Finding 35

1. The Night Before

        Never thought I would find my mind wandering in these places at this time in my life. Here I am lying in bed, alone. I’m 34.  I’m not married and have no significant other.  It is Monday night, November 28, 2005, and I have a meeting tomorrow morning at 11:00am. There is a good chance–sort of 50-50–that I will be downsized.

Wow. What would I do if I got the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket of layoff packages at the hearty old age of thirty-five? And why is this sort of stressing me out? I have gone through four or five of these downsizings over the past twelve years with Kodak, but this one feels different. I’ve never lost sleep over these meetings before. Since I can’t fall asleep, I have decided to make a list of the things I would do if I had the time.

I have this notebook that I bought at this fancy paper store a few months ago.  The notebook isn’t fancy it’s just a notebook. The store was fancy. It has a hard cover and is held together with a spiral coil on the top. The cover is black with some sort of Greek or Roman motif on the front. On the first page I title it:

                                                                Allan’s New Notebook

                                                                

I routinely buy a little notebook when an old one fills up; it’s a place to write thoughts, ideas, grocery lists, and phone numbers and other things. I have noticed that after a while the little notebooks record a random passage of thoughts, sort of like a diary of your state of mind. Messy, organized, sometime slanted, and I’m not talking about penmanship. Sometimes notebooks get lost or misplaced, and they somehow turn up later. Sometimes they fill up and occasionally they lose a page or two. I decide to write chapters titles instead of a to-do list as I have a feeling that tomorrow will be a life-changing day. It is like one of those scenes in the movies where you have this vision or voice in your head and some older wiser person says to you, ‘young grasshopper, it is now time for you to leave the nest.  Go forth and make your future’. 

Ok, so I don’t think grasshoppers have nests, I don’t know but I do know they have sticky feet and when they land they sort of smack into you and cling to your clothes. Maybe these last twelve years were sort of like that–I smacked myself into this job and got stuck in it. Do you remember what it was like trying to remove a grasshopper that was stuck on you? I was always afraid of squishing them between my fingers, as if the grasshopper didn’t want to be didn’t want to let go, it didn’t want to be free. Do I feel like that about this company, about this job?  Am I going to get squished? Or will I be set free?

I get back to writing my chapters.

Places I’d like to visit

                              Foulis Castle-Scotland

                              Hot water springs-Iceland

                              Warm beach with great sunsets

                              Provence

                              A seaside town in Italy

If I had a million dollars I’d …

                              Buy a De Lorean and make it an electric car

                              Build a garden maze

                              Buy all my friends big TV’s and great walking shoes