complich8’s journal

I’ve been contracting for basically the last year or so. Before that, I was in class working towards graduation, and then working towards getting a job that pays well enough to pay back the student loans and … err … eat.

It’s interesting though. Now that I’m a full-time employee with a permanent position, I’ve sort of got a different mindset that I’m adjusting to.

See, when I was a student, I was working toward a specific, temporal goal. Even with setbacks, as long as I kept working at it and didn’t fail out, graduation was essentially a temporal inevitability. I always knew it was up ahead, always knew I was working towards some specific goal, some time at which things would resolve themselves if only I could hang on and keep it together until then.

Then I graduated. The temporal inevitability came and went. I survived, I made it, I crossed that line. And I looked ahead, and found another line: finding a full-time job.

I was pretty much always confident that I could get a job. I’m smart, I’m attentive, I’m friendly and generally easy to get along with, and I’ve got pretty absurdly good technical skills. I wasn’t always confident where I would get a job, but the fact of the matter never left me. Working was another temporal inevitable. It was, in my mind, an irrevocable fact that I would at some point in the indeterminate near future get a job.

And get a job I did. I accepted the CACI job in the end of July and started there in September, after really seriously starting the job hunt in September and having to basically choose between two possible places to go. And when I started there, it was as a contractor.

As a contractor on a limited-term contract-to-hire setup, I knew that it was basically inevitable that I would become a full-time employee. Of course, that turned out to be wrong, CACI turned out to be a bad fit for me, and got hit by a nasty budget crunch that caused my contract to get squeezed out. But I spent 8 years in college. I’m used to setbacks. And after a day or so of being confused and disoriented, I stood up and started searching for jobs, regrowing the sense of inevitability that I’d find a job after a couple of very positive, very successful interviews. And find a job I did, as a contractor again. This time on a 3-month instead of a 6-month, but the same deal: temp to perm.

And 3 months went by like nothing. I guess if I can spend 5 months at CACI being bored to tears and have it feel like an eternity, the 3 months just evaporating in front of me was a pretty good indicator that Mitre was a better fit. And then they made me a full time offer that was slightly better than what I’d initially negotiated, and I accepted, and became a full time employee. Again, all these events, to me, had a certain inevitability to them. I knew that it would happen. There was always room for doubt, but there was also always a sense that this was definitely going to happen, at some point. If not here, then somewhere else.

So now I’ve crossed that line. I’ve got a real position without an expiration date. It’s at a company consistently rated pretty high on the “best places to work” lists. It’s got great benefits, great vacation policies, and a healthy culture that really fits me. Things are great.

But now I’m faced with a problem. The only thing I see in the future that I’m confident about, that I see as inevitable is my own death, and that’s not for a long time. I don’t have a milestone to wait for anymore.

See, the last … I dunno, 27 years or so, I’ve been waiting for things. Waiting around to get into elementary school. Waiting to get out of it. Waiting to get out of middle school. Waiting to learn to drive. Waiting to get out of high school. Waiting to finish college. Waiting to get a permanent job. It’s so easy to justify killing time, wasting it, watching it slip by, knowing that the things you want to do are essentially inevitable. But now I am starting to feel guilty about it, because I feel like my time-wasting is finally, actually wasting it.

The momentum is gone. I don’t have anything pulling me forward anymore, so if I want to do anything before I die I’m going to have to do it on my own motivation. There’s nothing else. It’s a little disconcerting.

Maybe it’s time to build my own fire.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Idle Musings, Uncategorized, life and times, observational, window to the soul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.