Visions of Fridays Dance in My Head

I think I've said before that I like Thursdays as a general rule. I find them akin to Christmas Even where you know the 'big day' is next but the anticipation of that is almost as sweet as the actual day of Christmas itself.

In this case, the 'big day' is simply Friday. While we still have to work on Fridays, they're like the reward at the end of the week. Things are a little more relaxed. People talk more on Fridays. The day goes by quickly, mostly because I have a lot of meetings on Fridays for some reason.

As not a huge fan of meetings, I don't mind meetings on Friday afternoons, particularly when they involve my boss. He's very easily distractable and clearly has a case of the 'wanting to escape early and start the weekend off right.'

So, pretty much, in a way, Fridays are part of the weekend because you know how matter how rough they are, there are two beautiful days of freedom just beyond the rise.

Today was a good Thursday. I had a couple of meetings which weren't too bad. I find that I tend to doodle a lot more in some meetings than others. Doodling, for me, is almost like meditation. I have to doodle in order to listen. As my pencil sketches odd designs and things on the page, my mind is listening to what people are saying.

Today, my doodles were off odd things. I drew a superhero who was an owl, two large evil looking pumpkins. Then I attempted to sketch a piece of corn. I don't mean the sweetcorn you buy in the supermarket, it was the type of corn that looks like wheat, that they make into flower. In England, when you see a corn field, there's no sweetcorn to be found. Instead it's rows and rows of green or golden sheaves, depending on the month, waving in the wind.

This is the corn I grew up with. My older brother used to go off to the corn fields to get up to mischief with his friends. They'd play in the fields, hiding from one another when the corn was high enough. When it was harvest season, they'd use the haystacks made from the dried corn stalks as objects in which to dive.

In our art classes, we'd have to draw pieces of this corn, capturing each kernel just right. Nowadays, while I remember in my mind how it looks, my pencil can no longer remember how to sketch it. It was sad. I used to know how to nest each kernel so it actually looked like corn. Now it looks rather bloated and more like a Christmas tree.

I was a little worried about this, whether it meant I was losing some of my Englishness. I compensated by making sure I could still remember how to make the pound sign. I don't mean that crosshatch thing you see on phone keypads, I mean the UK monetary type of pound sign. Fortunately, I could without any thought at all.

Thus, my meetings passed quickly. I like it when that happens. Doodling is good for making sure you're not so bored you start visualizing stabbing people in the eye with your pencil.

In addition to my meetings, we also had cake. I'm not a big fan of cake but today I was in the mood for a piece. My piece had plenty of frosting on it and clearly, I was in the mood for that more than cake because I realized that I'd slowly eaten all of that and left part of the cake. That's unusual for me. I'm not usually a cake eater at all.

I also had a meeting with the man who interviewed me last week. I was offered the job I interviewed for. At the moment, I'm 98% sure I'm ready for the change since the salary and benefits package met my requirements. All I need is the formal offer from the company which I'm supposed to get tomorrow.

The prospect of this change is both exciting and a little scary. I like this new company. People there seemed genuinally to like their jobs. Having been involved in a series of candidate interviews for a programmer position we have at work, I've had the chance to be on both sides of the interview process over the past two weeks. You can tell when someone is genuinely excited about their job. I don't think many people in our company are. In this new company, three of the four employees have been there over ten years. That says a lot.

I may change my mind but it's a lovely feeling to go into my Friday with this opportunity on my mind. It will help me focus on my current job and truly decide if I want to leave or whether the new opportunity is too great to pass up. I suggest the latter but I want time to sleep on it and make absolutely sure it's the right thing for me.

For now, I have that and the pleasure of it being Friday tomorrow. The weekend is wide open at the moment with no firm plans. It will give me plenty of time to do some serious thinking so that, by Monday, I will know for sure.

Then again, I have several meetings tomorrow. Maybe I should use those as my thinking time instead.

We'll see how it goes.

Happy Friday!