works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

Generally just words and thoughts on the progress of my day-to-day.

  • patio season

    It is only just the second day of May and I find myself sitting on the patio at the local Starbucks.

    Yeah, I know. There is a likely chance that you are reading this from somewhere in the world where (a) patio season in May is entirely normal and (b) eighteen degrees would not be considered patio weather whatsoever.  But I am writing this from a place in the world where the second of May is just as likely to be a snowy inside day as it is to be one facilitating a coffee from a suburban bistro table two meters from a bustling drive through.  So I’ll take it where I can get it, and celebrate it just the same.

    It is also my first writing excursion since walking out of my latest life phase: if you are a dedicated reader (but who am I kidding?) you may recall that I wrote earlier this week that I had quit my part time job. Resigned. Hung up my apron. De-shifted in order to pursue some more mentally stimulating contract-type work, and as I sit here sunning the light reflecting off a mini-mall cafe, it still hasn’t quit sunk in that yesterday was my last day juggling expired foods and lugging boxes of olive oil. It will, but there has only just been long enough to mark the space between shifts, so I could walk back in there this morning and only just be a few minutes late for work. I’ll let it settle out a bit more, but either way, I am free of that.

    And now here I am. It is in fact the first day of patio season and the first day of whatever comes next for me, and neither are lacking prospects. The patio function of the equation urges me to stop procrastinating with navel-gazing blog posts and finish my damn novel already, jeeze! The whats next(?) steps part of the same mysterious equation is a little less crystalized and may give me cause to write more about that in a day or a week or so, but not so much yet. There will be time for explanations when the dust settles.

    Patio season is different than the rest of the year for some reason, too.  It is a simple calculated fact that I spend a good chunk of my free winter morning agendas sitting at a table in this or that or other cafes around the neighbourhood. Everyone generally puts their heads down and avoids eye contact. But this morning, sitting and typing at a wobbly little bistro table, tilting my screen to angle it for best visibility in the glare of the outdoor ambiance, I’ve already had two jovial conversations with other patio folks. “What a great day!” “Do you live around here?” “Finally I can ride my bike to the cafe!” The glory of the finally spring mentality has burst through the hunkering isolationism of the winter chill and everyone is just happier enough to glory in the moment.

    Spring is such a cliche for new life I am reluctant to draw such an obvious analogy here, but alas it seems unavoidable. It seems cliche that I have timed my emergence from the chrysalis of career change in such synchronicity with the world around me.

    On my very first day of the job I just quit, back in August, when I arrived to a store-under-construction on a hot late-summer morning, it happened that the sun was shining and the dust was blowing and we all sat on the curb for our coffee break drinking cold pops and munching the assortment of salty snacks they had provided. It had been a hard morning lugging boxes and meeting new people and settling into a physical job. Yesterday, I stepped out the back door of the warehouse into that same alley, now just the cluttered space behind the store, the sun almost a parallel spring analog to that day last summer. We’d been through a winter, made a store, struggling in solidarity against the silliness of it all, and there I was on my last day on that same patch of asphalt almost a year later feeling about as full circle as one could feel about such things. Hardly a patio, but not completely different from where I am starting my day, this new era ahead of me, typing these words.

    It’s patio season. A new one.

  • big fishing it

    I quit my job yesterday.

    That sounds overly dramatic. But it is true.

    I have been working a part time gig at a little local retail grocery store, off and on, for the last nine months. Karin spotted the advertising along the side of the road last summer, and we followed the progress of the store getting ready to open. I had mostly been sitting around pondering my next career move and writing a novel and enjoying temporary unemployment during my career break, but it was starting to drag a bit and getting hella lonely, so I put my name in and the next thing I knew I was working.  I helped set up and stock the store. I was there for opening. I was there for a couple big management upheavals. I left for a bit, while they were sorting some of it out, but lately I’ve been back for a couple days a week, working part time, doing some inventory management and getting out of the house, to boot.

    But a few weeks ago that little itch in the back of my head started to nag.

    There is a twenty year old movie that I’ve always liked called Big Fish. The film is essentially a string of allegorical tales told at the end of the protagonist’s life and I can’t really explain it any better than to say he was a man who was full of big fish stories and this bugged the hell out of his son who was trying to understand his ailing father.  So from that the movie plays out as these big fish stories are told as tangential narrative of the film’s father son drama plot. And then, all of that is to say merely that there is one particular story that struck me as relevant lately. It was about when the young man, on his way out and away from the town of his childhood into the big wide world takes a detour that leads him to an unexpected small town in the woods. It is the town of Spectre.  And the place is filled with lovely people who have taken off their shoes and who dance in the grass and drink lemonade on the porch. It is the embodiment of what many might call success. Or retirement. Or giving up and settling. It is a place the main character realizes is somewhere he would like to get to eventually, but that he has stumbled on this place too early. He has reached it too soon.

    Spectre is, of course and as I said before, kind of an allegory for post-work, retirement, winding down, whatever you want to call it. It is meant to symbolize the rewards and spoils of a well-earned life, I think. And the main character quickly realizes that too. He sees people settling into their comforts and hiding themselves away from the hardships of the world, to waste away the rest of their lives enjoying the spoils of their lifelong efforts.

    And the main character having reached it at the start of his career realizes he had arrived there far too soon.

    Working in a grocery store warehouse is hardly an idyllic retirement. But at the same time, stepping away from challenging work that forced me to think and create and build and collaborate and fight for ideas, the warehouse was kind of an important job disguising the fact that I had arrived at that type of work too soon.  I wasn’t ready to spend the rest of my life sorting olive oils and checking the expiration dates on the backs of packages of cookies. I had arrived too soon at the low-effort post-career semi-retirement job that I had romanticized in my head.

