Today is the first day of my new job. I am so excited. I feel like -- somehow -- it's my first real job out of college. You know, that expression people use: "my first real job out of college."

So what have I been doing for the past twenty-plus years? Good question. Well, let's see, there were several years of unstructured adventure, including that handmade jewelry business that involved street vending and town festivals. And college student unions. And beloved Jazz Fest in dear, magical New Orleans. Also those years at the ashram. Somewhere in there was the performance art, which, of course, didn't make any dime. Then production work in Los Angeles, which devolved into craft services (running the food table) on C movies. Still more fun then the office temping, which spanned a couple of decades, on and off. Product demonstrations in L.A. led to supermarket food sampling in Madison, Wisc., a part-time profession that has become increasingly low-status over time. Delivering The Onion and the Add Sheet was a lot of fun, and helped Don and me get to know Madison very quickly. Temping led to a full-time job working in the office of the Wisconsin Association of Life Underwriters, but how long could something with a name like that possibly last for a person like me? The work was fun and challenging for a while, but after I reorganized the place and gave all the printed material a facelift, it got old. Worst, though, was the micromanaging, fear-driven boss who seemed to be made nervous by my presence. I was smarter than she was, and she knew it -- but she made triple or more the money I did, and I think she didn't know what to do with that information.  She was the first of the micromanagers. Next came the string of miraculously wonderful opportunities at small, growing companies that needed a smart person to help them out at the ground floor -- Internet service provider, regional publishing company, massage school. Each devolved into a nightmare of micromanagement, a disempowering, humiliating agony. Somehow, none of these places felt like "a real place" in some sense. Somehow like they were all playing at being a business.

Oh, yeah, and then there is cab driving. And involvement with worker cooperatives. A whole 'nother story.

Somewhere along this line, I picked up computer skills and computer graphics skills. Using a computer has always been fun for me. Using imaging programs, like Photoshop, and desktop publishing or layout programs, like Quark, PageMaker, and InDesign, has always been the most fun of all. (Although Illustrator and other drawing programs have always been a deep mystery.)

Apparently I have managed to noodle around with this stuff long enough and with enough drive to actually get good at at. Good enough to somehow stumble into a job doing it. At a real place. A printing place that makes great big pictures, the kind you see hanging from the ceilings of department stores where people are wearing the fashionable clothes of the season, or plastered all over the walls of museums, or transparently on the windows of bookstores, or cutout lifesize in a movie theater lobby. When the pictures are really big, little details in the pictures become very important, so having people who care about details is key. Having people who actually like noodling over those details is important. And having people who like organizing papers and computer files and notes about what's been done and what needs to be done in such a way that whoever comes next in the workflow can figure out what's going on -- apparently that is also key.

So, although I applied for a weekend job at this place babysitting a giant printer that prints on paper and other material up to 16 feet wide (!), rolling up the paper or vinyl or whatever and moving it around with a forklift, somehow I found myself in the running for a fulltime job in the digital image prep department. Against people with degrees in graphic design and stuff like that. Me with my degree in philosophy and my wacky, chequered work history.

It's like they care more about my aptitudes, attitudes, and abilities than about my formal training and experience.

Is that crazy, or what?