In three weeks, I'm leaving my clinic job and I won't be working as a nurse. I've done this before—only had RN jobs for 6 of the last 8 years—so who knows, but this feels a little more final. Or at least, now I feel like if I do this again it'll be just because it's a thing I can do, and not because I have something to prove or because I think it'll become great if I just try harder. I've been trying harder ever since I moved out west, and just about everything else got better in the meantime, but this didn't.

So it's back to being an artsy-techie-dilettante, with the techie part being the only one that corresponds to any kind of jobs for now. It's something I have a real love-hate thing with—I just really liked to play with computers as a kid, now they've taken over the world, and the industry is closely entangled with many things that are dumb about how we live now—but that's true of health care too, and a good auto mechanic is a good thing to be (a good guillotine repairman, not so much). I'll miss the people for sure, but most of the time the work and the craziness kept me from dealing with people as people much. And having to always react to one thing after another tends to make me even more passive and lazy and antisocial after I get home, which gets in the way of a lot of things, not just art.

Anyway, first I'm getting ready to go to Burning Man. First time there, kind of scared, curious. I'm glad my sweetie will be there. I don't expect it to change my life, but it seems appropriate to do it right before this other change, just to remind me in a really blatant way that there are different places to be.