I can almost always tell if my association with a place or person will be a long. Having consulted for over ten years now, my typical stint at an organization is roughly between two to four fiscal quarters. I try hard to contribute from minute zero knowing that I will not have oodles of time to make an impact. Most often my efforts to that end have ranged from Nada to Middling.
Organizational change I have realized is organic, it takes dog years to happen not a couple of quarters. Over zealous contract resources like myself are tolerated with disdain bordering on contempt by the long timers typically accompanied by entitled attitudes. So, when I being to feel the sense of floatation in imaginary space that generally precedes the end of a stint, I resort to questionable means to foster longevity.
For instance, I will pretty up the bare cubicle walls, bring a coffee mug to work when God knows I am no coffee drinker. I may even start to socialize by the cooler with the types that I didn't even make eye contact with before. Most telling is the increased organization of paper on my desk and folders on my desk top. I did not do this say five years ago but I guess age has caught up with me. I do not enjoy uprooting and re-planting constantly. Offline though, my resume will go through re-incarnations based on the kind of gig I want to pick up next.
I remember this incident that took place on the way back home from work a few months ago . They were playing a Vivaldi bassoon concerto on 101.1 FM, the day was wet and grey, traffic was crawling. I had the time to absorb the landscape that I otherwise whiz past too fast to notice. It's amazing how different detail looks from a blur. When my eye fell on the marker that said "Dallas City Limit" I was filled with overwhelming, unaccountable nostalgia like I was seeing this sign after many years. It was like I has long since left Dallas and was coming back to visit. A feeling of light un-belongingness best describes it. Once back on TX-114 that feeling had passed. It was back to being an ordinary day heading back home.
I would have most likely forgotten about thoughts that crossed my mind in those few minutes unless it turned prophetic. I have since relocated and it was fairly sudden as moves typically have been with me. Even spring cleaning desk and desktop proved quite unnecessary in the final analysis.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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