The Last Day of the Soon-To-Be-Previous Phase of My Life

One of my writers said this week that the old platitude "today is the first day of the rest of your life" was kind of stupid, because it was always true. Of course, in a way that's the point, but it undermines the concept a bit, too. After all, even if you're sitting around eating potato chips and watching reruns, it's the first day of the rest of your life. Sick in bed and unable to do anything? First day of the rest of your life. You get the point.

Tomorrow, I guess, will be the first day of my new phase of life. Today was the last day of the old one. The day when it becomes not-exactly-accurate to use the phrase "one of my writers" in the first paragraph of this post.

For the past two years I've worked in a place that some of my friends have referred to as "the Gulch" after Galt's Gulch. The kind of place that you probably think only exists on television: imagine one huge, open room full of energetic, creative, talented (and mostly gorgeous) young men and women. Add an interesting mission and a healthy dose of ethics and humanity coming from the top, bottomless coffee, the occasional bout of loud music, a dog wandering through from time to time and an invading army of tiny glow-in-the-dark zombies and you either have a very successful sitcom or a utopian work environment.

Unless this is a Truman Show kind of thing and I'm the last to know, my office was the latter.
Sadly, it was inconveniently located. By "inconveniently located" I don't mean that it was in a bad place. On the contrary (of course) it was in a section of the loop surrounded by activity, dining opportunities, parks, convenient banking and a large number of jewelers. It just wasn't anywhere near my kid. If you're a regular reader here, you may have gathered that I'm pretty attached to my kid.

Still, parenting is a balancing act, especially when you're doing it alone. I wanted to see more of my daughter, but (as she told me once when she was four or five) "you have to feed your kid every day. It's a law." So we got by. The days were long for both of us and I ended up in the hospital a time or two, but if you have to work for a living it might as well be in The Perfect Job, right?

And then, out of the blue, another perfect job appeared. (Yes, I'm well aware that my good fortune is far beyond what I could possibly deserve.) Like my current (past) job, this one made use of all of my varied past experiences: editorial, legal, educational. Like my current (past) job, this one involved working with quality people. Unlike my current (past) job, this one allowed me to work from home--and thereby solved every problem in my life.

That sounds absurd, I know, but every identifiable problem in my life related to the time I spent commuting. The days were too long for my daughter. I didn't get to spend enough time with her. She didn't get enough sleep. I didn't get enough sleep. We were both getting sick a lot. My house was getting out of control (okay, had been out of control for a long time). I hadn't seen my friends in months. I'd lived in the same place for a year and a half and not gotten around to hanging curtains.

So really, what choice did I have?

And yet, I don't want to sound like I'm taking a job I don't want just to cut out the commute. No, the new job is very exciting. Exciting enough that when my future (current) boss was describing it to me, I had to get up and pace around the room while I talked to him. I simply couldn't sit still for it. I'm very eager to get started.

So I left behind a cluster of talented young writers that had melded into a team of laughter and moral outrage and mission--that, I might dare to say, I had melded into that team. I left behind the close proximity of friends and the certainty that someone within ten feet would always share my outrage at the metamorphosis of language or the abuse of an apostrophe, traded it for dinner with my daughter and sleep and a brand new mission, for the possibility of vacations and the ability to help with homework and the chance that I might one day host dinners and volunteer again.

But I didn't quite believe it, even over a cake that said I was leaving (a cake dented, ever-so-slightly, on the trip across town, served in a kitchen stocked with everything up to and including a martini shaker, but nothing with which one could serve cake). I didn't believe it because the unity in the room made it seem absurd that separation was possible, let alone already in progress. I'm still waiting to see what it will look like Monday morning.