My new job

The bookcase of great nerdiness and awe

I love my new job, but I have to wear pants.

It’s not that I’m particularly averse to wearing pants, you see, but when you work as a freelancer from home, as I have for the last 7 years, there’s a lot of freedom going on. Some of it involves the luxury of the lack of leg wear. When you get a job, the fact is, they just prefer you wear pants. They just do.

But there’s more than that. You start to get those niggling feelings about other things you took for granted because you never left the house. And you begin to worry.

Now I worry about things I never used to. Like my eyebrows. I used to trim those with a razor (and hey; it was all right if you lopped off a little more than you meant to because who’d see that?). Or my teeth and whatever may have deposited itself there from lunch. Or pants, especially since mine were typically yoga pants, typically baggy, and typically optional. My socks didn’t have to match, because I rarely wore any. And brushing my hair was on an as-needed basis (leg hair, I mean. Hey, I have standards).

I was a verifiable girl beast. A she-ra.

Now I have transitioned into an awkward girlie girl who worries about whether my lipstick is smudged, whether I said something ridiculous to my coworkers, or whether there are too many zombie-esque items in my cube. I worry about wearing tights or no tights, getting makeup on my shirt, spilling soup on my shirt, spilling my coffee on my shirt, and forgetting to put a bra on under in my shirt.

I’ve purchased more bento boxes than a girl probably needs, have become obsessed with sashimi, and I now own items for a cubicle I never thought I’d own, like a small, happy, color-changing USB reindeer. I’ve become sassy, fussy, corporate, quirky, and sort of adorable in a totally disproportionately dysfunctional way. And I have to wear pants.

So long as I don’t have to start worrying about nose hair, how to program a voice mail message into my phone, or don’t slip and kill myself when the ground turns slick, I think I might just be all right. In the mean time, and until I get the hang of this thing, I likely put the ‘rear’ in ‘career’; but hey; at least it’s in pants.