On January 1, 2008, on the Blog That Was, I declared that the year would be the Year of Upgrades. The words no longer exist online but the plan came together, in some ways I did expect, and in others I couldn’t have possibly seen coming.
(My boss couldn’t believe that I’d just ax an old blog. “You deleted it?†I mean, I saved everything to file first. I’m not stupid. I have two degrees. Two and ¾, really, but I suppose “almost PhD†is like “almost pregnant†– you either are or you’re not. I’m not. Either of those things. Huzzah!)
In July, I traded in my 2005 iMac for a 2008 MacBook. This was done in compliance with the Law of Jobs, which mandates that all Apple purchases take place 1-3 months prior to the unveiling of a new edition of whatever product you buy. Even so, it wasn’t so much a “trade in†as it was a necessary thing — the iMac coughed through a kernel panic or two and I found out it had a bad logic board. How does a logic board go bad? I never asked. It wakes up one morning and decides if p, then cheese?
(and yes, I am aware that there are those reading who subscribe to the philosophy that all paths of logic lead to cheese. I’m open to this possibility, but I need to see the proofs.)
(then again, the Wensleydale I just snarfed down could be proof enough. Why did no one tell me before about this miraculous cheese?)
I was nervous about dropping the dollars on the MacBook, since I was also struggling with an incredibly unfulfilling job that paid a staggeringly unfulfilling salary. More than that, I could sense that the company was going under and I’d be without any salary or benefits at all, so I’d been looking and looking and looking for something else for months and months and months. The same week I learned I needed a new computer, I landed an interview for a web producer gig. And got the job. Snap, like that.
It’s strange now to look back on those couple of weeks and think that after all that time and effort, writing and rewriting resumes, reconfiguring my list of priorities so that I had a new bottom line every week, bargaining with myself about what I would and would not do, trying to figure out whether I wanted to find a job that would require writing or whether that would, as it had before, wear me down eventually, basically trying to determine what it is exactly that I want to be doing with myself until I finally decided that I didn’t have to have that figured out in order to get a job — after all that, all it took was knowing someone who worked in the office. Well, that and being awesome.
I consider myself extremely fortunate, particularly since this all happened before our government decided we’d been in a recession since last year. I’ve never taken much pleasure in the necessary evil of networking, but I’ve had to reverse my position on that since the summer. I also never thought I was much good at the self-promotion or the schmooziness, but again: I’ve had to rethink that over the last couple months.
2008 was about more than getting a job, though it was one of my goals for the year and it feels really good to be able to check it off the list. It was one of several major changes I went through this year and it’s only just now catching up with me — or rather, I’m only just now comfortable with the way these changes have altered my perspective on stuff: life, what I want, how to get it, etc. (you know: stuff.) More on that in the next post.
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