Gratification

I can't decide if I'm tired or bored. The last few weeks have been crazy... sewing costumes, painting sets, choreographing Renaissance dancing, learning lines, memorizing songs, researching songs, designing concert programs and the list just keeps going on. Four days until the big Madrigal production and I'm looking forward to reclaiming my life and returning to just a choir member, congregational song leader and band member. I'm exhausted.

My fourth week on the job, and I'm trying to convince myself that I made the right decision when I decided to take a step back and be just an employee, following someone else's plan, having more time to dedicate to my family. It would work out great if someone else's plan was a good one. Don't get me wrong, I'm obviously stuck in a learning curve, but there are so many opportunities for improvement and I'm low man on the totem pole. I'm used to being the one people came to with questions because I'd been around the longest. Now I'm learning a new industry from scratch. I love a good challenge, but I prefer the challenge to be improving the way we do business, not just learning as fast as possible to become as productive as my peers.

I just hate starting new jobs. I suppose that's why I do it as infrequently as possible. I don't feel gratified yet. The time I'm supposed to be spending with my family has been filled up with various volunteer activities - our church has practically been my second home. My doctor once told me I need to learn to relax... but I'm just not sure how. I wanted to just go to a job and do whatever someone told me to do, but the procedures are so muddled that I find myself having the urge to document and flowchart everything so that the next person who comes aboard can just start working. Finding and fixing problems has been a favorite hobby of mine for quite some time.

I need a new goal in my life. My need for immediate gratification has led me to accomplish all of the major events I wanted in life and here I am in my mid thirties wondering, now what? I don't want a high powered career goal right now. We can't have more kids. I certainly wouldn't want to clean a bigger house.

I'm starting small. Surrounded by project plans to decommission and build servers, I stumbled across a little gem today that, for some reason, I latched onto with more intensity than anything else. At the end of the day, I put all my papers away and took this one little challenge home to work on. Someone I've never met before put a posting on the employee intranet asking for help. His wife teaches an autistic child who likes to shop, but she uses attributes rather than actual names for stores. For example, Wal-Mart is "blue star" because they use a blue star rather than a dash in their logo. She has been asking to go back to "white J, yellow J, pink circle, bump" and they are asking for help identifying this place. This is a fascinating challenge and it's driving me crazy that I can't figure it out. If you've got any thoughts, please leave them in the comments.

Time to get rested up before another day...