While I was already told that I was hired, I didn’t know exactly what my last day as a contractor/first day of employment was. Today was that day. I got my paperwork, etc. Now, I’ve got a steady job during the worst economic mess in a generation, which means I can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

It’s definitely time to shuffle things around so that they don’t get stale. I’m moving away from the boredom of the suburbs soon, I’ve met some new people, and I’ve got the sort of job that I’ve wanted for a while. I’m heading in some direction, and it’s different from wherever I was headed before. Which is good.

This is the sort of photo processing I’ve been wanting to experiment with, but only so long as I don’t make a habit of it. Because it’s horribly overdone, and I’m almost embarrassed to have done the messed up film look at all. But, hey, as I’ve said, I’m trying different things, shuffling things around to make something new.

It’s been a while since I managed to prep and upload my Project 365 photo before nightfall. And it’s also been a while since I’ve actually had (entertaining) things to do on the weekend, let alone the pre-weekend (Thursday night).

My situation keeps getting better, and it still seems strange to me. If there’s a such thing as luck, I’ve always had bad luck, so the idea of more than one thing going my way in a row is completely foreign to me. Perhaps things

are just balancing out for me, and this is compensation for the generally horrible first part of 2009. And if that’s the case, I suppose I should expect some 28 years good luck now.

Though I’m not superstitious, I don’t like talking about something I’m working on before the wheels are in motion. It’s mostly because I don’t want to build hype only to get let down if things don’t go as planned.

Well, the wheels are in motion now,

I’m at the early stages of moving closer to downtown Orlando, closer to where I work, closer to where interesting things happen. I’ve been looking around College Park and Winter Park, and incredibly, prices are a little cheaper than where I live currently; if all goes well, I’ll rent out my own home for more than the price I’d pay to rent where I move. And I’ll be going in with one of my current roommates, splitting the cost.

Making the commute to work reminds me too much of the drives to work (or school, or really anywhere) when I lived in Miami. I’m getting a new bike and bike rack in preparation for living in the bicyclist/walker-friendly part of town. Depending on where I end up, I could well bike to work every day, saving fuel, and saving stress.

I’ve been through so many “last days” at Starbucks (including my own). Tonight was the last shift for one of my friends, and we went to Waffle House at midnight to celebrate. Well, not celebrate, so much as to eat cheap, tasty food in the early, early morning.

There are less and less people I know from Starbucks… and yet I’m not sure I’ll ever be away from Starbucks. I worked there almost a decade, and to this day, almost everyone I know either works there, or has worked there at one point. I don’t believe all retail jobs are like this.

I don’t think people who worked at McDonalds when they were straight out of highschool still keep up with their ex-coworkers when they’re pushing 30. And yet, a good chunk of the crew of the store I worked at around 1999-2002 remains tight, and all but a handful of my best friends are coworkers from that era.

All those years behind the huge La Marzocco espresso machine, all the nights hanging out with coworkers, all the good and awful customers over the years… it’s shaped who I am.

Yes, this is a photograph. From time to time, I like to take shots so abstract that almost all texture is absent, and it’s left an almost completely solid color—as seen in this set.

This shot pretty much represents what I feel like right now, too. The toughest bits of this project at work are about over, and things are starting to shift from 12+ hour days back to regular 8-hour days, and I’m starting to shift back down out of overdrive. All the energy I’ve put into this work has left me almost completely blank. Something like this shot is basically what I see in my head right now.

And I’m going to get to rest, and then I can start filling this yellow-ish canvas in my head with new and wonderful things all over again.

I’ve gotten so little sleep and so much work in the past two weeks that I’ve gotten pretty out of it lately. It’s essentially been a lot of working, punctuated by spurts of sleep. And I’m good at working like this, and I dump the semblance of a life that I have pretty easily.

It’s kind of like I’m pausing everything else and stepping into another reality where I work. And work. And work. And there is nothing in the world besides that work. And because of that, it’s so easy to stay there. It’s like time doesn’t exist there. And stepping back into reality isn’t so great.

This is the second time I shot this car in the same spot; I’m going to assume someone who works at one of the stores here owns it. Props to him/her. I stopped by Black Bean Deli for lunch today—it’s not the most authentic Cuban place, but there aren’t nearly as many in Orlando as in Miami, so I guess I can’t get picky. Plus, lunch was great.

I’m going to be working 8-5 with a lunch break that I guess will become an hour long now, but I’m not entirely sure. Either way, full-time work is going to make a lot of things a lot easier for me. I’ve already got more than enough for my mortgage payment this month, and it’s not due for another three weeks. I don’t want to jump the gun here, but the lean times might well be at an end.

Perhaps the last third of 2009 will be more about bounty and less about debt. And while the “starving artist” thing might help inspire some people, worrying about bills does nothing to inspire me. So, I look forward to a shit-load more creativity during the coming months. ]]> http://blog.asurroca.com/2009/08/25/day-two-hundred-twenty-six-bounty/feed/ 0 http://blog.asurroca.com/2009/07/17/one-hundred-eighty-seven-disorienting/ http://blog.asurroca.com/2009/07/17/one-hundred-eighty-seven-disorienting/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:01:40 +0000 asurroca http://blog.asurroca.com/2009/07/17/one-hundred-eighty-seven-disorienting/

I’ve been kind of sick the past day or so, and it’s thrown my sleep schedule off. Being sick wore me out so that I passed out in the early evening yesterday… and woke up at around 10 PM… and couldn’t get to sleep until 3 in the morning. I had to go to a meeting this morning at 9, so the couple hours I got of sleep didn’t exactly set me up for success.

Still, I got through it in tact. And passed out as soon as I got home, waking up around two in the afternoon. It’s been like that.

Really disorienting.

My head is spinning with the amount of information coming at it from all sides, most of it not connected. This just makes everything more confusing. I’ve got issues with past work, current work, and future work all mixed together; school issues from my past and future to contend with; bills that I’ve got to rank because I can’t pay them all anymore; people I’m networking with for business and pleasure; and a whole laundry list of small, but important, errands that keep getting pushed to the wayside.

Once I get through this month, the bottleneck I’m in might be at least semi-cleared out, but right now, I’m in the thick of it, and it’s making me sick. Literally. I feel like I’m coming down with something, and I know the stress is to blame.

Ah, and as for the photo. It’s what I saw across the street while I was buying bread at an overstock store.