more transitions

Strange things are afoot at the circle K.

Well, not necessarily strange, but change is definitely in the air, and it's not just the pollen.

Things have improved somewhat since Sunday -- there have been no cascading outbursts, no spontaneous breakdowns; the perturbance that had been clinging to the edge of my perception, that edginess, has settled down. It still sucks mightily that the SOOTTAD is almost a 1000 miles away, but it feels like things are under control, an equilibrium of sorts, be it unstable or otherwise. We've been talking a lot on the phone (thank god for free night and weekend minutes) and there's generally been stuff keeping me busy (and distracted).

For one thing, disc has started. My summer club team started its practices last week and I played in my first hat game in JP on Monday. The weeknight JP league has a much different feel than the weekend games in Waltham -- the level of competition is slightly higher, but more importantly, it has a more social culture, due in large part to the presence of Doyle's right across the street. I didn't fully understand how integral the bar was to the frisbee scene until I walked in after the game and the woman at the counter immediately told me that my team was in the middle room... and then noticed that almost every other team was in the bar, too; segregated by color (I'm on a green team), but at least present and accounted for. The running helped, it always does. But it was good to grab a beer with some friends I hadn't seen in a while.

So disc. And school. This week is effectively finals week -- we got our first final back in Physiology last night, and we have finals/assessments in Anatomy, Technique and Skills & Dynamics this coming Sunday.

Busy.

And then there's the new job.

Yeah, a new job.

When I was telling a friend of mine about how I got hooked up with this gig, she thought it was the weirdest thing -- no job posting, no applications, no cover letters, just a short email exchange, a phone call and then a fairly casual affair meeting people at their office. (I did send them a resume before I went in.)

It seemed a little weird to me, too, but not totally out of the ordinary. (This was also before I went back for a second meeting and a meatier grilling of my experience that actually felt like a job interview.) There had been a slightly more formal structure to the interview process for my previous job, but the discussions were still pretty casual and I got hooked into the position by a cold call from a recruiter. The only difference this time around was that the initial contact was an email from an ex-coworker. And if it doesn't seem that weird to you, maybe it's because I'm not conveying the vibe of the initial phone conversation I had with them, which I unfortunately don't feel I can adequately express here.

So anyway, I start Tuesday. We'll see if it works out. It's a contract gig, my first. So in addition to familiarizing myself with a new design and getting used to a new environment, (not to mention the return to a commuting routine) I get to figure out self-employment taxes (Social Security, Medicare), estimated taxes, IRAs and probably lots of other crap I don't even know about yet.

Between work and school and studying and disc and running, I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to have time to sleep or eat.

As an aside, it's interesting to notice that as I'm being pulled back into the step of working life again, all that political stuff that I've been ignoring and/or hiding from has started creeping back into my awareness. When I lost my job, it was pretty easy to just ignore it because it felt like it was outside of my circle of concern. It felt like I was no longer part of the system. My focus was on budgeting my savings, minimizing spending. Keeping active, distracted. There was no connection outside of that, perhaps by choice. (I don't know if I could deal, either financially or emotionally.) Simply being unemployed made me feel like I was outside, disenfranchised.

So I guess I'm, uh, franchised now?
Could I get some fries with that?

Anyway, here are two links that I've stumbled across over the last few days, one that discusses the falling value of the dollar (and how it's tied to our ballooning deficit) and the other about what's broken with the Bush Administration's education policy.

• In Yuan We Trust (via BoingBoing)
• Built to fail (via Miniver Cheevy via mkb)