The Longest Day

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The last week of work is done; I'm on vacation! It's Friday evening and I'm writing at Café on the Ave in the University District; I'm at a high little table by the black-framed windows with the colored curtains; the Ave and the U. Bookstore (where I bought a notebook for the trip) are thronged with returning students under a mottled muggy sky. In three days we're off for Hawaii.

The hours at the office seemed doubly leaden today, the fluorescent rooms and ancient cubicles additionally dusty and airless. A crisis arose; I sat in on an emergency meeting; it was already half-meaningless to me. Back at my desk I tried to concentrate on work; I could barely keep my eyes open; my head was sluggish and achy. I took a walk, I took a couple of aspirin, I went out for a coffee -- I used all my workplace drugs. Finally when the big clock hit the last half hour my energy returned in a surge. I wrapped up everything I had to do, shut down my computer, tidied my desk, swung my pack over my shoulder and strode out to the street, free and feeling great. Lately I've had reason to worry about my motivation at work -- the workload has been light but I haven't been assiduous in seeking new tasks; it's a decent enough company but I've been reluctant to mount those steps to the front door every morning -- and I've sought for subconscious blocks or hidden agendas but damn, with the advent of vacation I realize that, really, I'm just seriously burnt out!

This is the first actual vacation I've had since May of 2007. I've already written about what Sara and I have been through since then. I'm the kind of person who doesn't readily admit to burnout -- I tend to disparage the notion of "recharging" in favor of addressing fundamental problems, plotting dramatic changes -- and I'm not saying that I don't have subconscious blocks or real issues to address in my life, but as I sit here sipping my good bitter latté, watching the students come and go outside the café window, feeling for the first time in over three years the bracing security of time off with a job to come back to, and a trip to Hawaii in between, I realize that "recharging" is a valid effect, and I've needed it. I'll be better at even this job when I return.

This post is more like a personal journal entry; I don't know that it holds any interest for the wider world, and in general it isn't the kind of thing I want for the blog. But there will be external scenes soon enough, and the whole point of a travelogue is to intermix the traveller with the destination, so it's only fair to prop up the ash-grey participant for your initial viewing pleasure. He's by no means satisfied with his paper-pushing career; he ever feels its slow mold on the edges of his once-literate mind; he's growing old with no solution in sight for how to give his so-called true calling its due primacy. Perhaps aiming a barely-witnessed blog at an overly-brochured island is a more than forlorn hope for such, and perhaps his vacation shouldn't even be weighted with the attempt, but what the heck, tonight the traveller and the muse are both champing at the bit, and he and she are equally willing martyrs to a faith in the panacea of the new and the inspiration of the natural world. Call him a tourist if you must. But it's time to put on a loud shirt in many ways.

--Matt

Telecommuting and Writing

Or, What Happened To My Blog?

Yesterday I finished up my two-week contract telecommuting for PhoneMonkey. It's hard to believe two weeks have passed--they went by in a blur, and the whole thing seems to have taken just a second. I know that my blog pretty much ground to a halt during those weeks. I could easily and justifiably blame that on working from home, the setup where after a long day in my small studio tik-takking away at the desktop PC, the last thing I want to do is STAY in that studio and start tik-takking at something else. I could also point the finger at my dead laptop, which otherwise would have been happily blogging the evenings away with me down at Zoka's, Urban Coffee Lounge, Kahili, or other great Eastside coffeehouses.

I COULD say that...but I think the real reason is something else. Something to do with working again, specifically with telecommuting again.

I haven't always telecommuted for PhoneMonkey. In fact my history with that company is a long, tangled one; I realized the other day that this contract is the FIFTH time PhoneMonkey has taken me on.

The history goes like this: I was first hired circa 1995, in Tucson, then laid off in 1997. Just before the layoffs I'd been doing some work for their new branch in Cambridge, and lo and behold the Cambridge branch hired me. So I was "laid on" again, keeping seniority and benefits etc., and in fact the company paid to relocate Sara and me to Boston. (And Sara's horse, but don't tell them that.) I was then a PhoneMonkey employee in Cambridge from 1997 to 1999, at which point I quit. Why? To move to Seattle! The grand adventure, I was cutting all ties. But not so fast, said PhoneMonkey. They proposed that I stay on staff as a telecommuter from Seattle. Adventure or not, that was an offer I couldn't refuse. So I "unquit," moved to Seattle, and took up the telecommuting stint, which lasted from 2000 to 2008, when they laid me off. (The fourth instance was two months ago, when Sharon and Susan couldn't get the old online Help to compile and called me up in desperation to troubleshoot. I solved the problem and they paid me for 4 hours work. That greased the wheels for this latest contract.)

I need a mnemonic or something for my PhoneMonkey history, like for the wives of Henry VIII: "Hired, laid off, laid on, quit, unquit, laid off, contract, contract." As long as it ends with "survived" I'll be happy...

But back to the telecommuting. During my years working from home I was the envy of everyone I knew, and I won't deny that the situation had its perqs. But it also drove me crazy in a way. Sitting at home, all day, every day, for nine years had the effect of coccooning me in introverted comfort; it took a toll on my sociability, my energy, and above all my writing. I created many catalysts to get myself out of the house, meet people, and do things; I couldn't create a single catalyst to write. It's funny that I wrote my whole first novel back when I was commuting to offices, but here, with theoretically much more "free time" at my disposal, I couldn't write a thing. Writers will I think understand that.

Writing is such a solitary, introverted activity. When one's workday is solitary and introverted, one can't then "play" in the same solitary cell. Oddly, the best thing for a writer, at least for me, is a life that otherwise surrounds me with loud people and changing scenes.

So about this two-week blur, back at PhoneMonkey, back telecommuting again. I liked the work, I liked the people, I put in 10-hour days because I wanted to get as much done as possible, and I enjoyed doing it. But in many ways I felt the same telecommuting coccoon wrap around me. Coming out the end of it, I look back and see that in those two weeks I hardly WROTE a thing. The blog has been the measure.

Food for thought.