Bittersweet

...is the word I continually come back to.

While part of me is absolutely ready to hit the road and say goodbye to DMDC, I also feel like I didn't quite have enough time here.  This really comes down to lots of budding friendships that never fully flourished.  Given more time I feel like I could've carved out a solid niche here, but maybe that's always the case.  Life just gets bigger and bigger as you go, but that will happen no matter where I am.

At the office alone I've had friends here in all sorts of capacities: running buddies, lunch buddies, reading buddies, swing-by-and-interrupt-work-just-to-shoot-the-breeze buddies.  My immediate coworkers are great friends, too.  Sometimes our interactions don't ever extend beyond the office environment, but they don't really need to.  I can't even count the number of days that Kevan and I would have to schlepp around the warehouse, doing menial tasks.  But we made it fun.  Set up some speakers, rock out, and goof around.  And even though it's hard to distinguish one day from the next through all the drudgery, those days were really essential to getting by.

After much conversation with my new colleague (and eventual replacement), Ralph, I've come to appreciate how this office atmosphere still manages to let a lot of freedom and individuality squeeze through.  As he mentioned, this building is not dominated by the typical depersonalized corporate atmosphere.  He finds that the people are relatively care-free, but on top of that they tend to take an interest in other people's personal lives.  And it's never meddlesome, but rather out of concern.

We all kind of like each other around here.

My mother (where I get my preachy idealism from) always used to talk about the people in her previous lines of work that really made the job enjoyable.  I can remember her going through some rocky times in each job, but she seemed to find comfort in all of the people who were good to her.  I never really witnessed her having much of an outgoing social life (friends outside of work, etc), but she never expressed any remorse over this.  Even though it's sometimes difficult to forge deeper friendships in a work environment, it doesn't preclude all of your interactions from being genuine and satisfying.

Whatever complaint I might have had about the nine-to-five grind, I really must take this moment to appreciate all of the friends I've made here.