Onward and upward

Mood: apprehensive
Music: "Lorelei" by Styx was the last song in my head

It's an interesting time of year, September. Things are starting, things are ending, the short is getting colder, and a general mindset shift occurs. A lot has happened in the past month; namely, lots of responsibilities. I start this entry from a train platform on my way home. It's late, dark, and cold, but I don't feel as bad as I should be.

I somehow found myself a member of the Board of Directors of my chorus as the Treasurer. I was asked, out of the blue, and I took the position with little thought. I have much to learn yet, but it's already made an impression on me, and possibly on my career. (More on that next.) Tomorrow I'm supposed to help compile financial data for some grant applications. I don't exactly know what I'm doing yet, but I hope it helps.

I had an interview last Friday. The position at hand: one of three open slots for regional IT store support. I would be responsible for up to three stores' technological needs: PCs, networks, registers, scales, and managing one person per store. And on-call hours. Quite a lot of responsibility, but an almost double pay raise. (But it wasn't much to begin with anyway, and it still isn't much now, relatively speaking.) And I shouldn't have any trouble getting work afterwards when I move on.

I had only three days to prepare. Serendipitously I scheduled a mock interview for two days before the real one, which helped me out a lot. When I told all my coworkers that I was applying to move up, everyone was very encouraging and supportive, which helped my confidence a lot as well. I thought I did alright in the actual interview, but you can never tell. I won't know for sure until Monday.

I bought a MacBook Pro off of some dude from Craigslist. The price was unbelievably low ($380), so I immediately suspected some sort of catch. And there were two: no install disks, and applications quit randomly. I'm not even sure the programs on it (Adobe CS, Logic Pro, MS Office, and the operating system, for that matter) are legal. I'm going to have to spend some quality time (and money) wiping the hard drive clean and learning the quirks of OS X, but I figured that it was high time I learned to do it anyway, since I will need it in the future for my career.

So there's a whole lot on my plate right now, and even more if the interview went right. For now, though, I just need to get to bed fairly soon. I'm now on a train headed to Penn Station, and looking at a two hour layover at the Port Authority. At 1am on a Saturday night. Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, because I've done this exact thing before. Groan. Here we go, another long night in the city.