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Back to the ‘Grind’ (Not the Fun, Spanky Kind, Either)

The summer went way too quickly.

I’m not talking about the weather, per se. Frankly, I prefer the fall — all that hot, humid shit is for suckers. Who wants their undies in a bunch clinging to their ass all damned day, anyway?

(Somebody else’s undies, maybe. But your own? Nah.)

No, what I’m really bemoaning (and it’s ‘be-moaning’, people, not just plain ‘moaning’, all right; I don’t need any more nasty letters from the Peanut Gallery) is the end of my temporary retirement. My non-self-inflicted sabbatical. My extended vacation. My ‘fat lazy unemployed slob’ phase.

For you see, at nine am tomorrow, all of that changes. My new job starts. Suddenly, I’ll be a fat lazy employed slob again. It’s the end of an era. I’ll have to get up, fight commuter traffic, actually interact with people during the day. Possibly, I’ll even have to carry on conversations with some of them, or make eye contact. The horror!

(On the other hand, I am a software engineer. Which means that a bit of asocial behavior is pretty much expected. Maybe no one will talk to me, after all. I think I’ll start wearing Birkenstocks and grimy T-shirts and grow a Jesus beard, though. You know, just to be sure.)

Anyway, it’s going to be tough getting back to the grind, I think. I was unemployed for three whole months. You can break a lot of habits in a quarter of a year, you know. I’ll have to remember how to be polite to people, and greet them cheerfully in the morning, not to mention how to put my damned pants on.

(Last time I wore pants, I strapped a pair of my wife’s jeans to my head and chased the dog around the house, yelling, ‘I’m a bunny rabbit — hippity hippity hippity hop!‘ until I crashed into the kitchen table. I think it’s good to keep the puppy on her toes, in case a real wild animal should ever get loose in the house. But mainly, I just like wearing my wife’s pants on my head. Is that so wrong?)

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get all my shit together in the next twelve hours or so, though. It’s probably a good idea to blend in for the first few days on the job, before I let them know the kind of guy they’ve really hired. I even put the kibosh on a couple of antics already. Like pushing all the elevator buttons when I went to the interview, or futzing with the TB test I had to take.

(Yeah, they gave me a tuberculosis test. I think it’s standard procedure; my new employer is a hospital. Of course, it could be because of the tofu I hid in my hand and pretended to ‘cough’ all over the guy’s desk at the interview, too. Hey, I said I vetoed some of the shit I was planning on doing — I never said I nixed all of it.)

Luckily, I was given this last day of reprieve before getting in there and getting my hands dirty. (Thank you, Chris Columbus. You go, bee-yatch.) But tomorrow is D-Day. T-minus zero seconds. Showtime, and all that shit. And there’s so much I left undone during my hiatus from gainful employment. All those rounds of golf left unplayed, the Madden NFL championships unwon, the mid-afternoon drinking binges I never managed to find the time for. It’s sad, really.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad to have a job again, and this one is actually really exciting and interesting. It turned out to be a great fit. It’s just going to be an adjustment, that’s all. I’m not used to being out in public any more. I haven’t seen the light of day in a while. I’m like one of those kids you hear about who do something bad, and then get chained to the radiator for a few years, and lose their ability to socialize properly. You know the ones. What? You don’t? That doesn’t happen where you are? Hmmm. Must just be my neighborhood.

(Now you wanna visit, don’cha? Yeah, you know you do.)

So, anyway, life changes for me tomorrow. I just wanted to warn you. Hopefully, you won’t even notice. But if the firehose stream of words eases up a bit for a while, don’t be alarmed. I’m just adjusting. And I’m away from home three evenings a week. But on the bright side, I’ll be out in the rat race again, in the world of men full-time. So I’ll no doubt witness lots of asinine boobery to write about. The Content-O-Meter will be through the roof. That should even things out.

Now, if I can just find the time to write all that shit down, in between meetings and status reports and putting-on-pants lessons. Man, this ‘having a job’ shit is going to be hard.