Evening Pages: July 27th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Adorrrrrableeeee

aww

I start a new job on Wednesday! This time around, I'm trying a contract-to-hire agreement. A bit unconventional, but I think it might be a better way to de-risk the hiring process by learning more about the company and the people dynamics within, and there's an explicit fit check at the end where if either party is dissatisfied, we can walk away entirely, no harm no foul.

I honestly have a good amount of work to do to hold up my end of the bargain. I've been sleeping too late and waking too late (hence the far more intermittent Morning Poppins posts), and I'm a bit afraid I won't start off well. I also have to review a good number of technologies and read through a good amount of documentation between now and Wednesday morning. I'm hoping that besides the additional financial cushion and the opportunity to work on a codebase with other people, the contract-to-hire agreement will give me a chance to set my life in order (again), so that I can continue working on my own apps and see whether that goes anywhere.

I think with the whole pandemic, I had prototyped two approaches: try to brace against the storm, or learn to ride it. I think I'm learning to ride it, which to me is much more preferable than trying to brace against it. Embracing uncertainty and chaos as a way of life means much less fear of the sudden layoff, the sudden cancer diagnosis, and otherwise the all-engulfing Black Swan.