I started a new job today. So far it is remarkingly similar to what I have done for the past four years, despite the pending postdoc title attached, as I still work out of the same office. It all looks the same, but I haven't been there very much for the past six months. After the receptionist told someone who tried to reach me on the phone, that I didn't work there anymore, while I was indeed in my office, I quit coming in at all. Why bother? Technically she was right, though. I didn't actually get paid, but was of the perception that even lowly grad students are expected to show up now and then, as long as the institution provides them with office space. Oddly enough, they didn't seem to care at all. Later I found out by accident that they deleted my profile on the institutional homepage, and decided to jump ship and start working from home.

Working from home was not only a welcome change of environment, but also a complete change of pace and schedule. I was hardly any more lonely than in the office environment, where I would meet people for lunch but otherwise not see a single soul for days on end. If you are to go through the hazzle of getting up, getting dressed and go to work, most people like it to make sense. Arriving mid-morning in empty hallways, where lights are yet to be switched on, is not a great motivator. At home I still got up and I still got dressed, but I didn't have to go anywhere and could work whenever it suited me, in as long or as short increments as I could manage that particular day (prone to suspicious correlation with the number of newly updated favorite web pages).

Engaged in my work and stressed out by the demands of the task ahead, the need for genuine conversation with other human beings seemed to be adrift. I connected to the world through my dear online friends at www.phinished.org. We are all in the same boat, struggling to write these's or dissertations or struggling to get a job or tenure or anything that requires serious amounts of academic hardship. All this struggling keeps us together in a tight knit community, which happens to have a strong center on the northamerican continent. Accordingly phinished is not really awake until sometime after lunch european time and everybody will be around talking about the weather, their breakfast, their sorrows and their victories when most europeans call it a day and head out of the office doors. The cool thing about working at home is that nobody decides when you should begin and when you should stop. I usually had breakfast while typing a good morning message around 11 AM, worked for several hours, broke for dinner and continued into the night shift. I am a night owl, and I loved it.

If following my own time schedule made me feel a bit off from the world around me, my semi-nomadic lifestyle certainly only added to that feeling. My boyfriend lives in Germany and I spend a significant part of my time on the move. We have a home in each country, and generally it doesn't matter a whole lot whether we are currently one place or the other. In my closed-off world of the past six months this mattered even less. I do not speak german particularly well, and we communicate in danish and norwegian. My language of choice for work and online chit chatting is english and I can stay at his place for weeks without using more than the most basic vocabulary in the local tongue. If it wasn't for the travel time and the occassional border police, I probably wouldn't even notice the change of countries.

I'm getting confused. I need to connect with the real world again. I didn't talk to many people today in my quiet-as-usual workplace, but there were actual human beings around. I even talked to some of them.... in my own language. It was not entirely irrelevant whether it was night or day, winter or summer, one country or the other. It was surprisingly nice!