The Two Year Curse

This week is poking along slowly... can't figure out if it's just me being eager for a three day weekend (took Monday off for the hell of it) or what but it's starting to get to me. Could just be the two year curse: looking back at all the different jobs I've had since college, I noticed that I haven't stayed at a job longer than about two years before either moving on to a different position or moving to a different city or something. I temped for three years after trying the nanny thing many moons ago and after that I landed a job at a hospital in the medical records department where I spent a little over a year. I was asked to work on a special project for the patient financial services department, which lasted about a year and when the project ended, so did my employment at the hospital. A little over a week later, I started a job at a private practice neurosurgery office and about a year later, I was fired w/o cause (later it was determined by a judge that it was for "personal differences" between myself and the practice administrator and not for anything I did wrong, therefore I was still eligible for unemployment). Within two weeks of that fun incident, I was packed up and on my way here to Portland where I spent from Sept. 11, 2002 to Feb. 25, 2003 temping again. I've now been at my current job, which was a temp-to-hire position, for almost two years.

I remember my mom having several different jobs throughout my childhood and all the moves we made for my dad's job with the U.S. Marshal service over the years and it struck me that maybe I'm destined for the same fate: doing random jobs here and there just to get a paycheck. That doesn't really bother me, actually. Work is work. I'm not going to be passionate about or expect 24/7 fun doing something called work. If it was fun all the time, it'd be called fun. "Honey, I'm off to have fun now. See you tonight for dinner." Doesn't really sound right. And really, I can't complain too much because all of my jobs have been tolerable. I realized that none of the actual work I've had to do has been any real source of stress. Boring, sometimes, but not really stressful. On the other hand, some of the people I've worked with or had to deal with as customers have been a serious pain in my ass and made me wish I was anywhere other than at work.

The point of all this is that I'm feeling a little stagnant. I thought moving around and travelling so much as a kid made me get antsy after living in Eugene for too long but now I'm thinking it was more that I didn't feel at home there anymore and needed to find MY place. So far, Portland has definitely been that. Maybe I've jumped from job to job because I haven't felt like any of them were what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing. Is this job IT for me? Doubtful. Is Portland my permanent home? Who knows. All that I do know is I'm itching for an adventure and I need to figure out how to make that happen.