Now It Can Be Told

But I'm too tired to tell it properly. OK, I'll just come out with it: I have a new job! It's as associate art director for the Shambhala Sun magazine. I went for an interview last Monday, and there was a message waiting for me when I got home that I'd gotten it!

It's not quite the same job I applied for last year, but very similar. My friend Meg got that one, which was doing double duty for the Sun and their new, more broadly aimed offshoot, Mindful. Now it has turned into a position working just for Mindful, so the Sun part of the job became a new opening. That works out great for me, because I am actually much more interested in the content of the Sun than in Mindful. And plus, now Meg works there too!

I got to be a lot clearer this time around about why I wanted to work there, having had a year to kick myself over my unpreparedness in the previous interview. And I also got some hipper pants and shoes, the latter of which I'm convinced are what really got me the job.

So now I'm in the process of dismantling my freelance business. It's sad but also really exciting. I'm looking forward to getting out of the house every day and seeing real people. And it will be nice to have a regular paycheque, with health benefits and paid vacations. But mostly I'll be happy to be working on a publication that I actually enjoy reading, putting stuff into the world that I think lots of folks need and want to hear.

I start working there on the 22nd, and until then I'm working long hours trying to get all outstanding work done before other designers take over my clients' business. The clients are all super understanding about my leaving for my dream job, but they also suddenly need everything done that's been sitting dormant until now. Late nights and early mornings...

Tomorrow I'll be meeting Meg downtown for lunch, though, and afterwards she's going to show me some of the processes I'll need to know about. That will be my first real tour of the magazine's offices.

They occupy a floor of the Centennial building, which is coincidentally the same building my dad worked in when I was a kid in the seventies, on the top floor. It kind of looks like a smaller version of the building Bob Hartley's office was presumably in, as indicated by the camera panning up it before we saw Bob sitting at his desk on the old Bob Newhart Show. I used to go in with my dad sometimes when he had to get work done on the weekends. I would lean my head against the window and try not to freak out about how incredibly high up we were (probably about 12 stories, I think).

Or else I'd type hilarious messages about poop and my friends and my friends' poop into the keypunch machine and print them on cards full of numbers and rectangular holes, while my dad puttered around in a room full of wall-sized boxes and reel-to-reel tapes that he called a "computer." I have no idea what he was doing in there, but it involved giant paper constantly coming out of a very loud dot matrix printer.

Anyway, the elevators in that building still smell the same as they did then, I'm happy to report, and they even have the same square buttons with the Futura numbers like a Wes Anderson film. So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to calling the place home from nine to five very soon.