The new gig at the same company started yesterday. I’m in training now, which has periods of abject boredom that drive me to near panic. That happened a lot during the first rounds of training last year. I blacked out huge portions of it. But at that time I did not have ready or reliable access to anxiety meds or BP pills. Today I do and I at least arrive for work feeling calm and focused. There is a certain quality of training that fuels a rising volcano of anxiety in me. I have to stand up, at the very least, which sometimes seems contextually incongruous. I experience this kind of anxiety sometimes on the subway, too. There is a heaviness of procedure, of movement. The deliberate act of getting from point A to point B, from point 37 to point 83. There is a methodology and a studied science to these seemingly mundane tasks. I don’t usually think about the heaviness of these chores, the thankless, soulless, bottomless quality of achieving an assigned task or a chosen goal. In some ways we are always climbing, always scaling an impossible surface to an unimaginable height or depth. We can never achieve everything because there will never be enough time.

I had trouble producing some videos last night. Very tiresome and irksome. You spend money on expensive shit and it just doesn’t fucking work. I’ve slowed on the videos not because I don’t record them but because the software to put it all together gets in the way. Grumble grumble grumble.

I did not realize until yesterday that this training period lasts a full month. I’m back to “nesting” and being allowed to make mistakes, although mistakes are just about impossible to get through in this new realm. Not that I am prone to mistakes, mind you. But I’m back to the safety net I was in for the first many months here. Do I ever deserve this? Have I earned this role, which is so much less stressful, simply because I asked for it? You know what else? I asked for it by accident. I pointed at some mistake in one of our systems and said “I’d like to be able to fix that.” This was interpreted as me saying I wanted to move to the division that was responsible for the mistake. I had no idea what I was suggesting but the boss lady freaked out on me.

I sat net to a statuesque beauty on the train today. Bengali, I suspect, but not sure. There is a Bengali cluster in the area where she would have boarded. Her nails were painted multiple colors. Her lipstick was perfect. She wore many rings and a gold-colored necklace. She barely moved but exuded a presence of self-awareness. On a 2-seat portion she took the outer seat. As the train crowded it became more and more difficult for anyone to get to the inner seat. In fact, that seat was left empty. I’ve long considered it a sign of douchery when someone does this. For no reason they take an outer seat, making it awkward for someone to ask them to get out of the way. So my Bengali beauty is probably a bore.

I’ve not seen my original subway fascination for months. She barely updates her websites anymore. One posting suggests she has moved on but from what is unclear. Her routine changed. She is someone I’ll check in on in a year and find that everything has gone vanilla.

What is there to say? I’m feeling successful in some way, but it is undefinable. Here I am in Lower Manhattan working at a concern I have admired from afar for as long as it existed. Always wanted to be a part of it and here I am, a part of it. I don’t want to fail up this time.

Speaking of this, I had a long conversation with someone here last week. She asked where I had worked before being here. I kind of lit up, but in an embarrassed way. I remain firm on not wanting anyone here to know what I’d been doing the past 20 years. So it was not exactly a lie when I said my last employer was Time-Warner, even if that ended almost exactly 20 years before starting this job. In between TWX and here I did a lot of cool shit, made headlines, charmed millions, and basically went broke doing it. But no one here had asked any such question like that before. No one really seemed to care. I have to go.