Friday, July 27, 2007

FDA Confirms that Spastic Rabbits Cure Malaise

Many thanks for the comments on the last couple of navel-gazing posts here. I'd be lying if I said that such matters of malaise and greater life purpose weren't prominent in my mind these days (obviously), but I can also be a bit melodramatic at times. Long story short, yeah, that stuff is bugging me, but not to the point that I'm losing sleep and torturing myself.

Jobs are weird. I've had tons of crappy jobs over the years, so I definitely realize the necessity and the relative cushiness of my current job (as well as the fact that pretty much anything turns into a boring day job, at some point in time, if you do it long enough). My current dilemma isn't so much in finding the perfect job and pursuing it, but deciding whether or not being bored out of my skull is worth the relative comfort and safety my current job supplies. I'm pretty resigned to doing something less than ideal; I just don't want to feel as if I'm sleepwalking through 40 hours each week completely on auto-pilot.

As far as scanning the horizon for other things I could possibly do, real estate (both renovating and building new homes) would be the obvious choice. I do sort of geek out over that stuff in general, and could definitely be happy and relatively fulfilled doing it full-time. The timing for a leap into that is pretty crappy, though, with the general doom and gloom surrounding the housing industry. Things aren't so bad here in central Texas but it's not clear whether we're just trailing the general decline or if conditions are truly different here. It's also a capital intensive endeavor, especially on the home-building side, and would take a much greater leap of faith to pursue.

The slightly perverse part of me wonders about just leaping in and doing something completely and utterly opposite of what I might otherwise choose, if left to my own devices. Yeah, I could probably ramp up the Web design/hosting/SEO/content creation stuff I do into a full-time job, but I don't necessarily get a lot of pleasure out of that work and it's not really anything different, as far as staving off boredom and malaise. So I wonder what would happen if I scanned job ads, found something that would normally make me absolutely cringe (like something in sales), and did that for awhile.

I get locked into the idea that I'm stuck at my current day job, as the necessary job skills are pretty narrow and don't translate to many other jobs, but that's pretty dumb. I make decent money but nowhere near enough to feel chained to this job or industry. All my extra side endeavors produce enough income that I could take a decent cut in pay and we wouldn't really suffer that much or have to alter our already pretty simple lifestyle.

So, in the end, who knows. Not me.

Completely changing gears, we once again have a furry animal in the household:



That's our new dwarf rabbit Creasy, who we've had for three or four weeks now. Mainly my wife's doing, as she's been clamoring for a bunny for years now, and I finally caved in right before I left for Vegas, as she correctly played the guilt/abandonment card at the correct time.

He's not quite as entertaining (or smart) as a rat, but he's pretty amusing, especially when he gets all spastic and races around the living room at top speed, careening off things and generally imitating a whirling rabbit dervish. It's been kind of nice to have animals running around the place again, so that's been cool. We should be getting a couple of rats in a month or so, too, so the menagerie will once again be at maximum capacity.

1 comment:

AVIGANOLA said...

Scurvy,

Another post I agree with totally. I feel your pain :-). I too have choosen the security of a dull boring job that pays the bills. Maybe I should quit and try something new. Programming is so annoying and boring. BTW - I love the bunny picture. Keep up the good posts. I am sure you will figure out a solution to your prolems. Tony