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[personal profile] grinninfoole
Here's a post I started last month, that I'm going to try and finish up, reflecting on the past decade of my life.


I’m starting this post on May 2, 2011. I’m sitting at the Route 9 Diner in Hadley. Last night, the president announced the death of Osama Bin Laden. I came here to wait while my car receives routine maintenance, but I’m struck by the fact that, on September 11, 2001, I came here and had a bacon burger while some friends and I processed our shock.

I’m not sad OBL is dead, but I’m not celebrating, either. I’m glad that my tax dollars finally paid to kill someone who wasn’t an innocent bystander, but a fellow human being has been murdered, and that’s never a good thing (however satisfying it may feel.)

Ten years ago, I was starting my second year in the MA program at UMass. Looking back, that was the semester my wheels came off. That was the point at which I had to confront my need to write two original research papers, using primary documents, and something about the need to go out and find my own truth, to write history instead of merely read and comment upon it, unraveled me.

(Well, to be fair, there were other things going on. Millari and I finally got our feelings for each other out in the open, and both of our lives kind of exploded as a result. I also, starting on 9/11, felt this creeping numbness that I have long though of as grief, but now I think may have been depression.)

I should have finished the MA in May of 2002, but I wasn’t actually done until August of 2005. (I completed my comps on the day Katrina destroyed New Orleans–I went in, the Crescent City was there; I came out, it was gone. I deny any causality.)

I spent about three years in a sort of limbo, “trying” to write that last goddamn paper to earn my degree. I put it in quotes because “trying” was what I spent my time doing, as opposed to actually doing and failing. It was hardly the first time in my life that I sat on my ass, doing little to nothing, afraid to take on something that felt too big for me. (Those of you who read stories know that once I actually really “tried”, I found it wasn’t too big at all.)

It was in the depths of that time in my life that I started working at Modern Myths (last week of January, 2003.) It’s been a great boon to me, in all in all. There have been times when Lefty, the founder & manager, has been annoying and difficult. There have been times when I have such a pain in his ass that I’m astonished he didn’t punch me in the nose (or fire me.) It’s been a salutary experience, though, in many ways.

First, it forced me to confront my long-ingrained pattern of tardiness, and the dysfunctional attitude towards self-determination and commitment at its root, as well as the disrespect inherent in wasting other people’s time when I show up late. (I still need to keep this in mind, because it’s still hard for me to be mindful of the passage of time.) I owe Lefty a great debt because of his enormous patience with me, and his willingness to invest time and effort in me.

Second, it’s been my first real, sustained, adult job. (Well, maybe the second, depending on how I look at my time as a TA at UMass, but that was only two years, and was time limited from the outset. At MM, I started as part time and have become a full-time assistant managing partner.)

Third, it's provided an adult identity that has felt comfortable. I love comics. I love games. I love talking about them. It's great to have a job the requires me to play D&D twice a month, and to read comics and try new games. But it's also given me respectable, look other grown-ups in the eye answers to questions like: what do you do for a living? Who do you work for? It doesn't pay well (really, I'd be insane to work this job if I needed to save up for retirement), but it's given me a lot of nerd cred (which is great) and enough responsible member of society cred to get by.

I'm a great position right now: I'll either be moving onto an interesting new career with better pay and benefits, or I'll be sticking around at my own nerdy company, with congenial coworkers, interesting new challenges, and potentially a much better schedule.



Well, I don't know that I have exhausted this vein, but my time is up, so I'll call it done and move on.
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