Okay, so I was carving my jack o'lanterns this year while watching the latest two episodes of "Dexter" that I'd TiVo'd. (And drinking wine, even though combining alcohol with sharp knives and slippery pumpkin guts can possibly put the "me" in "eMErgency room", but that's neither here nor there.) And on the TV Dexter's doing the usual schtick of "I'm emotionally detached and don't understand how humans relate to each other, and that somehow gives me penetrating insight into the human condition". This led me to wonder what Dexter would think of jack o'lantern designs, specifically MY designs, which led me to think about my last few jack o'lanterns. And I noticed an odd progression. Stay with me here, this may be a little strange...

2007 ([link]) "Swallowed by the Beast"
2008 ([link]) "Fleeing in Terror"
2009 ([link]) "Happily Oblivious of the Danger"

Let's see where I was each time I did a carving:

2007: More than a year into a job that I had come to hate, passionately. Two months before Halloween my manager had (wisely) decided to leave the company and move to the other side of the country, and my superiors gave her duties to me. "Hey, I don't know about this," I said, "I'm not sure I can handle everything she was doing". "Oh don't worry", they said, "You're perfectly qualified; we're sure you'll do fine." Ha ha. Turns out, I wasn't qualified, I was there. The company was growing by leaps and bounds, they were chronically understaffed, and they simply moved the one person who'd had a little training into my former managers job. I couldn't handle it. Too much, too fast, so much to coordinate and WAY too many phone calls to make. I was miserable, I made everyone around me miserable, and I felt like I'd been thrown overboard. Or eaten alive.

2008: Five months into a new job. MUCH better this time. Good people, low stress, and I was being paid more per hour than I was at the previous full-time job. However, I'd been FIRED from my previous full-time job, and I think I spent most of the next year trying not to think about how rotten it was to be fired, no matter how much I'd hated the job in the first place. I did the best I could at my new job, trying to prove I wasn't the horrible employee I must have been previously, and counted the weeks since the situation had ended, trying to put as much distance as I could from the whole thing. Running for my life, basically.

2009: Same job, but the recession has hit my company just like it's hit so many others. We've been bought by an even BIGGER company, and we're all waiting to see how many people are going to be let go. I just found out that the higher-ups will notify everyone about their job status by mid-November, so it's very possible that I'll be unemployed by Christmas. And yet? I'm happy. I go into work and enter bits of information into the database for eight hours at a time, and the lack of stress feels like stepping out of a sauna into cool air. The possibility of losing my job is still hanging over me, but I'm having a hard time getting upset about it. In other words, I seem to be blissfully unaware.

So what does all this mean? Dunno. Maybe if I'd paid attention to what my jack o'lantern ideas were telling me, I could have done...something? Left the job I hated. Stopped worrying about the past. Right now I've put in a call to my staffing agency and updated my resume, but I can't believe I should start running away before I even know if the monster behind me is going to bite. I did that once, back in 2006, and because of that I left a sometimes-annoying job for one that was pure hell. Not doing that again, no way. Monster or not, I'm still smiling. And if next year I carve a jack o'lantern being squished under a rock or swimming in a pile of money, well I'll deal with that then.

And also? Those magic-eraser cleaning pads work GREAT for getting the pen marks off your pumpkin after carving. Just thought I'd pass that one along.