I hung out with Ben and Nora again last night (at Ol' Mex); it was the last time I'll see the latter for months, at least.

I have to admit that I'm a little jealous of Nora, who seems to have not only the freetime, but also the motivation to learn some new things in France: "mandolin" was the correct guess for the first and almost certainly only time in my life yesterday.

(Once again I'm drawn back to the thought of life-as-RPG: what a luxury it is to be able to improve oneself without having to go kill a bunch of vampires!)

I'm coming up on the one-year anniversary of my employment as a proofreader, this Tuesday. When people ask me how long I plan to stay or what it's like, or anything at all about my job, really, I tend to give a rambling, confused answer.

My responsibilities have changed a bit since I was hired on permanently this summer, but there's always been a shifting balance between proofreading (occasionally for spelling and grammar, but more often for proper layout, font, color, etc.) and straight-up quality assurance (e.g. making sure that the websites work, and that any fields that the customer fills in show up on the product). Sometimes when I have nothing else to do, my responsibilities range even further afield, to internal procedural or technical stuff.

I like the job's focus on skepticism and attentiveness — and, also important: I like my wages and benefits and even my coworkers — but while my fundamental skills (and let's face it: personality) are well-suited to this position, my head is full of information about English, editing, and writing that I rarely have the opportunity to use.

And so I don't know how long I'll stay. I do like this job, and I'm good at it, but at some point I'm going to have to decide between being comfortable and taking a chance at something more my style. I have no idea when that will be (presumably after more of my debt is paid off, at the very least), or where I'll go, or even what I'll do, but, as I assume is the case for many people my age, I'm worried about getting "stuck."

In the meantime, and for the moment it's all meantime, it's, if not downright foolish, then at the very least unnecessary to live every aspect of my life that I care about through my job.

I think I've been doing fairly well, for the most part resisting the urge to shut off my brain and decompress all night away from everybody, but during the winter it's a bit harder to fill in life's nooks and crannies in a satisfying way.