Transience

Jeez, I tell you what - you start working a contract job that takes the usual 9-5 timetable, and suddenly all my late-night blogging goes straight out the window. Fortunately for you and I (but definitely not my wallet), I am back to my standard unemployed self. And as I wrap up another contract, I can't help but think about how much of my life has been marked by a certain degree of employment transience. It's interesting, for someone who clings to such deep roots, that much of what I do for a living is connected to the "here today, gone tomorrow" idea of impermanence.

First, the roots: I have lived in San Francisco for what most would argue has been my entire life. Yes, there was a short-lived freshman year of college where I lived in the East Bay, but not only was that maybe a 45 minute drive from home, I spent on average four nights in the city regardless, so I was really just sleeping in the East Bay for the vast majority of that time. I still remain close with friends from as far back as pre-school, and I take a great deal of joy in going to any establishment where I am a long-time regular. I mean, come on, don't you like it when then owner of your favorite restaurant comes up to you and greets you by your first name? I know I sure as hell do.

So, taking all this into consideration, I find it peculiar that I have spent so much of my working life not connected to much of anything. Yes, there was my time as a Community Manager, and there was the year I spent teaching full-time, but by and large, I have spent the majority of time since graduating college as a worker who has no official long-term connection to a business. In the nearly five years I spent teaching, as I said, one year of that was full time (a stat that implies impermanence in itself), but the rest of a time, I was a substitute. This means that every day I worked, I was generally greeted by an entire classroom full of strangers in a room I'd never been in. People didn't know my name or anything about me beyond what was written on the white board at the front of the classroom. Still, in that time I feel like I made a number of significant connections with students, teachers, and office staff. I don't know if it's the nature of the job to breeze in and do that, or if I simply have that tendency as an individual, but I feel like it was almost a coping mechanism in dealing with the stresses of the job: if you could walk out of the school at the end of the day and feel like you almost belong, or that you learned something about somebody in those few short hours, it put a whole new spin on the rest of the day.

Freelance work, at least in my experience with it, has been rather different. While I occasionally had moments in my recent job where I felt like I was really part of the team, on the whole, I had a much greater "outsider looking in" perspective on the whole process. I think it's mostly due to the fact that I am only brought in house when it's really crunch time, so everything that is happening around me is a bit of a whirlwind, and I can simply put my head down, turn up the music in my headphones, and tune it all out while I do my drone work for the day. Naturally, there were exceptions to that scenario on a semi-regular basis, but still, on the whole, when I left the office for the day, it wasn't very often that I would find myself thinking about my officemates the way I did kids.

But all that aside, I find the nature of this work rather singular: why is it that I am drawn to jobs that I can take and leave at the drop of a hat? Do I really value freedom that much? Do I just like being able to work around my own schedule and whims that much? I wonder how much of it is that I do indeed have such a wide social base around me that I don't feel like I need the camaraderie of co-workers. Think about it: I have two awesome roommates, great bandmates, a bunch of Rumdums, high school friends, a cop, and a wonderful monkey who are all people that I look forward to spending time with pretty much on a weekly basis, so I don't really need to add to that, so maybe that's why I can come home from work, no matter how isolated, and still have all the social interaction I may have missed out on during working hours.

Who knows. It's just something that's been kicking around in the ol' brain for a little bit, especially as I once again start staring down the rabbit hole of full-time employment again...

(sorry there's no image with this blog post, but searching "transience" on google proved a hell of a lot of really ugly art, and for some strange reason, a lot of pictures of urinals. Check it out for yourself if you're interested)