I'm employed. I have a job. A real job. I'm stunned. I don't know how to deal with it, exactly. I haven't had a full-time permanent job in nearly two years, and it's been longer than that since i had a job that challenged me (or even where I even had to do work). There's an element of unreality to it. I feel like Charlie Brown waiting for Lucy to take the football away. But I have an offer letter in hand and my boss approved my couple of days off, in the first few weeks, so it's real.
I'm also wondering exactly how I might exist in an office environment. For two years I've been traveling, working from home, working as a contractor, or just sitting around the house not doing much of anything in particular. I'm a very different person now than I was two years ago; very different even from a month ago, really, in how I'm trying to be in the world and react to things. If something shakes me up (and I've had some anxiety and tension the past couple of days, mostly surrounding the job and its impact on my training, and paranoia about them changing their mind for one reason or another)--instead of just being in a mood and being captured by it, I can see it happening and (a) try to understand where it's coming from, and (b) not be bothered because I can stay centered in the stillness underneath the anxiety and agitation. Moods and feelings go through me now like waves through water or clouds over the sun. And this new way of being seems to hold up under stress, which is neat.
Also, holy crap am I sore. I was tired today anyway, but then during class I took falls for Sensei for four or five minutes nonstop, which left me sucking air for a few minutes. It was, in fact, as difficult as it felt: Caroline caught me a little later in class and said "You're my hero." Good training, but damn. I hurt.
It snowed in London for the first time in a while, so The Guardian published a manual for snow.
When Congress passed the DMCA, I'm pretty sure even this is well beyond what they had in mind.
Buy a program to erase your hard drive before you get rid of it.
I'm glad these parents got arrested, I think. I'm not usually a fan of hassling parents, and I'm very in favor of legalizing marijuana at the very least, but it's really irresponsible to allow kids access to any kind of drugs, especially the illegal kind to which America is incapable of forming a rational response.
As you may have heard, California has a budget deficit bigger than the GDP of many small countries, so they're cutting community college funding. It sucks, and probably will cripple the economy, but I don't have any better ideas.
I do, however, have a job. How fucked up is that? I've barely dealt with anything in the past years that I could call a "career", and here I go again.