In which I finally post! I really don’t know what my problem is; I mean I have all this free time and everything, I just never blog anymore. Also: I use the phrase “fucking awesome” far too many times in this post.

This is what’s great about my new job: there’s actual work to do. This is also what’s great about my new job: the fucking phone never rings.

Holy shit, but I was awfully bored at the last place. Morons calling me up all the time asking the same impossibly stupid questions over and over, no systems to administer, no hope of training or promotion. I had been really excited when they had offered me the job and that bitchin’ title a couple of years ago, but it just ended up being first tier technical support all over again only in an office instead of a cubicle. I didn’t get to learn a bunch of cool server crap and I didn’t get to do fun projects, only tedious ones like moving websites. There was too much free time and yet I always felt harried because I had to be in the queue all the time and talk to people.

I do miss being able to tell people I’m in IT, but my new job actually suits me better. I roll in there at eight o’clock in the morning and I have things to do! I produce things every day, and they’re tangible: pages in the goddamned actual real life treeware newspaper! I do a sports/weather page every day; I do the Business page every day; I do A2 every day. On Fridays, I do three pages for the Sunday paper. And usually before I’ve even left the newsroom at one o’clock, I have a physical copy of an actual newspaper in my hand.

There’s enough work to keep one focused and busy but not so much one feels overwhelmed. The other people in the newsroom — the reporters and copy editors and editors and photographers and interns — are all awesome. The police scanner is always on, and amusing more often than you’d expect. The gossip is fantastic. The long stretches of silence while everyone writes or edits or paginates are lovely.

The newsroom is like a cross between a library and a university and everyone in there is basically some form of nerd or another. It’s fucking awesome.

And it’s part-time. And it pays more than my last job did; I went from having a title and getting paid shit to being an entry-level newbie who makes almost as much in 25 hours a week as I used to make in 40.

Which means I get home a little after one each afternoon and I’m not even looking for another job. (I would probably volunteer at Helpline again, but they moved way the hell across town so it wouldn’t be convenient.) I’ve been doing one little domestic project each afternoon: catch up on filing. Go through dresser drawers. Clean out closet. Donate things to Goodwill. I feel relaxed and calm and organized.

I’ve begun to read again. I’m growing an avocado tree on the kitchen windowsill. I do my nails every week. I’m cooking a lot. I feel like I have plenty of time. It’s awesome.

Sometimes I just come home, change out of my office clothes, and go get drunk on my friend’s patio. And since she works part-time too, I can do that and still be home and in bed way before ten. Talk about decadent.

There’s also this wonderful e-boyfriend. I met this guy online; it’s my first internet relationship (which is actually pretty strange, considering how long I’ve been online and the sheer number of hours I’ve spent each week dicking around on the internet in the past decade and a half). We’ve been talking on the phone every night for months and we’re now at the (apparently common) sending-each-other-crap-in-the-mail phase. He’s fucking awesome: articulate, good natured, educated, employed, hilarious, and not a goddamned stoner. I can’t wait to meet him in person, but he lives halfway across the country and with the new job and everything that wouldn’t be until August at the very earliest.

He’s twelve years younger than I am, but I don’t give a fuck because he’s nice. Not to mention that the majority of single men in the age bracket more appropriate to me are single because they want 22-year-old models for girlfriends or are raging alcoholics or only marginally employable. The benefit of 30-something males is that that’s the age they decide they wanna settle down if they’re going to, and I’m basically only interested in settling down. Dating and screwing around are fine, I suppose, but I’ve basically already experienced nearly every permutation and most of the time it’s either shallow or neurotic. I think I learned from that crush last year that I was — am — finally ready to consider a real relationship again, but it really needs to be real.

Gig season is picking up. The band will be all over the northwest this summer, playing festivals and bars in three states. The latest album is doing well and has gotten some really good reviews. Our drummer is still threatening to move away, but he’s been doing that for years.

I still ride a bike everywhere and I pretty much have thighs of steel. My hair is long and I really need to get a cut and color. I’m going to go throw a load of laundry in and make some sugar-free chocolate fudge pudding. It looks like it might rain. Life is good fucking awesome.