Well, my two months or so of temping ended on Friday with a chocolate cake and card and a triangular plastic highlighter with three different inks.

Memorial Day 2003 and then a dive into a new work culture and all that that entails.

I think being layed off will always temper my job experiences, at least for the next couple of years. I will probably always be subtly aware of how I am doing and look for warning signs that the company is doing bad.

There was a certain aspect to the job search that I will miss. Once I had the secure temping in place - which afforded me time for interviews and searching - there was a kind of thrill of the unknown. I knew I would get a job eventually; and having the temp back-up job bolstered my confidence and made me feel that I didn't have to jump at the first job offered.

And then there was the daily ritual of checking bbboston.org for new job listings, reviewing automated search agents, reading Monster.com message boards, and networking through e-mail with former co-workers. It was a world of difference from my initial job search in the summer of 96 when I was a newly minted english major with college newspaper experience staring up at the gray columns of classified listings in the paper.

I remember that summer, when I was still living in Melrose, taking the bus down Main street into my first job in the city and thinking that all the commuters on the bus looked much older than me; they looked like a whole other species. With rumpled shirts and faded ties, glum expressions, bulging waistlines and coffee breath - this species of jaded workers commuting in from the suburbs made me feel young and different. But now, 6 years later - I don't think of things like that when I am on the bus. I have become what I once observed, I carry my Altoids with me though.

Computers have changed a bit too in the span of years. At my first job I was assigned a Mac Quadra and only one computer in the department had dial up internet acess. Also, you were considered lucky if you had a cd-rom player on your computer and extra lucky if you had a 17" color screen.

My new computer will be a duel 1 mhz Quicksilver G4 with 80 gig and superdive. The hardware might have improved exponentially but office politics remain the same, for better or worse.

But, I have had positive experiences personally and professionally recently and discovered how genuinely nice and interesting some people can be. It has renewed my faith in humanity, not to be too melodramatic.

I'm reading Don DeLillo's White Noise and have been captivated at how fluid and dense his writing is. Some of it verges on poetry in that it kind of leaves the meaning open to interpretation.

And my ex-girlfriend circa 1995, the only one who I still talk to ocassionally, e-mailed to say hello and tell me that she is getting married. That was one of the faith in humanity things that made me feel happy that I was still friends with her and that everything in life did not have to devolve into some Matrix like explosion of high drama.

Things are quiet at the weekend job, students are graduating or going home for the summer. The palpable tension of finals has transformed into the first laid back winds of a Cambridge summer.

As I write this I see my reflection in the window across from me, and the window behind that. So one is superimposed in the other, but smaller and as I move and glance up I see a trail of myself. That would probably be a good thing to meditate to, but I would probably look pretty funny.