March was a long and weird month for me: I changed jobs, took a week off, took a 48-hour trip to Texas for a wedding, and wrote 10,000 words of a new project. Plus the weather was nuts.

Now here we are in April and it’s finally spring. The weather is still a little nuts, bouncing between temperatures in the 70s and the 40s this week, but I’ll take it.

Where I’m At

So like I said, I changed jobs in March.

I’ve been lucky, employment-wise, for a millennial. I’ve mostly had stable jobs, and I’ve mostly enjoyed them, and been able to stay at them for fairly long amounts of time. I was at the job I just left for four and a half years; the job before that, I was at for fourteen years. (Well, I was at the company for that long, with a variety of different roles in that time.) I’m someone who craves stability, so this has been great, but that also makes leaving a job I still mostly like fairly fraught.

It also means I’ve had some weird side effects of capitalism on my mind. All of my roles have involved working on various websites. That means that for that long-term, fourteen-year job, I worked on some of the same websites for fourteen years. Then one day I switched jobs and… poof, I no longer have any stake in them. Emotional investment? Sure. But actual investment? Nope. Building something for over a decade and then fully stepping away with nothing to show for it but a resume is strange, but hey, that’s capitalism. You build stuff you don’t own.

Another fraught part is the lost relationships. You spend forty hours a week working with people — that’s probably more time than you spend with anyone else except whoever you happen to live with. Even if you aren’t socializing with coworkers after hours (which, as someone who’s fully remote, I haven’t done since before the pandemic), you still know each other’s lives. You get it in bits and pieces while you’re waiting for meetings to start, or perusing slack channels: the coworker who just adopted a puppy, the coworker who’s going on a family ski vacation, the coworker who’s taking her kids on college tours this fall. The coworker going out on parental leave, or scheduling time for a honeymoon, or who just had a hilariously awful travel experience.

Even for an introvert like me: you know the people you spend time with. And then one day, you don’t spend time with them anymore.

That sounds drastic. It’s not like anyone is murdered in the process. People can and do stay in touch, especially with social media to help. But instead of talking daily, it’s an instagram heart and an occasional text. You don’t know which college your coworker’s kid ended up at; you don’t know where they went for their honeymoon. It’s weird.

Of course, there are new people, new challenges, new projects and products to get invested in. That’s where I am now — learning the ropes at a new and very different job could also be a whole newsletter’s worth of musings. I’m just over two weeks in, I’ve learned a ton, and I’m really enjoying my new role…

But wow, it sure is strange to realize just how much of my life really does revolve around the forty hours a week I spend at work, even as I try to make sure I have a creative, fulfilling life outside of that.

A Thing I Made

If you are looking at that and thinking it’s not very good, congrats! You are correct!

This mug was an experiment with slab building using a template. I messed it up pretty badly. It basically collapsed down on itself, slumping inward and to the side (you can see that most in the first pic). To be honest, I should have scrapped it when I made it… but I didn’t. Then when it was leather hard and I tried to put finishing touches on it, I should have smushed it and recycled the clay… but I didn’t. I definitely shouldn’t have put it in the kiln, since I knew it was a lost cause, and once clay has been fired it can no longer be reclaimed and reused… but I did.

So, left with a lopsided, squished, ugly mug, I doubled down. Even something terrible can have a purpose. I made it with a lovely speckled brown clay, which my studio has just started using, and we didn’t have many test tiles of. I slathered my terrible mug with six different glazes, just so everyone can see how these paint-on glazes look with the speckles and how well they show over an underglaze (that’s the messy black lettering and stripes).

Honestly, most of the colors look pretty nice, so it’s a good reference to keep around! It’s also a reminder to me that I really don’t have to be precious about what I make. It’s okay to toss something bad. Being able to reclaim clay from collapsed pots and failed experiments is one of my favorite things about pottery, and it’s what I should have done here. But at least this little experiment ended up useful.

Something I’m Enjoying

Last weekend, my sister and I went to see Project Hail Mary, and oh boy, it was good! Do you like stories about hope and friendship? Do you like space? How about a story about how friendship can make you brave enough to save the whole world, in space? It is a funny, sweet, optimistic story that is deeply earnest and also still an exciting action movie. I would die for Rocky.

That’s all for now! Enjoy spring!