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Work as vacation from life.
And like that, I'm done with work. I tidied up my desk, turned in my timesheet, and walked back through the park. Tomorrow morning I get to sleep late. It's always an abstract feeling, leaving a position, although this time of year it won't be too difficult to adjust, not with how cold the mornings are.
I'd already finished all the major work I'd been hired to do back in December; everything I did this month was extra stuff they found for me, much like what happened last time I worked there. Still database management and information organization, still making sure everything is as up-to-date as possible across the board and accurate in both the digital and physical records. And I finished that yesterday. Today was really scraping the bottom of the barrel of stuff for me to do: tidying the papers in the copy room and photocopying documents for packets someone's giving out at a staff meeting. It was pretty fun, though, largely because I always enjoying unearthing strange and forgotten items and being praised for genuinely valuable finds, like misplaced printer cartages, or delighting in absurd ones, like an old rolodex with obsolete area codes that's twice as worthless as it would've been otherwise.
Lunch is going to be a bit of a letdown: four days a week there'd be a sort of communal lunch gathering I'd attend, and my day for bringing something was Thursdays. Instead of small items to be assembled at the gathering, I'd bring a big container of something we'd all take from. I made risotto, a chickpea-lentil salad, a spinach pesto dish, and a pumpkin-chickpea stew. Because I wasn't sure of what would be happening tomorrow, I didn't make anything. What I did do, in case this was my last day after all, was make very busy brownies - made with coconut oil as usual, but instead of the usual spice medley, this time I added in coconut, dried cranberries, and white chocolate chips. And boy, did they go fast. I'm glad I put in a little more time last night to make today a little more cheerful for everyone.
There were two major things I learned about myself from this job. One, that I have enough skirts, tops, and dresses to go four working weeks without repeating anything - I only started repeating dresses last week. Two, that I'm in fact capable of continuing my life as I like it with a thirty-five hour work week. Granted, my commute was about twenty minutes if I caught an express subway train instead of a local, since it was a contract position I could arrive anywhere from 8:45 to 9:30 as long as my working hours on site were up to a high standard of productivity, and because it was all on-site work I didn't bring anything back with me except a rare bad mood when my MP3 player ran out of battery power before I was done for the day.
I was really lucky to get this job, and to keep it for as long as I did. If it wasn't too cold or too wet I'd get to walk back to my apartment through the park. I got to take a break from writing cover letters and devote my nights to writing, getting tens of thousands more words added to my WIP and pushing its estimated completion date forward by at least a month. Tomorrow I sleep in, and Friday I see the live production of the Welcome to Night Vale episode "The Librarians" at NYU. And next week, I get back into my old routine.
It was a nice vacation while it lasted.
I'd already finished all the major work I'd been hired to do back in December; everything I did this month was extra stuff they found for me, much like what happened last time I worked there. Still database management and information organization, still making sure everything is as up-to-date as possible across the board and accurate in both the digital and physical records. And I finished that yesterday. Today was really scraping the bottom of the barrel of stuff for me to do: tidying the papers in the copy room and photocopying documents for packets someone's giving out at a staff meeting. It was pretty fun, though, largely because I always enjoying unearthing strange and forgotten items and being praised for genuinely valuable finds, like misplaced printer cartages, or delighting in absurd ones, like an old rolodex with obsolete area codes that's twice as worthless as it would've been otherwise.
Lunch is going to be a bit of a letdown: four days a week there'd be a sort of communal lunch gathering I'd attend, and my day for bringing something was Thursdays. Instead of small items to be assembled at the gathering, I'd bring a big container of something we'd all take from. I made risotto, a chickpea-lentil salad, a spinach pesto dish, and a pumpkin-chickpea stew. Because I wasn't sure of what would be happening tomorrow, I didn't make anything. What I did do, in case this was my last day after all, was make very busy brownies - made with coconut oil as usual, but instead of the usual spice medley, this time I added in coconut, dried cranberries, and white chocolate chips. And boy, did they go fast. I'm glad I put in a little more time last night to make today a little more cheerful for everyone.
There were two major things I learned about myself from this job. One, that I have enough skirts, tops, and dresses to go four working weeks without repeating anything - I only started repeating dresses last week. Two, that I'm in fact capable of continuing my life as I like it with a thirty-five hour work week. Granted, my commute was about twenty minutes if I caught an express subway train instead of a local, since it was a contract position I could arrive anywhere from 8:45 to 9:30 as long as my working hours on site were up to a high standard of productivity, and because it was all on-site work I didn't bring anything back with me except a rare bad mood when my MP3 player ran out of battery power before I was done for the day.
I was really lucky to get this job, and to keep it for as long as I did. If it wasn't too cold or too wet I'd get to walk back to my apartment through the park. I got to take a break from writing cover letters and devote my nights to writing, getting tens of thousands more words added to my WIP and pushing its estimated completion date forward by at least a month. Tomorrow I sleep in, and Friday I see the live production of the Welcome to Night Vale episode "The Librarians" at NYU. And next week, I get back into my old routine.
It was a nice vacation while it lasted.