Like time travel

I'm listening to Black Metallic again (brought it to work on my 128MB pen memory). I just got to the really quiet part in the middle, and suddenly I had this sweet, warm feeling that I was back at the computer animation studio I was working at seven or eigtht years ago, in that bright room in the attic of the old house downtown... in my late 20s, after lunch at the pub, surrounded by the other artists, the comradery, the fellowship, the work we bitched about but found so interesting and challenging, the really poor pay (literally less than half of what I earn now)... and the feeling that Jody, my RubyOcelot, would be there online waiting to talk in the evening when I drove back out to the burbs where I was still living with my folks. Wow, what a nice feeling.

The weird thing is, most of the time, you think you hate the place you're in, the time of your life at the moment. And there was a lot to hate about that period. The pay sucked, I couldn't afford my own place, I had an awful commute every day, I weighed about 300 lbs. But I felt free. I liked the guys I worked with. We were part of something just a little bigger than ourselves. I had good friends to go to online when I got home. And the really neat thing is, even though there was so much I hated about my life then, I still knew that I was going to look back at that time as something special. And I was right. I do. :)

Of course, I thought I'd feel that way about the traditional studio I worked at before—and after!—that interlude. I don't. I hardly miss that place at all. I was saddened recently when I learned it closed in 2002... but mostly because it made me feel old.

Wow... just occurred to me. That was my first "real" job (part-time that was really full-time, though the layoffs were frequent). The tenth anniversary of my getting it just passed, right at the end of August. I wonder what day that was? I'm pretty sure I started on a Friday, and it would have been sometime in the 20s of the month... Let's see... The 26th. I couldn't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure that was the day. Well... there you go. Time travel, alright.