The Westin in Detroit is a very nice hotel. Which is good since I'm working from it today. Instead of flying home this weekend, Aron is flying out to Detroit to hang out with me. He's got a friend in Ann Arbor so we're staying with his friend for the weekend which should be fun. It's nice that I don't have to get on a plane this weekend but it kind of sucks that i'll be out of New York for 2 weeks straight. But then Thanksgiving week I don't have to travel which should be awesome. If I stay in NY and don't go home to Boston early, it will be the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I've been in the city since the middle of August. That just blows my mind. I will have traveled every week for the last three months without a single week of reprieve. And some people do this for years and years, leaving behind families every week. I can't imagine.

My job itself is fine. If I were doing it in New York, I would be happy (or at least unhappy about something else). But this constant feeling of displacement is just too much. I'm going to give it a year (until next July) and then re-assess. I'll hope for a local project. Last night i was having the beginnings of a quarter life crisis, thinking about what I want to do with my life, where I want to live and work. And I just don't know. My brain traveled from city to city, industry to industry without settling on anything. I don't know what I want to do or where I want to be. I don't know how much energy I want to put into work as opposed to friends and other priorities. I don't know how important money is to me.

One of the directors on the project, his wife just had a baby a couple months ago, and she's unhappy about going back to work. And he was talking about how they both feel trapped in jobs they don't love because there are so few positions that will pay them enough to keep them at the life style they enjoy and pay their expenses. This is a guy who probably makes 300-400,000 a year and his wife is probably at 100-200,000. How do you get to that point where you need 500,000 to support your lifestyle? I guess you start by living in New York. I don't want that trap. I want to make enough to save. But at the same time, it's hard to resist. If I just make anotther 5,000, 10,000, 20,000..... And then where does it end? There's always someone higher up.

I think I could be good at consulting in the right situation. I'm pretty good now but not amazing. But that's not because I'm doing bad work. In a large part, it's because I don't fit in with the team. They are all guys, 10 guys, and they communicate by talking about football, basketball, baseball. They follow teams and compare fantasy draft picks and talk about players. It's either sports or work talk almost all the time. When we get on interesting topics like politics or religion or business or the news, I do fine but I feel excluded from almost all of the small talk that goes on and I really think it works against me. If I stay in this industry (manufacturing) I'm going to have to pick a fantasy football team. Which is too bad because I like manufacturing, especially operations.

It sucks too because my job has become almost the only thing in my life. I have very little going on outside of it. I feel narrow and boring 90% of the time. I don't want to live like this forever.

roller coaster

My moods follow a 7 day cycle.

Monday: relaxed, back on the road, enjoying chatting with work people
Tuesday: starting to get stressed out, get some sleep
Wednesday: starting to get tired and crabby, sleep deprived, irritable, anxious
Thursday: ridiculously happy to be going home in the evening, more and more anxious as my flight get delayed, wound tighter and tighter until the littlest thing (long cab line at the airport, being forced to check a bag) set me totally over the edge
Thursday night: totally crazy and stressed out
Friday: in the office, don't do much work, start to calm down
Saturday: happy and relaxed
Sunday: starting to tense up with the anticipation for doing it all over again

It's not fun. I have not been able to handle stress well at all. By Thursday I'm just totally out of control and the weekend isn't long enough to counteract that. It's hard to focus on anything, I start forgetting things, I can't stay at a task for very long, I lose things. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind.

This week I'm going to do better. I'm going to sleep and stop worrying. I have to. I'm not being healthy right now.

Consultant humor is weird. All I can say is that my team cracks me up and absolutely none of the jokes translate. They usually involve sound effects, economic references, and a constant understanding that the work we're doing here is out of control and ridiculous.

This week is better than last week. Last week was hell, professionally and personally. And I forgot my mother's birthday. Not even a glimmer of a memory til my parents called me over the weekend cause they hadn't heard from me in days. I had no less than three meltdowns (probably more), one involving the fact that the airline made me check my carry on luggage. Interestingly enough, I didn't have a meltdown when my flight on Monday was delayed for 5 hours. Anyway, this week is better, so far. There's a lot of big shots coming down to nc tomorrow so there's a pretty strong possibility that it will get tough.

