So, the new job. It's pretty good, though it means learning an entirely new way of working -- the Way of the Meeting. I've never had so many meetings in my life. But the people are great, the work is a challenge, and an interesting one, and I am enjoying learning all this new stuff.
The hardest part, however, has not been the job but the commute.
Every day I walk right past, and look down into, what used to be a giant smoking hole in my city. I've started having flashbacks again, which sucks so hard I can't tell you. The ghoulish tourists and the makeshift souvenir carts that cater to them incite a terrible fury in me and I try not to glare as I walk past.
I spent six years avoiding the place, so I get lost down here doing errands because the last time I was looking for the bank, or shopping at Century 21, there were a couple of very large buildings there affecting the route I walked.
I am also working on the 35th floor. The view is magnificent, except that I hate seeing airplanes. The week before I started they had their yearly full evacuation drill, which involves walking all the way down to the ground floor. I'm already planning to call in sick nxt year.
I am lucky that my boss is a good friend of mine and when I expressed some of this to her she admitted that she has a hard time with it sometimes too. Somehow that makes it a little better.
So I am gritting my teeth and trying to remind myself that the flashbacks will go away eventually, from daily to weekly to monthly or less. Soon it will just be my commute, and I will be thinking about the magazine I read on the subway or the work I have ahead of me, but I'm just not there yet.
Posted by designatedgirl at June 7, 2007 10:15 PMWhat can I say, other than I hope the flahbacks fade sooner rather than later.
It ocurred to me a while ago that on my original visit to NYC in 1967, I paused at a viewing hole at an enormous construction site. I must have read the name and description of what was being built, and around me people were talking about these incredible buildings. So I looked at it with the idea that sometime in the future I'd realize the significance of what I'd seen. Even when I saw the buildings many years later, I didn't connect them with the hole in the ground. Now I do.
Posted by: Sandra at June 10, 2007 02:43 AM