Archive | May, 2009

Office culture for the self-employed

22 May

Next week contains my last day working a traditional day job. After much hemming and hawing and budget reviewing with my husband, I resigned from my job in order to focus on my freelancing full time. I’m nervous, but mostly very excited. I feel like it’s finally the best time and things have been going well so far.

After so many years working in an office, the prospect of being self-employed is sort of a strange one for me. I’m typically a pretty reserved person anyway, so I look forward to cultivating all kinds of strange tics and habits after so many hours alone all day. However, I have realized I can still replicate the office environment, which I will do in the following ways:

  1. I will finish a pot of coffee in the morning and not make a new one. In the afternoon, I will go for a cup of coffee, find the pot empty and make a new pot with a lot of banging and huffing, cursing that jerk who took the last cup.
  2. I will construct a water cooler out of scrap paper and envelopes and lean against it, gossiping to myself about myself.
  3. I will prank myself every Tuesday. I think my first prank will be to cover my desk, chair, laptop, pens and file folders with cling film. I can’t wait to see the look on my face!
  4. I will explode my lunch in the microwave and not clean it up, then send myself a passive-aggressive email titled, “Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here!”

It should be fun!

Jude the Melodramatic

12 May

Robertson Davies is my favourite author, but Thomas Hardy is probably in the top three. Because of this, I was really excited to watch the 1971 adaptation of Jude the Obscure. I loved the 2003 adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge (my favourite Hardy novel), so I guess my hopes were high.

jude01

It’s been a while since I read the book – four or five years. My memories of its details are foggy, but there were certain things that I took away from it. The mood of the book seemed pervasively dark to me, full of deferred hope and promise.

jude02

To me, Jude was constantly trying to chart his own course through life and getting beat down, but always kind of resigned to the fact that it was happening. And I always got the impression that Sue was fairly level-headed. She knew what she didn’t want out of life and, while she sometimes got confused, she seemed to be fairly rational.

jude03

For these reasons, it was almost depressing to me how this adaptation turned out. I think it was a television miniseries, as it came in two disks with several parts on each. I mention this because I hope it will somehow explain how melodramatic it was. This overly emotional Jude was certainly not the Jude I remember from the novel. I don’t remember him flying off the handle every single time he spoke with Sue. He’s up, he’s down. He’s up, he’s down. Sue wasn’t much better either.

jude04

These photos don’t quite do it justice. He freaked out so constantly that I couldn’t even finish watching.

Sorry, Jude. I know this is just a movie, but I think our relationship might now be too awkward to carry on.