Holding pattern

In two more hours my sister will get here. We've spent the weekend doing and redoing the apartment so that we are now minus one office and plus one bedroom. Tomorrow morning, on her first day here, I will make my first drive to my new job.

This is a lot of change all at once. I'm going from a situation where I have a pornography of time and a dearth of money, freedom to indulge selfishly in anything measly writing fellowships can afford. In addition to writing a book, I have run thousands of miles, made calzones for the first time, and watched every episode of M*A*S*H. I have become greedy, a glutton for time to myself. I am always on top of the laundry.

From this I am moving to a situation of considerably greater amounts of money and frighteningly stingier time. I will have a desk at work but not at a desk at home. I feel greedy in a different way about the month ahead. A month with my sister before she starts law school and we never live in the same place again, with ambitious weekend plans. We're going to Vancouver, Mount Rainier, the rain forest, and convincing her that she likes Seattle. It's also the first month in a while where I'll have to try something really new. I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm wondering what will happen in six months when this contract expires and I'll either be permanent, on another contract, or doing something else. This feels like a resolution to the past year and also not a resolution: a holding pattern. But I know one thing going into it: there isn't going to be enough time.