works of wanderlust

Tag: career break

  • what’s in a name

    I have been inching towards some contracting work. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed and in many ways I’m five steps ahead of myself here, but ultimately, all things being equal, my end game in this adventure is to start doing this kind of thing on the regular and actually get paid for it.

    I’ve officially taken a stab, and its an optimistic one, but if I’m being honest wih myself not even really a favourable one.

    That said, my guide on this adventure did politely inform me that if things proceeded to the next step I would need to do something much more than personal introspection: I would need to set up a business. Legit. Corporate registry, tax account number, bank account, government filing documents, legit.

    Not a big deal. It’s just time and money and effort. I can handle it.

    But what’s got me hung up is that when I do all that legit business stuff, I actually need to call myself something. I can’t just hang an Inc off my name and go from there. I need a business name.

    I wouldn’t say that I’ve been good at naming stuff, but I’ve certainly been prolific. I have registered dozens of domain names over the years and let nearly as many lapse, each a little project or business idea that I threw against the wall hoping it would stick. I have created funny and clever handles for social media accounts. I have given myself an artistic pen name and am currently writing a video game under a clever (and unregistered) studio name, though neither of those really encompass the tone of professionalism that I would hope to impart with a corporate registration name that someone would need to put on an invoice, you know?

    And is my way, I tend to trudge along with the bigger plan, ever forward, even while swatting at the air as it buzzes around me with these pesky little problems that need solving.

    What’s in a name? Everything, in many ways. 

    All those previous names I have mentioned were chosen to impart a sense of casual disconnectedness from my professional self, as odd as that might seem. I wanted to add a jagged edge to my art when I called myself “squwetchy” online for that. I used the name “pixelazy” for my photography for a while throwing a broad tone of just-a-guy-with-a-camera snapping photos into the digital ecosphere. My online coder-guy presense has always been wrapped in this very domain name “8r4d” a kind of throwback to the geekily trend of numeric hacker lingo that I secured in a domain name nearly a quarter century ago now. All of them are little slivers of me, but none are my professional self, and none of them convey a kind of marketable trust that even I would look at and go “let’s hire them…”

    So I have entered the realm of needing to tangle myself up with a very official, very long term, corporate identity. And I find myself thinking I may need to do that sooner than later. Even inching towards something might get you there eventually, right?

  • 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.