cubicle rot

One of the things I've learned through the past few years of reading online journals is that it's a bad idea to talk about work on your blog.

But I figure that the vast majority of people at my company don't read this blog, so I'm free to talk about it openly. Right?

Really, this post isn't so much about my job itself as about the way that a 9-to-5 job can slowly kill your imagination.

I'm looking for advice here. I'd like to hear about how other "cubicle dwellers" manage to hang on to their sanity and their imagination in the workplace. This isn't an issue that I'm going to "solve" today, of course, but it's an area where I would really appreciate some fresh perspective.

So far in my career, my work as a graphic designer has presented a constant tension between two poles: interesting, challenging projects that paid poorly (or not at all), and "fat cat" projects that paid the bills. When I took this design job with the Very Large Multinational Corporation last year, it was a smart financial move. After a couple of bumpy years, I was delighted to have a job with bona fide health care, a 401(k), and a salary that would let me save a little.

But as with so many scenarios, there was a snake hiding in the garden. In this case, the snake was called Soul-Eating Boredom.

I could do this job in my sleep.

One of the issues with working at a giant corporation, of course, is that you are generally rewarded by honoring the many restraints the company puts on you. In a way, you're getting paid to be bored. You fill out your Periodic Self-Evaluation Forms (PSEFs) with rigorous care. You contribute to the annual United Way campaign with a smile. You learn what all the acronyms mean, and you use them correctly in sentences. Mediocrity is applauded. (So much that I sometimes find it crushing.)

All those limits that I carefully honor from 9-to-5 have started to leach into my 5-t0-9 life.

It makes me want to run away and join the circus. It makes me want to get a job driving a bus or planting trees or working as a trashy waitress at a trashy diner. (The dream of working at a trashy diner has been with me for years. Years!)

This is a hard place to acknowledge. I think I thought that by this point in my career, I'd be past the place where I felt like chucking everything in the nearest dumpster.

So. How would I start over? What is that work that I'm seeking? What is the job that will prevent me from losing that quiet little spark of creativity and imagination? Am I expecting too much from work? Maybe when you work in an office, a certain element of office rot is just to be expected.... right?

I don't know. Who ever knew that the thought of serving hash browns to deadbeats would one day sound kind of invigorating?

Lessons from the Past Three Weeks

About three weeks ago, I started doing a boot camp workout in the mornings. It's a six-week course, with four sessions a week. The workouts start at 6 am and last for an hour.

The past three weeks have involved lots of getting up early, sweating, Advil, and pain (I developed a fairly impressive case of shin splints early on – thank goodness it seems to be abating now).

I wanted to enroll because it sounded like a good way to get off my keister and do something with myself. If you work at a desk all day, like I do, there's probably a pretty big disconnect between the physical universe "out there" and all the little problems running around like drunk squirrels in your brain all day long. The disconnect was starting to make me a little crazy, and I wanted to push back against it.

Three weeks into it, I think it's one of the best things I've ever done.

I was ready for a change, and this boot camp is a change. It has forced me to make some real lifestyle adjustments – getting into bed by 10 pm, eating differently. It has also paid off in some satisfying ways, some of which I'm just now starting to witness.

Here are some of the lessons I've started to learn over the past three weeks.

• Doing physical stuff can actually be pretty fun, if for no other reason than the massive wave of good feeling you get when you're done. I love getting to my office in the morning knowing that I've already done something really good for myself.
• The drill sergeant is king. Having somebody tell me what to do when I get to the gym is invaluable. It's a vast improvement over my previous gym pattern of walking around aimlessly for a while, doing some random some sit-ups, taking a casual stroll on the treadmill, and calling it a day.
• The endorphin rush is a wonderful high. Maybe the people honking and cursing at traffic in the morning are the ones who skipped their workout!
• The food angle is probably even more important than the exercise. I have started to eat way, way less junk food now that I've begun to recognize how hard I have to work to burn all that crap off. Also, I want my body to run like a well-oiled machine. I can see now that Chips Ahoy and chocolate milk is not quality fuel.
• You are capable of a lot more than you realize. That is probably the biggest lesson I have begun to learn. I hope to explore this one some more during the second half of boot camp.

The exercise is all old-school stuff. There is no fancy equipment. We do sprints, squats, jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, lunges and suicides. We also play freeze tag on Fridays, when the coach feels like cutting us a bit of a break.

For me, there have been no Rocky-style victories. It's all been hard. This morning we were challenged to do some fairly ridiculous exercises, and I felt so weak that I almost started crying in the middle of it. Then I seriously contemplated getting my keys and leaving early (behold, The Power of the Crushed Spirit!).

And I am one of the worst people in the whole boot camp. I'm usually the last to cross the finish line during sprints, and I do things badly on a regular basis.

But I still keep doing it badly, and I figure that doing it badly while trying to improve beats the heck out of not doing it at all.

Mostly I've just learned that if I want to address the disconnect from the body and from the physical universe, no one is going to do it for me. I can think about it all day and wind up more frustrated than before. I am in charge of making the changes that I want to see in my life.

I just booked a massage for the last weekend of March, when boot camp ends. It will be a small personal reward for completing the workouts. The next boot camp season begins the first week in April. I think I'm going to sign up.