Workin' For a Livin' Every Night and Day

I'm having one of those red wine-epiphany kinda Fridays. I've had a long week and have a three-day weekend, so staying in and chilling makes a whole lot of sense. I have two more weeks of OT coming at me, but it's helping me take care of long-time needs that really ought to be rectified with cash as quick as I'm able.

But I'm having a great week of work, despite the overtime and difficult shows I've worked on this week. I don't really want to get into the specifics of my job and will never discuss any of the shows I work on, as I'm bound by confidentiality agreements and all that bullshit. What I can say is, what I do, which is captioning for film and tv (subtitling for the hearing impaired), involves a lot of thought about language and its finer points... grammar, truncation, phrase construction, verb conjugation, et al. Then I also have to consider math... words per minute and how it gets divided and time-stamped for display rate for the at-home viewer. Every shot gets a time stamp, and when a hard shot change (ie: picture to picture with no fading in between) happens, I need to find that time code down to the 1/30th of a second (the frame) and manually create that t/c and flag it as immoveable.

It's a complicated job. I work for a company with really exacting standards and a work quota. It's a difficult balance and a challenging job.

I worked there for much of seven years, then left for the spell I spent at the job that nearly drove me to exhaustion and depression. I was always a good, loyal, hard working employee. But I've never been as good as I am now. I've returned with this clarity and focus I've never before had.

I'm pretty fucking impressed with myself right now because I feel I've been very creative, precise, and right with my judgment at work of late.

And how sweet it is.

I finally realized that unhappiness went a whole lot further than work, and that the work I'd left was far better, more fair, and more balanced than it'd be anywhere else. Like my good buddy Gayboy commented not too long ago when I'd been stating how I think I left for all the wrong reasons, and that returning was one of the wisest choices I'd made. He said, "Yeah, like, I can see why you left, but... I don't know why you'd leave" or something like that. :)

I mean, I show up when I want to. I ask for a day off and 85% of the time or better, I get it. I work anywhere between 35 and 45 hours a week, often of my choosing. I don't have to answer phones. I don't have to talk to customers. My colleagues don't talk to me. All I do is sit there with headphones, a TV, a television show or movie, and play with words.

Yeah. Such high stress. Really.

So, yeah, why'd I leave? I guess I had delusions of grandeur and the need to prove them in corporate ways. Whoopsy-daisies. I've seen the errors of my ways. I'd rather sleep to a reasonable time, live a little in the morning, and work sometime around 11. Call me crazy. I'm single and have no reason to worry about sitting in fucking rush hour and twiddling my thumbs... as it rains on my little scooter and me. Fuck that. I'll go when traffic's easing up and life's not as fucking annoying.

But to have this clarity not only of the job but ON the job, well, I'm really getting content with life again. I'm keen to see where this all leads.

I guess I'm just really happy that I get to remind myself every single day that work comes second, and the even better thing about that is, work thinks they come second, too.

I guess it's really a case of older/wiser, and I was just too fucking dumb to see it sooner. Later's better than never. Here's to the old carpe diem-moment siezing thing.

And don't fucking kid yourself. If you think work's just something to suffer through so you can live your life in the off-hours, then you got another think coming.

Work consumes 23.8% of your life. Hating what you do isn't doing you any favours. My job may not be my dream, but it's certainly a million times better than most of 'em. Pay's pretty decent, too. And I get to watch TV. Good stuff, too. Love that.