So, I started my new job a week ago Monday. My first day I had to be in at 8am. I did not like this. I now work 9-6 rather than 8-5, and this is much, much better.

I haven’t really tested the waters yet on the whole web-browsing thing, so I’m browsing almost exclusively via lynx these days. You have no idea how fast the web is until you go text-only. Yeah, so I miss the pretty pictures. I can look up the pretty pictures when I get home if I want to. In the meantime, I’m really enjoying having the interwebs transformed for me like this. I remember when lynx was practically all we had, when Mosaic was out and lynx was out and we had more dumb VTY terminals on campus than machines with a GUI and so I knew lynx better than I did Mosaic (and at the time I thought the web was fancy but, you know, gopher had a lot going for it). Now, well, of course now the web is a different beast entirely but, on the other hand, so is lynx. Both are capable of much more. Now I look at it with 1994′s eyes and I think, wow… cool for the first time in a long time.

My new job, I have to say, is pretty rad. I am given to understand that right now it’s unusually slow but they could ramp things up by 50%, maybe 100%, and it would beat eight kinds of hell out of my last job. There, everyone ran around with their head on fire all the time. I didn’t, because I’m just not like that, but it was grating to be fairly sedate and surrounded on all sides by screaming chaos. Here everyone is much more relaxed. The downsides are that I’m working in a building where I worked once before, sitting one row forward of where I used to sit, for a different tiny-but-promising company. The last time I worked in this room the company went down in flames. (LastJob was, in all honesty, the first place I’d ever worked that didn’t completely collapse within a couple of years of hiring me, though they did get bought out.) I have higher hopes for this place than the last company to occupy these storied halls; or, at least, I’ve got my fingers crossed harder this time.

Oh well. We’ll see how it goes. Here it is, the day before Yule, a night I’m going to spend celebrating the rebirth of the god of the hunt and the harvest and I’m sitting here thinking about years past, times when one employer or another felt the weight of the axe on the back of their collective neck, thinking what next year will hold, what ties have I severed and which ones I managed to retain. LastJob seems to be offering me a payout on my pension plan. I have paperwork to do on my new benefits for my new company. I need to roll over my 401(k). Endings are beginnings and other happy hippie shit. One job, like any person or thing, had to die to make way for another, and maybe the new one is fresh and fun and exciting and excited, and maybe it isn’t, but in the fullness of time it, too, will fall. I just hope that, as with so many falls before this one, I manage not to go with it.

In completely unrelated matters, I watched Brick with The Boyf on Monday night and loved it. Watch it, if you haven’t. It’s a noir detective story set in a modern-day suburban high school. Last night I watched the RiffTrax version of The Matrix. Hilarious, just utterly hilarious. It is so good to see MST3K alumni doing their thing and having fun doing it.