My idea of the perfect job would be one that would allow me to work from anywhere with the single stipulation that I either work 40 hours in a 7-day period however I choose to break them up or to simply get paid by the project milestone (e.g. have weekly goals that, as long as they are done by COB on Friday, I get paid based on percentage completed). This would allow for me to work when I'm inspired to do so (oddly enough, oftentimes between the hours of 10pm - 2am), wherever I am, and would also give me the flexibility to do things on a whim without having to always be available, request time weeks in advance, or feel guilty about enjoying life and not being in the office between 8am - 5pm. I know, I know, this is an unrealistic idea because what business could function if people are randomly available, how can you have any sort of team unity, how can you make sure that people are doing their work and churning out quality deliverables, and blah, blah, blah? I didn't say I had an answer to it, I'm just saying that if I could design my own job parameters, this is what they'd be. I'm sure someone could figure out how to implement it and answer all the other logistical issues that go along with it, right?

Anyway, those are my thoughts on my unemployment experience. May you find them coherent and perhaps in some respect entertaining and possibly thought-provoking. I'll catch y'all on the flipside, and I'm sure that there will be a flurry of bloggery this week as I try to empty my brain of all those free-form thoughts floating therein before the data from the new job crowds them all out.