Saturday night

I am so grateful for my husband's ability to listen to me and for his support.

D caught me looking at job listings and wanted to know how serious that was. So we had a long talk. Actually, as I was saying, I had a long talk and he had a long listen and good advice.

I am not an ambitious person when it comes to work. I have never been. I don't feel the need to push myself ahead in some career path. I do not strive for more and more money. I feel extremely fortunate that I do make a good living, but that's more accident than planning.

I want a job where I know what my duties are and I do them extremely well and am recognized for my competence. Beyond that, what do I need? Health benefits and hours that allow me to pick up my kids from school. But as for the rest? I was happy covering books with plastic at the library, which required next to no brainpower and by most peoples' accounts was hellishly monotonous, but to me was therapeutic and lovely. I was happy doing software troubleshooting which required thinking hard and fast all day long while keeping 20-50 customers and programmers satisfied. If I know my place and can work hard behind the scenes to make the machine function, that's good enough for me.

My unhappiness at jobs has more often than not sprung from personality conflicts. I know I'm not perfect, and I'm sure I'm not easy to work with all the time. But whatever faults I have, I think that I have a positive attitude at work in general. And I only last so long working with people who are chronically angry, or disrespectful of other people who don't share their political views or temperament. My skin is only so thick, and then when I've had enough, I've had enough, and any more of the same negative attitude or unethical behavior from colleagues is fuel for the fire of discontent. Maybe I need to participate in some kind of workshop where I learn to interact more productively with aggressive personalities.

Or maybe not.

Just because my childhood has given me the tools needed to put up with abusive people doesn't mean I should.

Perhaps what I really need is to be a writer. They work alone almost all of the time. Some writers complain about this. At the moment, I think it sounds heavenly.

Fretting about work is not something that one should be doing on a Saturday night.

Is it?