It’s early. I had to set an alarm today. I haven’t done the alarm thing, at least not on a regular basis, in a little over a year.
It’s my first day at my new job. I’m giving myself extra time to wake up, get ready, and make the commute. I haven’t had a commute in a little over a year. The job is semi-remote, and I think semi-flexible: 2-3 days in the office per week, some work can be performed on off hours. I’ll be doing a good bit of grant writing and grant reporting – tasks that I suspect will require some dedicated quiet time.
The job is in Oakland. the commute, according to Google Maps, is 14 miles and 25 – 40 minutes by car, closer to an hour by bus/train, not walkable. I plan to take the bus/train, but I’ll have to test out driving at some point. I’m avoiding driving because traffic on the Bay Bridge is notoriously bad, street parking near the office fills up by 8:30 (though I can probably make that work), garage parking is between $20 and $48 per day, and then there’s the bridge toll where I can pay $11 for the pleasure of sitting in traffic on the bridge.
Figuring out my commute is just one of the many new things I’ll have to figure out now that I’m employed. There’s the whole office culture thing to adjust to: do people eat lunch together; do they eat at their desks or go out; is it a jeans and hoodie office; do they go to happy hours together; is there cake every week for birthdays; is Janet from accounting overly talkative; etc. etc.
Beyond learning the office culture, I’ll need to figure out what this does to my schedule. For the past year, I’ve gotten up when I wanted to and, aside from the various scheduled interviews, gone about my day at a leisurely pace. I went for runs when I wanted to go for runs. I took walks and naps in the middle of the day. On some days, I didn’t shower until after lunch. If I want to continue to run/exercise a few times a week, I’ll have to re-figure out if I’m a morning person or an after work exercise person. I’ll also have to re-figure out / re-learn how much energy I’ll have at the end of the day. Will my entire salary be eaten up but going out to dinner because I’m too tired to cook or because I didn’t plan my week’s meal out and I don’t feel like going to the market?
These are all first-world problems and things that people navigate without much thought. It’s just that I’ve spent a year not doing any of these things, and now I’m out of practice. I have no idea when I’m going to be hungry today because I’m not usually up and eating breakfast at 5am. Do I need snacks? Am I going to become a grazer eating snacks all day? And what’s the coffee situation going to be like? I kinda need my afternoon cup.
When I have this type of nervous energy, I tend to pace around more, tidy up, flit from thought to thought and task to task. This is when I want to get things in order, make lists, schedule everything. I tend to watch the clock and back out my time. If the bus is at 7:45, I should leave the apartment by 7:40… which means I should be in the shower by 7. If I had wanted to exercise, I’d need to be done that by 6:15 or 6:30? etc. etc. It’s pointless to try to figure these things out on the first day. It’s all going to change and will take several weeks to find a groove. But I’m a “get there early” kind of person. I an “establish a baseline and adjust from there” kind of person. Despite all of my practice at working with ambiguity, I still like the comfort and security of routine and practice. And well, today is day one – which is anything but routine.