WARNING! - wildly Off-Topic post!

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. " -- Mathew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's

When you consider that the film above came out in 1986, and is now of legal drinking age (!) the point is well-taken. And things move even faster in the post-modern a-go- go 21st century. Ted Haggard was cured of The Gay in just 3 weeks. In less than a month, Brittney Spears has already been into and out of rehab twice already. Add to these dubious signs of the times the fact that since I was laid off in January, since my last entry, I've had 2 new jobs.

The first, for a small dot-com, was trumped by the benefits and better pay offered by a broadcast television station. It was a tough move - the dot-com employed Hot Women; women who made art and played in bands during the off hours. Short hair and pierced noses were the office uniform. At the station, the uniform is stretch-pants with stirrups and Winnie the Pooh tee-shirts. Sure, there's some "attractive" women at the station, running around, primping for the 9 pm newscast, but they're the cool kids, with their very own table in the lunch room. Up on my floor it's cubicles decorated with happy meal toys all the way.

Now, once you get to know me, it's perhaps not so surprising that I've been employed 3 different places just in '07. As a legal adult, I've had no less than 27 jobs (though I'm pretty sure there's a handful of others I've forgotten about in there). I have to admit, it's nice having choices for once. Options. Even if I did have to fill out an application for my current job. Is it just me, or do you ever wonder why you bother endlessly editing, revising and updating your resume, arguing over formatting etiquette as if it was religion ("You must fit everything on One Page!"... "Never supply your references until asked, naive!") if in the end, you have to sit and fill out a bunch of itty-bitty fields by hand, like you're trying applying for a shift-lead position at Wendy's?

But it was cool for once, as hard as it was to walk away from the hipster chicks at the dot com, to leave on my terms - and for more money. To not have to hop on the first job I came across and hump it's leg like sexually frustrated cocker spaniel. To not give two weeks notice, regardless of what my parents may think, because it's not like the man always gives the same courtesy in return. Sometimes you're the windshield, and sometimes you're the bug, baby.

(Yeah, I quoted a country song. Bite me. I'm tired and I'm not used to blogging from home... at night... how do people do it?)

Furthermore, its was good to have a practice run through the usual "Stages of a New Job". I got to get my usual reaction to days one ("Hey, this is great! Everyone is smiling at me and wants to buy me lunch") through five ("Why did I have to get married and have kids? I should have slept around more and wandered the earth like Caine on Kung Fu!") out of my system.

So, here I am; I just have to decide where to go from here. Do I try to work my way up - sell out and attempt to claw my way up the corporate ladder? I toyed with the idea of getting a "personal coach", though admittedly, they'd have to be more Dustin Hoffman from "I (Heart) Huckabees" than Greg Kinnear in "Little Miss Sunshine".

If nothing else, I think this could be what I've always dreamed of; a real live, well-balanced "day job", one that I could actually come home from and still have the piece of mind to indulge in my creative pursuits. My last job, it took me 6 months just to reach "incompetent". This, I think I'll have mastered in 3.

I've been getting my coffee at Moe's Broadway Bagels, pissing distance from the office. So I should be able to write about that, just as soon as I get all this self-indulgent, personal life stuff out of my system.