Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.
Night Shift, Fruition, and Public Transit
I started my new schedule at work this week, 3:00PM to 11:30PM. I've really enjoyed it so far. I take calls for the first four hours, then dinner, then I answer e-mail for four hours. I wish that I could just answer e-mail all day long because even though people tend to be bitchier through the veil of semi-anonymity e-mail provides, at least I don't have to talk to them. It's also nice because I can listen to my MP3 player for the last four hours. My music collection is feeling kind of stale, though, so I've begun again the arduous process of ripping my huge CD collection. I hate ripping CDs, it takes such a long time that while I'm waiting I keep re-ordering the "must have" CDs for the evening. I guess if I do five or so a day I'll be done in a couple months. I've actually purchased songs on itunes before to avoid having to find and rip that CD.
I find it pretty amusing that there is such a stark difference between the people that work the day and night shifts. The people who work during the day are, for the most part, pretty straight-laced and tend to be a bit older. As soon as 7:00PM rolls around and all of gentle folk go home, the freaks come out of the woodwork to occupy their desks. During the day shift conversations usually tend to focus on weekend plans, sports, children, tv shows, etc. As an example of typical nighttime conversation, here's something I heard last night in reference to the author of an e-mail: "This is the kind of guy that wants you to stick your tongue up his asshole until he coughs."
It wasn't until I moved to the night shift that I realized how uncomfortable I've felt at work the whole time I've been there. It's not that there's anything wrong with my day shift coworkers, it's just that I never felt I had much in common with them. They tend to be true adults, instead of my permanent man-child state, they have kids and real estate and I always kind of felt like I had to watch what I say around them. I haven't quite mastered the "polite society" conversation filter, so when I start to get comfortable around people I can say some "impolite" things. A poor example of this, my mother and I were at Applebee's the other day and talking about people getting married who shouldn't be married, differences in values, etc, and I made the comment "I could never marry someone who was religous." She was surprised and asked if I was serious, to which I responded "I could never marry someone who believed in a god or gods." The previously loud and talkative couple sitting next to us stopped talking and stared at me continusously throughout the remainder of their meal. Oops!
So while it was very nice for a time to have a shift that allowed me some sunlight on my commute home from work, I have to say that I feel much more comfortable with the night shift.
Also, my new supervisors took me out and treated me to dinner last night and we bonded. It was very nice.
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In October I came to the realization that I was very unhappy with the direction that my life had taken thus far, and that in order to break out of the rut I'd worn for myself I would need to make some significant changes. To that end, I moved to my parents house, found a higher-paying job, began saving money for tuition, and made various health-conscious changes. Most of these were geared toward finishing school, having dropped out of college twice already for lack of direction and purpose I spent a long time trying to honestly suss out some core passion that I could latch on to and somehow turn into a career. I'm fairly certain that I've got a firm direction now and after almost eight months of planning and saving, school starts again on Tuesday.
I've started to wonder how I'm going to be able to suppress my old behaviors that have always led to difficulty and disillusion and caused me to falter and fail. I feel confident now that I'm on track, that I can change for the better and finally grow up. But I wonder whether this passion will fade again in two weeks, a month, a year, when I am tired and questioning the drive that takes me to class every morning. Living at home should help this, I doubt that my parents will let skipping class pass without comment. But knowing that I had trouble waking up to drive five minutes to class, let alone walking from Stephenson or the house on Indiana, how much more difficult will it be to wake up for a forty minute commute to Lawrence?
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I love public transportation. That statement is probably pretty ridiculous to those who depend on public transportation on a regular basis, but I've lived in the suburban Midwest my whole life. I never even took the bus to school, so my exposure to public transit is fairly recent. My first trip on a subway was in Toronto in October when I was visiting Justin and Amy. It was probably more the excitement of being in a new city with good friends, but the rush of running to catch the train, jumping off amid the throng of others trying to enter and exit so we could catch our transfer bus, all of it was very exciting. So when I heard about the K-10 Connector bus running from the Edwards campus to the Lawrence campus, I got pretty excited. Having done the math, it looks like it should save me a ton of money, a round-trip on the bus is $3.00 whereas I would spend roughly $8.00 a day on gas, not to mention the cost and frustration of parking. I will have to wake up awfully early to make it to the bus on time, and I'll be stuck in Lawrence for an hour and half after my class gets out. Hopefully that I'll be able to use that time to force myself to study and do homework.
On Tuesday I decided to get up early and take the bus for a test run. Shawn met me at the bus stop in Lawrence and we ate breakfast and ran around for a while until the time the bus was leaving. I can see that taking the bus will give me a whole new perspective on regular travel, with very strict deadlines I'll need to be pretty obsessive about the time. Despite these minor negatives that I'm sure will seem very major in a few weeks, I'm still pretty enamored with public transit.
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I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go read this right now. It really made my day.
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