Dithering yet

Blogging and a full time job…hmmm, how’s that gonna work?  Typically I've enjoyed sitting alone at home once everyone has left for the day, laptop in my lap, writing in peace to fiddle and tweak and finesse over a cup of coffee until I get a post just how I want it.  Writing’s been my knitting since knitting got boring.  And this speaks very much to my knitting when I say that you'd rather read my blog than wear my scarves.

My avatar with Don Draper. Where I wish I worked.

But there's no peace yet.  Home after 5 there’s already at least one kid home, hoards of pets in need of nourishment and release, phone messages to be answered, neighbors to greet, dinner to be made all before evening commitments commence.  I’ll get it all together eventually but not this week.  I’m chasing my Ann Taylored tail. 

Everything that is routine about a person going to work is a succession of hurdles for the new guy.  Opening my calendar on Outlook and finding my parking spot are thought provoking enough for now.  My commute's code is yet undecipherable…I’m either 15 minutes early or 30 minutes early.  Every literal step I take is with some hesitancy.  Am I going the right way?  Where am I going?  Who is behind the next door?  Typical newbie overload.

I unloaded from my car on my first day like I was about to move up the mountain from base camp. Three bags thrown akimbo over both shoulders as I teetered and tiptoed through an unpaved parking marsh called Lot 130 by the University and Lot Bangladesh by me, fumbling for my phone, my keys and my ID badge as I lunged and stumbled onto the parking shuttle to the withering glances of other riders.  Did they harken back to their first days on the job?  Hard to say since they had all been snoozing until a wild woman fell onto their bus.

Every day it gets a little easier.  I wear my sneakers now to cross the marsh to the shuttle and I’m down to two bags.  Today I was simply on time.  I’m finding more economical paths through the medical matrix to the office where I squat while someone's on vacation, still not even a chair to call my own.  And still packing my lunch and eating at my desk because there’s nothing worse than standing in the salad bar line without a friend.  

“Aw, Mom, you ate alone again today? In your car?  Not in the bathroom I hope?”
“Yes, Ally, I ate in the bathroom… in the stall, sobbing on the toilet.”

Nothing more tragic for a teenager than to picture her mom, or anyone for that matter, eating alone.  I don’t feel lonely at all eating my lunch at my desk.  There are hundreds of people around me for the first time in a while and I'm content to be quite anonymous for now.  Nobody even knows to look for me yet.  The discomfort and the uncertainty of being new are shortlived, this I do remember from each job I've had.  It just feels long.

My family took me out to live it up large at Sprechers for my first dinner as a working girl.  

I had a history teacher in high school, a quirky guy overly obsessed with Japan named Mr. Fisher who when we complained about being hot in the classroom told a story of suffering such unbelievable cold as a soldier in the military that he vowed never to complain about the heat again. I am Mr. Fisher.  No complaints.

The housewives in the neighborhood miss me, I think.