Living and working in hellholes and paradise.

There's a saying about careers, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." I've got to add, "Work where you love, and every day is a vacation."

I've been on a camping trip the past week or so, followed by a few days of tooling around the city. And I loved them both.
Lucky lucky me, I work in a field where I can get a job nearly wherever the hell I want. I'm going to push to get my internship done out there, get my foot in the door for a long-term position.

I'm not one of those people who says that if you hate your job, you should just quit-- because I've had people say that to me (before my current job) and it's infuriating. While it's nice for a person to assume you have the requisite skills, it's not exactly sympathetic-- especially in the current economy and when one lacks things such as savings to fall back on.

But, I interviewed a career advisor the other day, and he told me what he says to get people to pay attention: If you work 40 years with two weeks vacation per year, that is 2,000 Mondays you will have to get up and go to work, whether you want to or not. His point is to be careful picking your major and make sure you go into something you actually like; my point is that it baffles me when someone comes home and bitches about work all day. Find something you enjoy about it, try to do something about it, pick up an other-field-you're-interested-in-for-dummies book-- don't resign yourself to another 1,950 Mondays of hating your life.

(The difference is that the unsympathetic fuckwads think you should turn in your two week's notice right now, damn the consequences, while I think you should start poking your other options.)


By the same tack, don't live somewhere you hate. Again, don't up and move with no savings or prospects, but don't resign yourself to waking up somewhere that's too hot, too cold, too liberal, too conservative, too quiet, too loud, too whatever. Right now? I like where I live, for the most part. It's reasonably liberal, has decent events, has a lot of hole-in-the-wall restaurants where you can get a pile of food for five bucks if you aren't afraid of trying something new. (How to tell your ethnic restaurant is serving authentic food: the kitchen staff the servers the owners the customers are the claimed ethnicity.) It does, however, spend six months of the year making me bitch about "What sort of crazy person lives here voluntarily?" as I languish in front of a fan or chip ice off my windshield. And I've found a place that has the attitude, events, food, and weather that I want. So I'm making my plans.

Upshot: If where you live or work makes you hate your life, then a change of venue is probably worth the effort, even if it's not advisable to move/quit right this second. Look around.