Friday, June 5, 2009

Home is Where my Bed is, Contentment is where my Heart Lies...

It's Friday today and I'm in a far better mood than I was yesterday. I apologize for that by the way; some days you just wake up crabby and moody and the shadow of the day never quite goes away.

Today seems better though. The mere fact that it's a Friday helps. I had a nice relaxing evening with Sausage last night, ordering pizza, watching a little "True Blood," and catching up with a good friend on the phone. That's always a mood enhancer.

I'm looking forward to the weekend. I have a bridal shower tomorrow and after that, I'm heading to my parent's to house-sit/drop of The Sausage. In a way, I'll be sad to lose him from my apartment. Aside from the stress of having to leave him alone all day, having those liquid brown eyes following me with adoration (even if he is really just waiting for a snack), is a lovely thing. Last night while eating my pizza, I was sitting on the floor. He was on the sofa behind me and he just put his head on my shoulder. It was a nice moment. It's about as much of a Marley and Me moment than I'll ever get.

As of Monday, I'll be a dog-less singleton again. I'm going to start packing to move though when I look around, I feel like much of what I need to pack can just be taken as I need it. I can pack my media up, my CD's, my books, my DVD's. I can take my Christmas decorations and storage-type items. But when do you decide when to take things like cookware, silverware, bathroom stuff? I use all that now. It's going to be a balancing act between when I decide to physically move into the house and move out of my apartment. When my bed goes, I go. That's pretty much all there is to it, I suppose. I always say home is where my bed is. I have a bed at my parents. Thus...I have two homes.

Given that it's a Friday, I'm prone to ramble. I'm rambling now. I was reading a friend's blog today. She just bought a unicycle and juggling pins and is going to bartending school. She recently graduated with honours from college with double degree in Engineering and Philosophy. She has decided she doesn't want a 9-5 job and is now exploring different paths in life. I'd like to admire her for that but mostly, I can't help thinking how lucky she is to have friends and family who are supporting her as she goes through a stage in life many of us go/went through. I graduated with a degree in Technical Theatre. When I left school I became...a legal secretary. I wanted to go to law school, you see and that was my way of figuring out if I really wanted it or if it was a the effect of reading too much John Grisham. It turned out to be the Grisham effect because I realized law was boring. I moved on to other fields, medical, journalism, video production, market research and various other fields. I had my writing ephiphany and from then onwards, I realized it wasn't about how I earned my paycheck, just that I liked my job enough to keep doing it so I could keep writing.

I'm reminding myself of that now. I'm letting this job trip me up, fall into a pit of insecurity because I'm just not being utilized enough. I need to remember that while I need to like my job, it isn't where my heart will ever truly be. My heart is mentally sitting at a computer, the sun pouring in while I hold a cup of coffee, a warm brown Sausage dog at my feet and a novel open on the screen. I can have that no matter where I'm working and when I picture that, I realize it's not so much about getting a good review from Publisher's Weekly, it's not about debating with acolytes of Nathan Bransford about craft vs. profession and what makes us writers and it's not about those rejection slips I get regularly. It's about that level of contentment in knowing I have the power to create anything on that Word document.

I hope my friend discovers that somewhere between learning to ride a unicycle, juggling and going to bartending school. I hope that someday, just as I did, she wakes up and realizes that working in an office, working a regular day isn't imprisonment, it's a means to support the things in life you really want to do. It'd be nice if we could all have our dream job but sometimes we think we know what that is and then, when we have it, we realize it's not what we thought it would be. For me, that was theatre. I loved it. I love it still. But I got burned out from it, I got tired of working 18 hour days, tired of seeing the magic of the theatre in it's realistic, down-and-dirty reality. I still love it and wouldn't mind doing some light theatre work but when I actually got to do it, I realize it wasn't my dream job.

I'm sure there is such a thing as a dream job. Right now, I think it would be nice to get paid to blog. I'd love to be a television blogger; I do that occasionally on my Captain TV blog but not as often as I'd like to. I still get to do it though, I just don't get paid for it. So, in a way, I am doing my dream job, blogging here every day, blogging sporadically there. I just don't earn a living from it. Yet when I do it, my heart is there and I am happy. Contentment is where my heart lies and it lies with writing. It's a nice realization.

Happy Friday.

No comments:

StatCounter