So this is how they get you

The beginning was innocent enough to fool me. It looked like this: getting there early in the morning, exchanging polite smiles with the rest of the people in the office, asking thousands of dumb questions (South Park strikes back - I kept hearing the voice of Mr. Garrison in my head: Remember there are no stupid questions, just stupid people), trying to get everything done during the day and happily riding my bike back home. It lasted for about a week.

The first thing that worried me was that extra quarter of an hour spent at work. It is my firm belief that once you stop working freelance, you trade a limited amount of your time for a limited amount of cash. I thought it was an accident and tried to ignore it, until the next day, when it happened again. It didn't take me long to spend some extra 30 minutes at work. Not to mention I started smoking less, because I didn't have the time to go out of the office and smoke. This is another downside of the whole sharing-the-office issue. And anyway, you can only smoke on the corridor, which is still better than being kicked out of the building. 

When I spent a whole extra hour, I figured I had a good excuse, because I was just about to meet Ceci downtown. By the end of that day, I was starved to death (no time to eat, either, and anyway I hate eating while I'm working, unless of course I'm in my room, sharing some quality time with my laptop and writing whatever is it that I might be writing at that point), pissed off for having broken my rules, even more pissed off atfer having figured out that my rules were rather naive and it was going to take a lot of effort to stick to them.

However, in the meantime I managed to submit the translation for The Eye of the Moon, even though it took me quite some time to edit it, over and over again, just for the sake of having all the characters and all the fun to myself before sharing yet another brilliant Anonymous novel with the world. I did share it with my Mom, who's the master of proofreading, and unfortunately she came up with a very elementary and unproblematic explanation for my fascination. I'm still wondering if she's right, and if my efforts of putting the whole story in a theoretical framework  were marvelously useless. The other good news is that starting this month I've come up with a new column for our magazine, dealing with Eastern European writers, books, editors, translators and everything else that comes with the pack. I'm already planning a few interviews, none of them in Poland at the time being, so I'll have to slowly start planning my trips to Slovenia and Croatia, to begin with.

Getting back to the job thing, today I totally crossed the line. Not only did I spend the extra hour at the office, and probably would have spent another one if it hadn't been for the power cut, I also brought a file home, thus profaning the very last stronghold - Ceci's living room, which I am squatting at the time being. As I sat down with my laptop and lit a cigarette, it dawned on me that I've showed the file enough kindness by taking it out of the office, for a bike trip around Bucharest and a lovely dinner with Ana, and I figured it needed a good night's sleep in my bag.