Changing Jobs

What am I doing up at this hour? Well, I'm changing jobs, you see. I ended my new job at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. I am starting my old job at 6:30 a.m. on Monday. I've had the intervening 47.5 hours to adjust my sleep schedule from working all night and sleeping all day, to going to bed early in the evning, getting up very early in the morning, and working into the early afternoon. It's not an easy adjustment to make over a weekend. I expect to reach equilibrium sometime around Thursday.

No, that isn't a mistake of a tired mind. I said I was quitting my new job and starting my old one. That is correct. I solicit your prayers and God's blessing as I bend my efforts once more toward duties from which I was relieved almost exactly a year ago.

I'll be spending a lot more time on the road. The old job that I'm starting has a much longer commute than the new job I just quit. I've made an investment to help me with that. With my last use of the employee discount card, moments before my exit interview, I purchased a portable CD player that I can plug in to the cigarette lighter, and that has an adapter that I can plug into the tape deck in my car radio.

Now I won't be at the mercy of the radio any more - even beloved KFUO-FM, where I used to hear the same commercials twice going each way, day after day, until I thought they would drive me insane. For all the wonderful classical music they play, they seem to spend just as much time broadcasting advertisements. This is their bread and butter and I don't hold it against them. It's just a me thing.

I can't stand having pieces of my life torn off and burned on the altar of commercialism. I can't stand the mindless drone of the same ad playing day after day, three or four times a day. This is why I can't watch TV any more. I prefer to be in control of the time I spend watching video, listening to music, and reading. I prefer to fill that time with quality content, and to keep words from our sponsor to a minimum. So I watch the boxed sets of TV shows, season by season; more often I read and play the piano, etc., when an ordinary person would be watching the tube; and now I'll be listening to my own classical-music picks on CD as I commute.

I've given some thought to combining two of my interests. I may start investing in audio books. Until now I've been deterred by the fact that most of them are available on CD, while my car radio only has a cassette player. Clearly, the car is where I would need a book to be read aloud. When I'm not at the wheel, I can read by myself very well, thank you. So I'm going to be taking stock of what's available, and affordable, among the books I've been planning to read. Maybe I'll be able to redeem the two hours a day I spend at the wheel, by having that many more book reviews to write at the end of the week.