The biggest reason I miss our cabin is that it was so roomy.
This cozy bedroom’s smaller and has more stuff. It’s still in the hard-to-move-around stage. Stage might be the wrong word, since that implies it’ll eventually be different. Not that I should whine; the majority of it’s mine. My stuff. My world. My hive. Ugh. Well, if I was all that thrilled with space I’d chuck the lot and play Inside the Brain of a Bureaucrat.
It’s been a week of shoving things around, then nestling in and going to computer land. I finally graduated from dial-up to my very first DSL, and promptly got a case of Internet Indigestion. What I used to skip as a ten-minute detour now loads in ten seconds. Great. Now I can try to read the whole Internet.
Outside, meanwhile, the sun glistens on our little postage stamp of paradise. But being your own boss means you’re never off the clock. If I want to spend time outside, I don’t get anyone’s blessing. Those wasted minutes are my responsibility. No bumbling overseer shields me from the face of God.
Oddly, being at the computer seems to mean ‘’time spent well'’, even if I’m on the Internet or playing Zork 2. It’s when I step away that the torture begins of whether I’m going to get enough work done today. On the farm, I could be off the clock. Now I’ve plunged merrily into the familiar freelance morass. Time Management. Yuck.
It’s such nonsense. How much money per hour/week/year/life is enough? Pick a number, and you can always add ten cents. Darn infinity. If only you could work constantly for an infinite amount of money. Then you’d win. And die in your chair. Slurping cold Ramen.
Or you can come at it from another angle: hours per day. But if you’re still working eight hours, why precisely did you exit the cubicle in the first place? Sure, you like this work…but as a writer there’s often ‘’fun'’ writing and ‘’paying'’ writing. What about that balance? And all the while there are songs to sing, wives to kiss, people to meet, wines to sip, God to exalt, and annoying limericks to memorize. How to dance through it all?
Nice thing is, most of the time, no one on the planet cares what I do. Nice but scary. I still cart around an imaginary Stress Friend so every task seems colossally important. My first week back, honestly, has been a bit too much time with this guy. I like feeling important, but I’m thinking of trading him in for unsung sanity. He shouts too much. A little silence, and I can look around again.
Hey, there’s other people here. Wow. The world is so roomy.
