Other Weekend Notes

I finished my book for the book club over the weekend.  It’s “Home to Harmony” by Philip Gulley.  At amazon.com, it’s billed as, ”a simple book,” which it is.  There are cute lines in it (my favorite:  the pastor says, “I left for health reasons:  I was sick of them, and they were sick of me”), but overall, I was underwhelmed. 

The book is written in an anecdotal style, which itself drives me a little nuts – sort of like reading small talk.  There was the occasional profound or insightful moment, but as another quote so delicately put it, there is “just enough [substance] to be annoying, but not enough to be [entertaining].”  In other words, meh.  It will be a challenge to lead the book club discussion this Saturday on a book that I find not-so-entertaining, but what’s life without a few challenges? 

The one quote that stuck with me, though, was the one I mentioned earlier about why the central character left his previous church.  It started me thinking – which is always dangerous – that in many ways, I am in the same boat.  I’d like to leave my own job for “health” reasons; although I’m not necessarily sure that my employers are sick of me, I am nevertheless convinced that they are at a bare minimum bored about our relationship.  We are, as they say, in a rut.

I got the “thanks but no thanks” letter from the one job I applied for earlier in the summer, so that was at once a downer and a relief.  And, I’m right back where I started and starting to reexamine my life and see if (or if so, how) I can make it more like the picture I thought it would be.  Unfortunately, much of the evaluation process thus far has started with my winning the lottery (impossible, of course, because I haven’t played in a long while), so I can’t say that I’ve had a great deal of success in reframing things. 

Failing the finding of either independent wealth or a brand spanking new job that pays me gobs of money for doing pretty much what I want, I’m thinking that maybe I just need to look at what I like about my current life and what I don’t like about it, and see if I can figure out how to fix/change what I don’t like while keeping what I do like. 

The reality about much of what I do is that I’m bored.  Really.  And that’s not something you really want to voice at a job – they usually respond by piling more work on top of you, and it’s usually the stuff no one else has gotten to yet because they don’t like whatever it is.  In my head, high learning curve = low billables because I need to know the whys and the hows and the what-ifs – granted, I learn fast, but it still takes time.  On the other hand, a low learning curve (i.e., I already know how to do it) = even lower billables because I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THIS.

This is not a dramatic change – my mother kids me that I’ve been like this since, well, first grade.  I would do one problem (maybe two) in math or whatever, and when I figured out how to do them correctly, I would stop and not finish my homework (or do it in the first place) because I now knew how to do these things.  Like the little robot guy from that dumb Steve Guttenberg movie:  “Input, input, input!  I need input!” 

It’s going to be an interesting rest of the year.  Billable hours are not coming as well as I would like, and that seems to be no one’s fault by my own.  In an economy where people are afraid of losing their jobs, I should be struck by lightning for even thinking that I’m bored or unhappy, but that’s the conclusion so far. 

On a lighter note, my uncle (the one that broke his hip back in April) is doing really well – he’s walking without a cane as much as he can, driving, etc., and my aunt (his wife) has at least completed the latest test on her heart, and her brother (my other uncle, a retired cardiologist) is going to talk to her doctor on Thursday.  These are really good things – we are back to our Sunday evening dinners, which is good.