And some how, I find myself writing bad poetry late at night.

work and play

I wonder if everyone is always stressed by work no matter what they do or who they are. I am. Not because my job is particularly hard. I mean it keeps me busy and I have to think a lot. But the stress comes from the amount of uncertainty I go through in any given week. That's mostly specific to my project. The client doesn't like us (his boss pushed us on him) and is trying to find ways to make us look bad. Unfortunately for us, the project has been mismanaged and that's not hard to do. Most of that doesn't get down to my level. The higher up people have to deal with the consequences of that.

But what does get to me is that on any given week, i don't know what part of the project I'm going to focus on and it frequently changes. On any given week, I don't know where I'll be traveling to the next week. And I don't know when the project will end because none of us do. Part of the project is scheduled to end Nov. 2nd but me and one other person we're supposed to stay til Dec. 15th. But now that's unclear. I'm comfortable with a degree of uncertainty but I have to say that constant changes of direction and a total lack of control over my environment does stress me out. I come home on weekends feeling drained and empty.

There's also not a lot of job security at my company. People get fired or counseled out pretty regularly. So if I'm on a couple of bad projects or rub a couple of people wrong, that's it, i'll have to start polishing up my resume. I think I'm doing ok but combine that with the fact that I have to spend 12-14 hours a day with the people I work with and it means that when I'm on the road, I always have to be on. Which is also tiring.

Next week I have to go to Detroit. I hate being in Detroit because it's cold, the building we work in is a dump, the Sheraton doesn't get Comedy Central, the team there works much longer hours and then goes straight to dinner so I can't run in the evening, it's dark in the morning so I can't run then and there's no really nice Y to swim at like there is in North Carolina. It's those little things that can make me hate an entire city.

One random North Carolina story..... we had dinner one night at a place called the Steak Barn where the parking lot was full of pick up trucks. I was in the back seat yelling "veto!" but the guys didn't listen to me. Stupid guys. So four of us, me, my manager, and the two associates, sit down and the food is awful. It's terrible. But THEN, the waitress comes over and starts talking. My manager is Indian. He was born in the US and he lives in Ohio but he is of Indian decent.

So, this waitress starts talking, "where are you from?" she asks him. He tries to say Ohio, but she won't have that, "No, where are you FROM?" He concedes and says India. "Oh," she starts, "We have Indian people here. They move down and open convenience stores in the ghetto. They make so much money selling fried chicken to black people. Those poor people love their fried chicken. The Indians make more money than KFC. And they sell cigarettes one at a time, because you know poor people can't afford the whole pack. But those Indians aren't very nice to their wives are they? I know one that got mad at his wife and made her wear that outfit. Why do they do that?"

The worst part about all that racism was that she thought she was being really welcoming and friendly. It was totally and utterly shameless. She just kept talking about the Indians in the ghetto and the time she lived in the big city of Durham. I don't know what she would have said if she had found out that the associates were both Jewish or if my director (who is black) had been there. It was ridiculous. Because of that and because our project is going so badly we went from there to the Applebees and got hammered.

I guess this post was all work and no play. My weekends aren't very exciting if things go according to plan. When I come home I don't want to do anything. Last weekend was kind of exciting I guess. I flew home to Boston and hung out with my mom and then came down to the city where my dad and my brother were visiting. That was fun.

Hampton Inn

I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the Hampton Inn. Free breakfast, cookies at night, and today they upgraded me to a suite with a huge ass whirlpool in the middle of the bedroom. Seriously this suite is bigger than my apartment. This week looks like it's going to be a little calmer than last week mostly because the very highest up guys don't seem to be around.

This weekend did not feel long enough. Mostly because Friday was so long and I didn't sleep enough. I was just trying to do too much. I didn't relax enough. I just don't feel right yet. I'm going swimming tomorrow morning. 6 15. Gross.

new apartment

I realized that I haven't posted about the fact that I'm in a new place. I am! Me and Leora moved into a 1 BR convertible on 90th between Columbus and Central Park West. In the last month, we had the wall put in so that it became a 2 BR and we moved stuff in lots of stages. First a little of my stuff, then all of her stuff including 9 sections of a sectional couch (we got rid of 5 of those), and then my parents came down last weekend or the weekend before with a mini van full of furniture, including an 8 ft tall IKEA wardrobe to be my closet and dresser all in one.

