Work in Progress

God, I have a sweet job. I work for Disney. I get benefits. I work from home a lot of the time. I watch movies. I pull clips. I get to take people to dinner and lunch on Disney’s dime. I get my internet paid for. I get taken to lunch by cute vendors vying for my business. I have the greatest boss on earth. She literally rules. We go to the magazine stand at lunch and marvel at the latest celebrity gossip. We eat M&Ms all day and send eachother funny things that may not exactly be Disney appropriate. I’m well compensated. I work hard and I have a lot of fun doing it.

Yesterday I told my boss I was applying for a job within Disney that I may likely get with the very team I was part of before I landed before my sweet job. I did a bit of crying. I experienced immediate regret. This new job means working on product that I’m not necessarily crazy about. It means moving from my office back into a cube. It means going from working in my pajamas a few times a week to going into the fluorescent depths of cubicle hell five days, 40 plus hours a week.

Am I crazy? The answer would be yes, maybe.

But no. It’s a strategic move, really. Currently, I’m having fun fun fun. A year from now, very likely, I’ll be having fun fun fun. Two years from now, good ole times. This can go on forever. I will, however, be in the same position I am in now, working for the same woman, forever and ever. Her boss is not going anywhere, my boss is not going anywhere, so we'll be staying in the same squares that is the chess game of our lives. My life would move laterally into the future. This doesn’t sound too bad, but I’m trying to have a career not just a job. For chrissakes, I’m a homeowner, I’m thirty one years old, I need to have a job that reflects this, a job with a future. Therefore I’m going to eat shit and do the thing that grown folks do and make an investment in my future. I’m going to strap on my pumps and cardigan every day and look towards growing in my career.

I have also made this decision with my personal life. I’ve been involved in a series of lovely relationships with beautiful fun men who make me laugh and make me feel sexy and make my feel good allover. I can see myself having fun with these (types of) guys forever. I see me laughing with them for weeks and months to come. I even fool myself into thinking that this is enough.

I’m only kidding myself. It’s time to make an investment in my future and start looking past the next good time. I’m standing still and my feet are starting to hurt.

I’m not 20-something anymore. There’s got to be something bigger out there than fun. Fun is overrated anyway. Here’s to the next big thing in my life, may it be a big career move or finding someone who won’t have to have the “not ready” speech with me. I originally penned that speech. I know it line by line. I even know all the micro-writing between those lines. The loopholes and the footnotes were all written by memories of the first guy whose heart I broke when I left him behind in SF while I made my way out to NY to start what would become my 10-year era of fun.

Its funny how you spend your life not being ready and when you are ready you spend your time convincing yourself that the not-ready guys and the fun jobs are just riding tandem with you while you ride the fun wave towards someone and something bigger. The only problem is that space in your life is already taken, temporarily, yes, but taken nonetheless. And there’s no room for ready guy and great job in your full car. So I’ll be riding dolo for a little bit. And I’ll be making major renovations to my life.

Let the fun end and the growing begin.