kartooner

To all of you who have emailed me or sent a mes­sage via the more tra­di­tional and yet slug­gish snail mail, thank you and yes, I am alive and breath­ing. Let me backpedal about two (or three) weeks ago to fur­ther explain why the dust gath­ered here and god will­ing has “finally” settled.

Around the begin­ning of Decem­ber I was regret­fully let go from my pre­vi­ous posi­tion as a Graphics/Web Designer after three years of a solid work ethic. The rea­son for my pre­vi­ous employer’s deci­sion in let­ting me go had to do with “con­flict of inter­est” and more specif­i­cally the fact I would occas­sion­ally free­lance on the side, some­thing that they were well informed of pre­vi­ously but I always felt it would come back to haunt me and it did.

All said and done, words were spo­ken and a feel­ing of relief was felt on both ends and less than 20 min­utes after being ush­ered into a small meet­ing room I was silently putting my cubi­cle toys into a card­board box, ready for a new adventure.

Here I am, almost three weeks later, work­ing two jobs and enjoy­ing life with a fresh per­spec­tive on the path ahead of me. By day I’m a free­lance designer, cur­rently employed with a 3-month con­tract job on my plate and when the morn­ing sun meets mid­day I’m a “late night envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer” with a local school dis­trict, which really means a second-shift “cleaner” or “janitor”.

It’s truly one of the more inter­est­ing employ­ment dynam­ics I’ve ever expe­ri­enced, con­sid­er­ing that dur­ing the first part of the day I’m design­ing some truly unique and yet chal­leng­ing web projects and when the after­noon rolls around I’m load­ing a jan­i­to­r­ial cart with clean­ing sup­plies and prep­ping myself for rou­tine work that at times gives me that sat­is­fy­ing feel­ing that I’ve accom­plished some­thing. Maybe I’m loopy, but I’m extremely con­tent right now, even if I’m work­ing close to 70 hours a week, on top of doing the young, mar­ried, daddy thing.

Life couldn’t be better.