Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: adulting

  • Reflecting On My Job Search

    I’ve always been a bit of a prima donna when it comes to jobs.

    Not that I want everything at a job. Or treated like a superstar at my job. But that I just have certain things I don’t want from a job.

    I don’t want jobs that start too early. Or have a windowless office. Or require me to do something I don’t have an aptitude for.

    I don’t like jobs that have too much process. Or have ebb and flow where it’s boring sometimes and hectic others, with zero control of my schedule. Or sit in a Bullpen with a lot to do but where people are distracting me. And I hate “locked” jobs where I have to work in an office 8 to 5 every day with no flexibility to my days or schedule minus pre-determined vacation time.

    I’d love to say this is new. That’s it’s my age. But it’s not. I’ve always been this way.

    Time was I really thought I hated working. But it turned out that I hated working hourly jobs with time requirements and where I was a drone.

    I learned when I went into teaching and into sales that I’m actually an incredibly hard worker. And very determined and quite good. When I’m given flexibility and freedom to do what I think needs to be done.

    I went into real estate. And like it. But it isn’t paying the bills. I need to pad this income. So am looking at supplemental jobs. And am driving myself crazy in the process because so many jobs are either micromanagement hell (one has two syncs per day to keep the manager updated on what we’ve been doing) or have fixed schedules in an office that are 40 hours per week.

    Here is to continuing my search. And not giving in to a job that will make me unhappy. Because I’m 58. I’ve done more than my share of jobs that make me unhappy. And life is just too short, especially at age 58.

  • If I Want To Live Forever, I Need Only Attend Corporate Presentations From Hell

    What bores you?

    There is the saying that only boring people are bored. But is that true?

    I’ve found in life that I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. There is sooooooo much to do in life!!!! So many books to read, magazines to peruse, films to watch, exercises to do, hikes to take, places to explore. If I lived a thousand years, I couldn’t begin to cross everything off my list that I’d like to do. So for me, the problem isn’t boredom but sometimes of feeling overwhelmed.

    For me, the only time I feel bored is when I’m trapped. When I was a kid, that meant sitting in class with teachers who dictated what we had to do, or sitting in a class (e.g. shop class) where I had no interest. As an adult, it’s corporate mandated trainings and meetings. Life is an ETERNITY when I sit in these meetings. I feel so bored. So trapped. I feel like if I want to live forever, I should just spend every day in a Corporate Presentation. But who wants to live forever in that way? That’s like an eternity in hell.

    Have I ever left a corporate presentation Zoom call or a training or a meeting where I thought, that was worth my time? Not that I can think of. But I do feel like time has slowed down and that the day was 10 years long.

    So I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. It’s when I’m forced to waste my time in meetings where I feel trapped and bored. If I want to live forever, I’ll just spend the rest of my life going to corporate meetings.

  • Living A Different Life Than My Parents (AKA My Parents At My Age)

    PROMPT: What were your parents doing at your age?

    I was always 5-10 years behind my parents.

    By the time they were 20, my parents were married (to each other 🙂 ). They started careers at 21, having kids (me) at 21 and they owned a house by 22. Later, they upgraded their house by age 27, started earning decent money at 30, and making great money at age 40.

    Me?

    I was married (for the first time) at 25. Started my career job at age 29. Had kids and a house at 30. And started earning decent money at age 35.

    Always I was about five or ten years behind them. And that was okay.

    By some miracle I caught up to them by age 40.

    At age 40 I had some lucky breaks in my career, and I too suddenly started making pretty great money, just like my parents themselves had done at 40. Mom was proud of me, telling me that I was farther ahead of them by age 40, but the reality is we were about even.

    Then life took me on a different path for me.

    I got lung disease at 43. What started out as some fatigue and breathless when I exercised at age 40 was diagnosed as potentially-fatal lung disease when I was 43. That irrevocably changed the course of my life.

    Whereas my parents spent their 40s having fun and accumulating money for retirement, I spent my 40s managing my health and holding on for dear life to my life and my career.

    I spent countless hours in the doctor’s office. I lost a job, then found and lost another job. Meanwhile, after 5 years of trying to push and horse whip me back into my past successes despite my lung disease, my (now ex) wife lung gave up on me and moved on, first emotionally and then completely.

    By 50 my parents were living their greatest life and could retire at any time.

    By 50 I was job hopping, making half what I’d been at age 40, job hopping, managing my health as a second job, and hoping I could scrape enough together to retire by age 70.

