Changes

“You have turned over a new leaf,” Mom commented and I thought briefly of my 7th grade campaign slogan for vice president. (Oh, yes, I did win. I had a construction paper tree with leaves students could pull off. They trunk proclaimed, “Turn over a new leaf!” and the individual leaves had “Vote for Katie!” on the undersides. It’s little wonder my political career was rather short lived.)

“Because I’m awake?” I asked, glancing at the clock. It was before 7:00. I shrugged while moving toward the coffee pot. “I don’t even nap anymore,” I noted as I took a seat at the table and began to sip.

I’ve been doing a bit of soul searching – if one can call the scattered attention I’ve played to the matter – about changes. After hearing Friend’s news and reading Richard’s post (though the two aren’t related in any way), I suggested a change of scenery to the former and commented that I was different to the latter.

In truth, I have any number of complaints about my job. The magnitude of the politics behind decisions and telling people that they can’t have items we know how to make because the decision isn’t commercially valid? It bugs me. But I’m a tiny cog in a giant machine. I don’t get to decide what’s fair or not. I do the best I can with what I’m given and sometimes I absolutely recognize it’s not enough. And have to explain to people why something is OK even when I don't think that's necessarily true.

But I’m happier here than I can remember being. I’m busy – sometimes ridiculously so considering my level of importance (which is pretty low, frankly) – but I come home remembering what I accomplished. I took 10 conference calls and sent 100 emails and ran across campus to make as many meetings as possible. I’m challenged in different ways than I have before. I’m learning a lot. And I feel valued. If I’m late, people call. When I said I’d take care of something, one of my colleagues hugged me. Surprised, I hugged her back and smiled. Then I went opened my drawer and ate a piece of chocolate before diving back into a sea of problems.

I think the changes – whether it’s sleeping less or being so mentally consumed by work 5 days a week – have, as most aspects of my life tend to do, been obvious in what I write here. I forget to think of blog topics during the day (or discover one I think is a bit risky in a professional sense) and have been catching up on thought-requiring tasks during the evenings so I’m reasonably caught up the next day. So I keep waiting to settle, to return to posts I like writing and editing, to actually find my camera so I can post photos.

“What’s up with you this weekend?” I asked one of my favorite engineers as we waited for a meeting to begin on Friday. He said he was taking a trip with friends and asked what I’d be doing.

“Work. Sleep,” I predicted, as yet unaware that my parents were planning to arrive to assemble shelves and shop for furniture and keep me busy with house stuff.

“I used to take work home,” he recalled. “Now I do things I enjoy in my free time. It’s much better.” I nodded in response, knowing he’s right. I should take time to relax, force work to remain work. But I like what I do and want to be good at it. And I tend toward all or nothing – I either want to work constantly because it’s so exciting and cool or I can barely gather the energy to reply to emails because it’s all so tiresome and tedious.

I do have a huge amount of affection for this blog and people who read it. So I’m not worried that I’ll arrive at some suitable solution for writing and posting and reading when I’m not half asleep or mostly distracted. But the transition is demanding a lot of energy. Changes can be fabulously positive, but they have the potential to be exhausting and uncertain as well. So bear with me here. And I’ll try to find my camera soon.