It was pretty intense moving and putting together furniture, but it seriously looks awesome now. The living room is a good size and it looks so much like home. Couch, chair, bookshelf, end table, lamp, dining room table and chairs... it looks really good. My mom loves shopping at the salvation army and she picked up some great stuff for me. She had a week at work where she had to be there but she didn't have any appointments, and I swear she spent the whole time on the IKEA website. I'd get random messages ("Nicki, 20 by 30 rolling kitchen cart. Call your mother" ), but I couldn't have done it without her. I think leora and i are going to finish hanging pictures this weekend. My room is small but now that the furniture is in place it looks good too. It's really starting to feel like an honest to goodness, grown up home, that I look forward to getting back to. I'm still getting used to the kosher kitchen, but I love the space and I love having all of Leora's books here.

I was reading Mara's blog about the school v real world debate, and right now, my vote is strongly with the real world. Yes traveling is hard and I work a lot of hours, but I feel like my life has simplified. Some of that is bad- I hang out with much fewer of my friends and much less frequently. But some of it is really relaxing- I have very little to actively worry about. I have to do good work on the job; I have to make time to run; I have to stay as connected as I can to my friends and family. My efforts are so much more focused. It's especially nice compared to when I was looking for apartments.

But I remember school as a time of fractured attention and constantly being pulled in different directions. Always having something I should be doing or some where I should be, either socially or academically. Where I am right now, I have enough money that I don't have to worry about it and I have a finite and known set of demands from one sources (work) rather than a million different classes and projects. I feel more streamline. I wouldn't say I'm doing well on the keeping in touch with people thing, but it's a work in progress.

I have a feeling that from now on, I'm never going to have the time to post anything very often. I can say I'll post once a week or once every two weeks. But when you're on the road and with people all the time, it's hard to carve out time.

I mean, this past week, I went to Chicago last Sunday and got back yesterday. I had training there from Tuesday through Friday and I went early to hang out with Aron (who was in Chicago for a wedding) and meet some of his friends. And it was fun. But I was so ready to be back in my own little apartment in my own big city. The week before that I was outside Detroit at a different site for the same project, but with entirely different people. Is it bad that I'm really looking forward to being back in familiar North Carolina with the 3 guys I'm used to working with?

Training was intense. They take you through a sample case from proposal to completion in 3 days, so you learn stuff in workshops but then you have to immediately do it. I think it's a great model for a training, but they gave us no personal time at all. We went all day (8-6) and then straight to dinner or happy hour. I only ran once in 6 days. I also had regular work that I needed to be doing, so a couple nights I was up late trying to finish stuff.

Since I got home this weekend has been awesome, just what I needed. Aron and I had a rough couple weeks when I first started traveling. There was two or three weekends in a row where we wasted the little time we did have together with stupid fights. But I feel like we're starting to get the routine down. Last night I got in early (the greatest gift that the airlines can give to anyone), and actually had time to take a run before we went to our Friday night dance lesson. I've really been enjoying dance lessons. I suck at them. But it's just a fun way to spend an hour, and it turned into a great date with a long, conversation filled dinner and a slow walk home. Today I've done very little and it's awesome and tonight I get to see Leora. I haven't seen her in 2 weeks cause she's gone home for holidays the last 2 weekends.

So in the last 9 days, I have been pulled over 3 times. I wasn't driving any of those times. Each was with a different person. Before the week, I've never been pulled over or been in the car when the driver was pulled over. Apparently, I've suddenly become very bad luck.

1. My manager on the way to the airport last Thursday = 20 miles over, mandated court date
2. This random guy who drove me up to Wudi in a X4 BMW convertible = 40 miles over, got off with a "passing on the right violation"
3. Aron on the way up to Tanglewood = new york state doesn't tell you the fine amount

I enjoyed this weekend. I had so much fun going to governor's island. I love that place. And Tanglewood was great. Totally worth the drive. And it was so nice to stay over with Carol and David rather than drive back that night.

Oh but some guy was a total asshole. We were lying on a mat together during the concert (me and Aron) and we were talking between pieces and whispering to each other. So this guy turned around and told us to be quiet. So we did and it was fine. But THEN this guy came over during intermission and said "You two think you can keep it down during the second half" and we were like "yes of course" and THEN he says "or go get a hotel room" and walks off. What a jackass! And totally unnecessary. We were having fun and giggling, but we shut up after the first request.

Yeah I think the hardest part about travelling is the pressure it puts on the weekends. If I don't do what I need to do or if things aren't perfect with aron I don't get a chance to fix things until the following weekend. It's like the time I'm in North Carolina is a dead zone in which nothing good can happen. It's a state that can be neutral or negative but never positive. Nothing good happens during the week. Nothing to help my social life, friendships, or relationships. Just things that keep them in a holding pattern.