    In short, by age 50 my parents had been a LOT better off than I was.

    And that’s okay.

    I’m not my parents. My life is not my parents’ life. I was blessed because life could have just used my lung disease to kill me, but instead it spared me and I learned that I am a survivor, a battler, and surprisingly resilient.

    And, overall, happy. Happier than I was at age 40, for sure.

    I’m remarried. I won’t retire rich but by age 70 I’ll be okay.

    In short, I was behind my parents, then caught up to my parents, then life pushed them ahead while knocking me back. And all in all I’m grateful. Because at the end of the day, all that matters to me is carving out some joy, managing my stress, and being alive.

  • An Average Home (AKA My Dream Home)

    Write about your dream home.

    There was a time when I daydreamed a LOT about my perfect home. Oh my gosh I wanted a perfect home.

    My perfect home was large, of course, with a large yard, of course. It was on a quiet street with a view of the mountains and water. And there was a spacious swimming pool and a sport court complete with a basketball hoop. And everything (!!!) was in perfect condition, not because I was a relentless do-it-myselfer but because I had a staff of people to keep everything in perfect condition for me.

    How much I yearned for all this. Sometimes that yearning hurt my heart. A lot.

    That was then.

    All those things are less important to me now. I’ve learned that I have a lot of friends with perfect houses who I can visit. And that since I have a visual imagination (I’m not a visual person but I have a visual imagination) that I can image living in a perfect home. And that a massive perfect house with an attending staff headspace and energy. And would cost a lot of ongoing money.

    For me, now, my perfect house is an average house. A smaller house. It has a few bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms, an artificial yard that stays green and needs no mowing. It’s large enough that the kids can crash when they need to.

    I love our house now. It has all these things. Plus a lot of trees. Right in the heart of Seattle. It’s Larissa’s house, not my house. But in my lifetime I’ve owned two homes and a fourplex: that is a lot of homes (seven, technically) to manage. So I’m okay sharing Larissa’s house with her, sharing the upkeep with her while allowing her to reap the financial benefits of homeownership (while I myself am invested in stocks and bonds to cover our living costs in retirement). That’s okay with me.

    I really am grateful that life can change us. That once I yearned for bigger things, but now I’m okay with simpler things while also admiring/helping people who want/need bigger things. There’s no perfect answer to a dream home, it’s what works for the person. For me, I’m right where I want to be.

  • A Night Of “Sunset Boulevard” And “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” (AKA The Risk Of Being Kept. Or Suckered)

    Last night, for the first time in maybe five years, we walked two movies back-to-back. It just so happened that both were classics.

    The first was Sunset Boulevard, picked for the primary reasons that we haven’t seen it in a long time, we love it, and it was free. The second was Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which I’ve seen twice (not in a long time) and couldn’t recall either of it other than it was two young kept people who develop a friendship. It was surprisingly good.

    It was interesting that we watched both movies on the same night because there is a similar string in a way. In essence, all the main characters are younger people struggling to pay bills who are at risk of (or dream of) becoming kept people by people with means.

    It is an interesting dynamic in a romantic relationship, a financially struggling person and financially comfortable person. Both people have to be totally grounded (I believe) and noble for it to work. The risks otherwise of course, is that one person takes advantage of the other. This can work how we might expect it to work, wherein the wealthy person exploits the poor person; in Sunset Boulevard, the struggling “hero” as consumed by the wealthy older person until he loses his independence and identity and becomes a virtual prisoner. But it can work the other way too, where the struggling person wraps their tentacles around the poor person.  In my own instance, I think of how I was 20-something with work ethic and a college degree and a savings account who met a high school dropout with bad credit and literally nothing to her name. I feel like she latched on to me and drove me to get what she wanted in life until such time 30 years later that I was no longer capable or needed and so was put to pasture, all the while gaslighting me. I was duped. I should have been wiser. Smarter. I became a victim. It worked out for me in the end (I was free!!!) but I lost 25 years of my life and my health in the process.

    So it definitely can be where a person-in-need becomes entrapped, but so too can it work the other way. So it’s very important always that we enter a relationship with our eyes wide open, and we are aware of the potential dynamics, and we work to stay on sound footing, whether financially or otherwise. Anyway, that was my take.

    I loved watching those movies last night. It was a fun way to relax on a stormy evening. And I liked Breakfast At Tiffany’s a lot more than I thought I would. And how much I wish I’d been wiser about relationship dynamics when I was 23.