I started working at Free Press three weeks ago (!), and my life has been a whirlwind ever since (though the job itself has grounded me throughout). The whirlwind hasn’t been one of those negative, hell-in-a-handbasket dustups, but more of a too-many-good-things-at-once kind of squall. Here’s a short list of lessons I’ve learned in the recent weeks.
Offices are good
I suspected it before and now it’s confirmed. I really, really like working with other people who occupy the same physical space as me. For some, this is a no-brainer, as obvious as a statement like, “I really, really like eating food.” For others, the notion of a physical office is a quaint takeaway from the 20th century. We have the Internet, so who needs offices, right?
I’ve worked remotely since leaving my last office job back in 2004, when I went to grad school. While I’ve enjoyed the “freedom” that comes with working at home, what I’ve actually found — contrary to what I’ve heard from others — is that working outside an office actually keeps me much more tethered to work. Instead of getting distracted and not being productive — as others complain happens to them — I have a harder time pulling myself off the laptop and attending to other things in my life than I would if I worked in an office that I had to leave every day.
Some folks like an in-office job because they can more easily separate their work life from their home life. I’m not really interested in that — my work is a source of pleasure and I don’t want to completely separate it from the rest of my life. But when it comes to structuring my increasingly limited amount of time, I need some external structure to save me from myself or else it’ll be early evening and the baby will be a-crying…
The other, much more important, aspect of working in an office is all of those little banal moments of idle chatter, lunchroom talk, and physical meetings. Some folks hate these aspects of office life; I thrive off them. I’m an extrovert, and I get energy from being around other people. It makes my brain work better and I get more creative; an off-topic digression becomes fodder for a new project. Without those kinds of spontaneous interactions, lots of my creativity and focus would seep away.
That said, I’m still working remotely for the next few weeks. But I got a taste of the office life for a few days last week, and verily, it was good.
Northampton is nice
As I’ve written before, the Levy-Bourdon clan is moving up to Northampton, MA this summer so that I can work in the Free Press office. I’ve always liked it up there; Nicole is from there, so we’ve been going up a few times a year for the last nine (!) years now.
But we’ve only recently started going there with the knowledge that it will be home. That little nugget of truth has been at the center of our lives since April, and now that the first stage of acceptance has passed, I’m on the road to excitement.
We arrived last week during the first heatwave of the year, and the result was a beautiful introduction to a very different kind of life. The trees were in bloom, everything was green, and I felt like I could physically and psychically breathe for the first time in ages. Time slowed down, I could focus on my work and my family, and was easy to sit in the grass and eat dinner and drink a beer and just chill out a bit.
This summer will bring more picnics in the park, canoeing down rivers, music outside, and the sound of bugs and smell of fresh air. Yeah, it’s pretty rough.
Finding apartments sucks
I thought it would be easy, but we still haven’t found a place in Northampton. We’ve seen enough college dumps and disingenuously-advertised armpits to house a small college. A few nice, but not quite right, places have popped up here and there, but the overall feeling is that Northampton is a beautiful town with a very frustrating rental market that has some sort personal problem with me.
Selling your apartment sucks even more
We’re almost there (I hope), but trying to sell our apartment in the worst real estate market since the Great Depression has been, in a word, depressing. Low bids, low interest, though we’ve been fairly lucky, and it looks like (fingers crossed) we have a buyer.
It’s easy to lose perspective
The new job and the move are a lot to deal with at once, and it’s enough to make me obsess about the million things that still need to be done in order to make my life right. But here’s the kicker: my life is right. The family (immediate and extended) is happy and healthy, as are the friends and the colleagues. I like what I do for a living. I’m swimming through a sea of the good kind of problems to have — what apartment to rent, how much to sell a place for, navigating a good job — so I should really shut up and stop complaining about it.
