Call Me Irresponsible

I have spent the vast part of today doing things that would likely be considered time wasters. I do have a few things I’m supposed to do but I can’t seem to find the energy or motivation to do them. Not that they urgently need doing but they would all fall into the category of things that responsible adults would do. I’m just not feeling it today.

Days like today make me think about what it would be like to cut all ties. Well maybe not all but things like selling the house, getting rid of a bunch of stuff and just going to find some small place on a beach where I could live in shorts and flip flops for the rest of my life. It is just a dream because no matter where you go, there will be the need to have money to pay for things and that implies some level of responsibility.

I did go to the gym this morning which I guess you could put under the category of responsible things. I mean taking care of your body is pretty important. Then again, I kind of find it fun so it doesn’t take much to get me to go. Maybe it is sort of responsible.

I took Rocco the wonder dog to the park. That’s being a responsible pet owner, right? Well it was also a diversion. Do I go make some tweaks to my LinkedIn page or take the dog for a walk? Pretty easy call.

We are having a very fall like day. The temperature was in the low 70s. It was one of those days where the air temperature with the breeze was cool enough that long pants wouldn’t have been a bad choice. Throughout the summer, we like to get under the trees to enjoy the shade but today was a day where you wanted to feel the sun on you because it was just a bit of a chill in the shade. Nothing major but clearly not middle of the summer weather.

Saw a guy walking in the park who certainly looked like an office worker taking his lunch hour to enjoy the outside. I get that. I did that a few times myself. Every now and then, I would swoop up all the stuff I needed to review and drive to a place where I could sit at a picnic table and just enjoy the outdoors. Working in an office will do that to you when your an introvert and you just have had it with people bugging you.

I’m wondering if I just used up all my responsibility at work. I’ve learned over the years that I’m not the most serious person. I enjoy keeping things light and bubbly. Which was hard at work because work was serious business and there was limited time for fun and frivolity. I still tried but some people really just don’t have a sense of humor.

Now I know my experience in the corporate world is limited to the one place I worked so your experiences may vary. But there always seemed to be this veneer of niceness that people put on. It was like you could never really show who you really were. You had to tone down everything you said because we had it hammered into us that you didn’t want to offend anyone.

It wasn’t like that we I started and I’m not at all saying that the good old days were better. I can remember sitting in rooms and cringing at things people said so having some awareness that other people may not want to hear certain things isn’t a bad thing. But I will say that it felt a little more free and loose back then.

This is why the dance studio is sometimes quite a culture shock for me. Now, again, my experience is based on one place and your experiences may vary. But I think people who run dance studios know that a whole bunch of people come in with a lot of fears and insecurities so they try to amp up the fun. Also, for a lot of reasons, they want to make people feel comfortable at the studio. So you get stuff said there that you’d never be able to say in a big company with an active HR department.

I mean nothing that is overtly offensive but things that would fit in a “professional” environment. I should give you examples so you know what I’m talking about but I can’t come up with any right now. I mean its not the wild west where anything goes but the atmosphere is clearly a whole lot looser than my ex corporate world was.

I see a lot of that veneer on LinkedIN as well. I probably shouldn’t be assigning motives to people I don’t know but a whole lot of stuff just appears to be more virtue signaling than anything else. And that’s one reason why I’m not really in a hurry to fix up my LinkedIn page. I suppose I may just be doing this to appear like I haven’t totally decided to toss in the towel on work but I think about having to deal with the constraints of corporate life and it kind of makes me twitch a bit.

And now that I’ve rambled on for quite a bit, here comes a totally random topic shift. I have this weird kind of fear that I’m going to drop my key fob into an open sewer grate. Probably comes from the fact that I sometimes have trouble holding on to it and I’ve dropped it numerous times. So every time I get out of my car and see a grate nearby, I get a little nervous that I’m going to drop it while trying to lock my car and watch helplessly as it bounces into the sewer where it would be gone forever. I’ve even gone past parking spaces if there was a grate nearby. Never felt that way about actual, physical keys for some reason.

Well that’s really all I’ve got for now. I’m hoping JoNY has recovered from her illness because we have a lesson tonight. If not, I’m sure OwnerGuy is already working on another Plan B.