Reading: Middlemarch and Daughter of Fortune

Listening: How Green Was My Valley. When I do walk to work, which I tell myself I'm going to do tomorrow.

Watching: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season three. Also "Mary of Scotland."

Moving: Running around like a decapitated fowl.

24 July 2002: No more Ms. Nice

Monday night we had a combined staff party--Denver and D.C. offices--in the new building. It's a crazy week--the Big Top is in Denver this year--and Tex actually called me at home. I noticed the number on the caller id on my way out the door to the new building (I drove) where the party would be and figured I would call him from there. So I got there and turned on my phone and guess what. Six miles from downtown and no phone service. It is the middle of nowhere. We get phone service in Rocky Mountain National Park, the top of Summit County, from suburbs fifteen miles south and north of Denver. The new site is, I say, in a vortex of nothingness. Someone or other thought it was a utopia enough to move us there--someone who didn't know the Latin meaning, obviously.

I'm really not pleased.

Moving from downtown to the 'burbs saves Dot Org money by putting that expense on the employees. Rumor has it that the Eco-Pass program will be discontinued, because of course we'll all be driving, to the 'burbs where real estate is cheaper--for Dot Org, not for its employees. There will be nowhere to go out for lunch. There is a small library branch a much longer walk away. There is no art museum, post office, bank, bookstore, used bookstore, capitol. No hustle and bustle, no vagrants, no people-watching at lunch. All the disadvantages of the country without any advantages of the city: in a word, suburbia.

And I don't know. I have a 35-hour week, zero stress, work that matters (we're on C-Span and NPR and the network news often, Al Gore is addressing one half the group on Friday, and what could be more meaningful than being mentioned on "The West Wing"?), a great boss and coworkers, and four weeks of vacation a year. I have no career, of course, but a career would require ambition and entail stress, both of which I avoid.

There are politics and schmolitics and much more involved griping about the move, but overall it's making me think about What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, and that's what I took this job to avoid. It's what I spend my life avoiding.

What I told my sister about the stupid new hick place is that, like Connecticut, it has no cell phone coverage or restaurants, but unlike Connecticut, there are no trees or water to make up for those lacks. It sucks entirely.