Employment

Maybe I'm crazy.

For six months I have had a miracle job: simply, I was paid full-time for working no-time, and I spent this no-time in my own apartment, in my underwear.
I had "won life's lottery," said one friend.

But then I decided to quit, taking a full-time job and all that usually entails: 40+ hours a week in a chair, 7-10 hours a week commuting to-and-from that chair, office politics, lunchroom gossip, bending the lines of business casual, excess coffee, "turning in early" on weeknights, using the word "oppression" flippantly, hiding a GMail window behind the corporate website window, ridiculous email forwards, exhausted happy hours, "how was your weekend?", making friends with the candy jar coworker, ashamedly sneaking stale twix from the vending machine, basing the day's morale on free breakfast food, and working.

So why did I quit? Well for one, I just can't bear to leave Chicago right now: a constant threat from my old employer. It came to the point where it was worth trading all my lottery winnings and executing the great experiment of "can I remember how to handle real life" to stay.