Nothing's wrong with a little back-breaking labor …
… as my grandfather used to say. And, since he'd worked out a deal with his brother to put them both through college by working as a miner, he had some perspective.

My shoulders are aching, my back is strained, my legs are throbbing, and, were this a cartoon, my feet would actually be on fire. But something funny happened on the way to the paycheck -- I'm having a really good time. By the end of the day yesterday, I was feeling a strange euphoria -- in fact, I was itching to go out dancing. That makes sense, though, as the whole day had been given over to something close enough to dancing to whet my appetite -- swishing legs, brushing bodies as two people spin past another, never breaking stride, a touch on the back, an implication of flesh, a knowing smile and as much charm as one can muster under pressure, not to mention my employer's strange but pleasant obsession with piping Bee-Gees music.

These are all motions that I enjoy but they also lend themselves to another reason why I'm enjoying myself -- I'm good at them. I was good yesterday -- not perfect, but far better than anyone on their fourth day has a right to be. The average five-minute period would see me work three or four physical improbabilities, and everyone I worked closely with commented on how well I was doing, so quickly. Add to that the strange charm of having a boss who doesn't assume the best way to run a business is to hope for the failure of the employes, and I'm having a good time.

Of course, if I were offered the Columbia job or something similar, I would take it as soon as I'd stopped shrieking like a little girl, and a large part of this enjoyment is the novelty. I've been through this before. When I came home after graduating college, I was at the end of a very frayed rope. My relationship was in serious trouble, I'd been getting about a third of the sleep I should have, I was in the worst shape of my life, and my average bed-time was 6:30 a.m., leaving it not uncommon for me to spend a day without any sun.

I was looking for any job to keep me busy while I wrote freelance articles for the local paper and prepared to move to New Orleans, as was the to-be-unrealized plan. A friend of mine from high school hooked me up with a job doing maintenance work at the Comfort Inn. It was a complete anathema to me -- nine hours a day in the summer sun, working with power tools and fixing things whether they needed it or not -- and I loved it. I reveled in a job where the benefits were unlimited access to the soda machine, the ability to make "Ryan: Porn Star" name-tags when no one was looking, and taking out flower beds with a power washer on a setting that would (and did) tear up asphault. The job only lasted three days before I got one of those damned professions, but I left behind a varnished deck (dubbed the "Brenizer Memorial Deck"), a completely unvarnished rest of the hotel, countless empty soda bottles, a badly abused name-tag maker and the makings of a tan. I loved it.

And so I go back into work, feeling at ease, knowing that even if I fuck up, which I will, that I will fuck up with authority, and am eager to see how this translates into the rest of life and the career progression that I am still decidedly in.

Either the job or the increased level of exercise is making me break out like a deep-fried Comic Book Guy, though. Hurm. The skin will adjust.