WAG - Status Report
“Two more days,” the tired mass of protoplasm gurgled.
“Just two more days…” he muttered.
After his rasping ellipsis echoed and died away, his tired mind tried to review the events of the day. His synapses, frequently taxed and easily overloaded, blew a fuse and went into default mode.
After playing soft music (and several dozen games of solitaire) on the computer, I lost the “third-person self-referencing motif” and scraped together enough brain cells to put together a post (or at least the mangled set of letters that hopefully form words and, Lord willing, semi-coherent sentences. They look good to me, but then my tired mind could probably find significance in the patterns carved in my mashed potatoes by my fork).
But before that, I think I smell microwaved popcorn wafting through the house. Forgive me. I MUST investigate.
Here’s another ellipsis to denote the passage of time: …
I’m back. My sister had a slightly burnt bag of butter popcorn as a companion to viewing of The Breakfast Club. Not wanting to leave her in such company (the bag of popcorn, not my sister), I kept her company until she was empty and Bender had racked up eight weeks of detention.
Note: Every time I watch "The Breakfast Club," I can’t help but admire Judd Nelson’s character but at the same time lament the fact he seems to have misplaced his acting ability somewhere between there and "Suddenly Susan."
Anyway, my mind is beginning to function after another day in my last week as grunt for the Conservation Department.
Well, my conscious mind (or at least the programmed facsimile that I’ve been using for the last couple of years. It seems to work). When chopping branches 7 out of your 8 hours of your work day, the mind seems to take leave after a while (and not seem to find itself back until sometime after I’ve been home a while).
I am getting to work outside as well as a good exercise, but I’m looking forward to returning to my moth trapping duties. I like the outdoors, but some days (when the weather is blistering or biting) I prefer to have only 30-second doses of it at locations spaced out across multiple miles and I’m only separated from the air conditioning and radio for a few seconds. Depending on the song and the neighborhood, the gap may be nonexistent if conditions are right for cranking the song.
Part of me feels like I’m complaining about stupid things; and that’s because I am. My job, even with its current decent into menial labor IS pretty good. It pays well, I get to see some wonderful sights, and I’m less likely to die of overexposure to fluorescent lights (though the numbers are hideously unreported, I’m sure they take out more than a fair share of lives each year).
Of course, it seems everyone complains about their jobs. People make take it too different degrees (which is why you have some people taking those stress-buster bags filled with sand to work and why others bring shotguns), but it is a fundamental part of being employed.
You always want things a little better; a bit more perfect. A tad more of this… A smidgen of that… And one you fire that dirty old what’s her face, this place may not be bad at all…
People seem to take the best attributes from all the jobs they’ve held (or sometimes the positions they wished they held) and use that idealized conglomeration as the benchmark against which the job is judged.
When you compare dream world against reality, I won’t say one side always wins, but I won’t lie to you and say one side doesn’t have a natural advantage (depending on the imagination of the person involved of course. Some people don’t dream big out of conditioning but just because they don’t think that broadly [which is why those people are to be both pitied and envied]).
At most, I should only have two more days of barging through thorn bushes, scraping through poison ivy and brushing sawdust out of my hair.
No, that isn’t true at all. My job description requires that I still come into contact with all three; it’ll just be to a lesser extent. I’ll go from contact 98% of the time to 78%, which really isn’t much of a reduction, but it’s a difference I’m looking forward to.
Actually what I’ll be loosing is chances to chop trees so that they land in rivers, go off-trail to the entryway of a cave with the stated intent to “pick up any trash” when the real intent is to lounge in the cavern-cooled air, and take a break on a conservation bench and stare up through the breaks in the pine to watch hawks soar through the sky.
Well, it was probably a turkey buzzard, but I was on break and if I want to fantasize, I have the right to say it was a hawk (I’m not saying it was an eagle; that’d be greedy).
Different jobs have different perks (and you’ll never be able to hold on to all of them).
So, for now, I’m making the most that I can out of my final days wielding a pair of clippers and pole saw.
After all, I can only complain about it for just a little bit longer.
'two_days_longer'