    Like the main character of Big Fish, I needed to find my shoes—or ditch them entirely—and run back out onto the path to figure out my next challenge. And more importantly, I realized that I could not do both simultaneously. I couldn’t keep this little part time job in the soft grass and then also to devote myself to the path ahead. I needed to choose. I needed to decide if I was settling in for the long run, accepting a life of short commutes to a little grocery market in the suburbs where I may aspire to climb the little heap of food stuff dramatics and spend the rest of my life doing just that, noble and important and simple as it is—or if I needed to get back out on the hunt for the things I really wanted from my life, from myself, for my soul, my creative endeavours and my personal magnum opus of creating something far bigger than that.

    Like the titular big fish, I don’t know where my trail will lead, but I am pretty certain that I want to be on it again.

    So, I had no other choice than to make that decision. I had no other choice but to quit and move on.

    So yeah, I quit my job yesterday. 

    That sounds very dramatic, but maybe it is.

  • weekend wrap two

    Technically it’s Tuesday, but with yesterday being election day in Canada that Monday really blurred into the other days. In my continued efforts to be as pedestrian and basic as my pride will allow here once again is a wrap up of this past unofficially extended long weekend’s activities.

    This past weekend, I…

    Completed the saga of our broke ass hot water heater. The new unit was installed and after flushing the pipes for a couple days to ensure that we weren’t going to cram up the new part with crud, replaced the faucet head. Both hot water and water pressure are at optimal levels now.

    Held my member of parliament’s feet to the fire after I spotted and reported a minor (but rules are rules) election sign infraction around our polling station.

    Brought my weekly running distance total up over twenty-five klicks by rounding it off with a great Sunday run. I also happened to hand my willingness to volunteer as needed with our local run club to KB who is the area manager round these parts.

    Attended a duo of dance competition performances and watched the kid bring in top marks for her second show, much to her own and everyone else’s surprise. Apparently, according to the mom contingent, the number was a little rough even just the week before and they were worried it wouldn’t be compeition-ready. But they locked in a “diamond” and celebrations ensued.

    Finally picked up some new coffee filters for my aeropress.

    Took the dog to the off-leash park for the first time this season.

    Drank my first slurpee of the season, too.

    And, yeah, that’s about enough for one chilly April weekend, no?

  • keyboard life

    I have developed a lot of little productivity hacks for myself in the past couple years.

    It’s odd, actually.

    Realizing that.

    Odd.

    For the first year of my career break I wrote about it all the time. The career break I mean. I was always writing about it. I was slightly obsessed with working through the whole thing in long rambling essays, very few of them published anywhere but in my own personal files, but all of them detailing my reasons and logic and emotions and everything to do with this whole deal of quitting a well-paying desk job (thanks stress and burnout) and spending the following months and months and months sorting through the effort of trying to rebuild myself professionally.

    So many words.

    It’s odd, because thinking about it right now I realize that I haven’t written much about career breaking in nearly a year now. And yet, no, I haven’t moved on, nor found myself breaking through the far side of that career break quite yet, but then too all the tangled complications of the last year have sort of left me a little less introspective on this thing that I did nearly two years ago now. I think about it. Write words. But those two haven’t really intermingled recently.

    Yet, it was the first thing I thought to write about now, just sitting here looking at the keyboard under my fingers, and I guess that means it still comes up, particularly when I start introspecting on some of the changes and habits that manifested in the meanwhile of my not quite but kinda still a career break era.

    Like, I’m typing on one of those productivity hack things as I write this.

    Yeah, the keyboard.

    About a year ago I bought myself this little portable mechanical keyboard.  Well, in fact I bought two of them, each for very different purposes. First, I bought a really nice one that is amazing to type on and which I carry in a little bag along with my iPad when I go off to a cafe to write. It’s wonderful. Clicky. Solid. Durable. And no I’m not selling them. But then I also bought a cheaper, smaller keyboard. It’s not quite as nice, though still pretty nice, and its a lot more plasticky, and it tends to live in the glove box of my truck. It is a little trickier to type on, I will admit, mostly because it is lacking about twenty of the more familiar keys like number digits and punctuation marks, and when I need them I need to access those with little function key combos that also make it a bit cryptic to type on, but I use it even more than I thought I would, squeezing in a session of writing before work or, like now, sitting in a park at a picnic table waiting for the run crew to arrive and taking these twenty free minutes to pound out a blog post.

    All of this is tangled together, of course, because this whole career break has given me this little new productivity skill of forcing myself to be much more free and effective about my writing. Impromptu. Spontaneous. Picnic table in the park free-ish. 

    Oh, and that’s the other thing I should mention. If nothing else comes of this career break, I am emerging from it feeling a lot more like a writer than I ever did prior. I’ve always fashioned myself a writer, but right now I feel it inasmuch as I would not hesitate to put it on a resume and defend it as a professional skill. 

    In fact. I’m a writer in the same way that I’m a runner, because I practice and practice and practice it a lot. I’ve just logged the time, you know?

    So, here I sit in yet another gap of free time writing on a keyboard in the park on this little keyboard. And the culmination of this anecdote is that I know damn well that I was not a type in the park on a little keyboard kind of writer before the career break. 

    That is the little productivity hack. 

    The hack is that I just write anywhere and everywhere now, shamelessly, even though as I’m sitting here in the park and cyclists and dog walkers and kids on skateboards are passing by looking at me with this idle curiosity, some weirdo at a picnic table typing away like a nut. That’s just what this looks like, I suppose.

    And that is a cool realization for me, fumbling and tangled and unfocused as I feel in the emergent spring. If nothing else, I’ve been productively hacked.

  • multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    Some may think of this as just a bit of opportunity cost comparison, huh?

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.