I watch the 9-to-5s go home

It's bizarre, but despite my having a work schedule considerably offset from the norm, I still feel bad about being up past 4 am, even though it's been less than three hours since I got off work. I feel equally bad about waking up past noon. It's as though offsetting my sleep schedule, even in conjunction with work, is not allowed. Maybe I'll feel better about it when I'm living on my own.

And hey, though I feel bad, at least I don't feel like a worthless lump, as I would when staying up past 4 and waking past noon in my jobless state. This is a "sigh and shake my head" bad feeling, not a "stare paralyzed at the vast blank page that is my future" bad feeling.

And so it begins

I always like discovering a blog in progress (prog blog?) by someone I know, after a nice backlog of posts has accumulated. I sit and read all the old entries at once. Therefore, I intend to do the same favor to my will-be readers by not telling you about this blog until later. So this entry will probably be a bit old by the time you read this. The bread is stale, but hey, I'd rather have a stale slice than fresh crumbs.

My summer has just ended. In an unusual turn of events my days will be less packed as a result. (Well, not unusual for me; all my autumns since I graduated from college have been less packed than my summers. This will be my first September as an employed non-student.) What happened was that I got a software testing job in May that I had no intention of quitting. This was followed by a month of agonizing about my old summer job, to which I have something of an emotional attachment. Unwilling to have my cake without eating it, I switched to the night shift at my job, and took on the summer job for three days a week.

The upshot of having your cake and eating it too is the unpleasantness of regurgitation. My unpleasantness consisted of Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that began around 7 am and ended on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays respectively. What's more, I had to endure two of these three days on less than five hours of sleep.

Somehow I survived. I slept in on Tuesdays and Thursdays; on the other three weekdays, I fed off the energy of the children I worked with, and afterward I kept myself going with the occasional nap on the bus to my "day job," and the less occasional dose of caffeine and/or aspirin. (I wouldn't do this year-round, but I could do eight weeks of this again. We'll see what my professional life is like next year.)

And now the summer job is over, and I'm back to one job. I switched to the night shift the same day my summer work started, so this will be the first time I can really enjoy the different schedule. I have to sacrifice a thing or two, but I fit better with the 5 pm-1:30 am crowd. (If the times were the only factor, I could go either way, but the environment in the evening is more comfortable to me.)

A new blog (with a new readership of people who are physically present in my life, I hope), and a new experience of work. Here they go.