Reality hasn't quite sunk in yet. I'm still living in a blissful, paycheck-filled existence, complete with health care benefits and access to my old work email (helpful for those acquaintances who don't seem to follow directions when you send out an email notifying them that you will no longer be checking that email account and to please send future correspondence to ijustquitmyjob@gmail.com and who send you emails to your old account asking you what happened, and did you have the $10 you owed them from two weeks ago). My jaw is still sore from the grinding and clenching of teeth I'm apparently doing at night in my sleep, induced by stress from work. My boss is still calling me to ask where I saved some information on the company intranet.
I quit my job last week. And if felt good.
Well, it felt good until the part about not having a source of funding for things like rent, food, gas, prescriptions, cell phone plans, gym memberships, and of course, wine, crossed my mind. That's when I started caving in to work a bit, and instead of walking out the door from work that morning - I'd reached my limit of irascible clients, unrealistic deadlines, weekends spent in the office, and a corporate culture of treating its employees like drones, and had stormed into work and delivered to my boss the perhaps-not-so-eloquent-in-hindsight diatribe about needing to quit ASAP in order to preserve my sanity, my personal life, and my desire to move on to a bigger and brighter career - I gave in and said I'd stay three more days to finish up the report I was working on. Then, when doing a call with HR the day before my supposed final day, I caved in when the HR director gently reminded me of the nasty expenses of COBRA. I decided to just go on "vacation" for a week and then come back in a part-time role.
So here I am, on the second day of vacation. I feel a bit like one of the real housewives of Orange County except with a lot less money, a lot smaller boobs, and a lot fewer sugar daddies in my life. In the two days I've been on vacation, my life has been like that of an OC housewife: I've been a lady who lunches (albeit with a male former co-worker), I've dined with a group of girls (granted, it was a sorority alumni group event I attended in the hopes of networking and having those networking dreams dashed when I realized all of the women in attendance were middle-aged housewives), and I've gone shopping (for a new-every-two free phone from Verizon to replace the piece of garbage that had been moonlighting as a cell phone for me the past 3 years). In between my busy social life, I've emailed former co-workers about any potential openings they might know about, added connections on LinkedIn, applied to five jobs, and scoured Careerbuilder.com. No leads yet, but at least I can say I've been trying.
My fiance suggested I start a blog to help dust off my writing skills, which, given that the past 7 years of my life have been spent toiling away in market research and political polling, have accumulated a rather thick layer of dust. While I'm not convinced that my life is interesting enough to necessitate (or even justify) a blog, I'm also not convinced that 99.9% of the blogs out there are interesting enough to warrant their existence. If there's anything my market research experience has taught me, it's that we Americans are a narcissistic lot, and I might as well be true to my American blood and throw another narcissistic blog into the mix.
So, without further ado, I conclude the first entry to my blog. I think my effort in writing this deserves the reward of a nice glass of white wine, even if the content in this entry quite possibly doesn't really justify a reward of any sort.
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