From the Big Apple to Silicon Valley

Since I've started working at my current job in Large Corporate Firm, I find office humor like Dilbert and the notorious Office Space movie ten times as funny as I ever did. Similar to the way that old episodes of Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live became far funnier to me after I started living in New York City. I suppose that the persistent normalcy of Mountain View or San Jose made the events and characters on these shows seem far too absurd to be too terribly funny. I've never really worked in a corporate setting before but now I have a boss who sounds remarkably like Lumberg, ("mmmmm...K? We reeeallly appreciate your flexibility....yeeahhhh....Thanks"') and I'm fairly certain el mas grande Queso still doesn't know my name ('Hey........YOU! how are you doing?"), I can't help but find myself highly entertained in spite of the dread overhanging the banality of corporate life. I laugh at email forwards with things like the 'My Cubicle' parody of that annoying James Blunt song. I find myself discussing the merits of last night's Project Runway elimination in the break room. I draw caricatures of colleagues and post them on their cubicle walls. I've become a corporate cliche, and I find it equally funny and disturbing. When did my life start reminding me of TV shows and movies? Is it the Truman Show-esque precision of the morning routine? Cue: pull out of driveway, crossing guard on her way to school stage right, arrive in ghetto parking lot, cue sketchy drug dealer on the corner behind the van....lady with stroller and three kids cross the street at the same light...and Mr. HippityHop crossing stage left and ACTION!
I don't have the weekly wacky news that I'd cull effortlessly living in NYC (ask me about Mr. Fishpants or the Bus Driver who yelled at Guy Waving Gun sometime...) but I find that the lack of challenge gives me ample time to exercise my imagination. San Jose is in some ways the polar opposite of NYC. In NYC there was so much buzz and energy that often I'd feel overwhelmed and wish I could just find a nice quiet spot for just a few minutes, and that was an exceptionally difficult task...particularly if you live over a mexican restaurant facing Broadway. In San Jose I have the mental expanse to notice things like the tick of the clock in my kitchen and how it reminds me of my grandfather's den and all the other various ticking clocks I've heard over the years. A hefty whiff of roofing tar in SJ's downtown sends me instantly back to the muggy summers in Hong Kong where roads endured endless repaving. I can suddenly relate to the pace of the opening scene in a Murakami novel, where the hero mulls over the wrinkles in his shirt with a hot iron and listens to a peculiar bird outside. I know how boring this sounds but at the moment I'm enjoying the relatively slow pace, realizing that *not* having kids, a mortgage, and a high-stress job while having the husband to myself is a brief selfish luxury to be savored. Now the trick is to take the luxury of this 'thinking' space and DO something with it besides pouring it into a blog detailing my neuroses for a two person audience...my current fixation is to figure out some sort of non-Kramer business to start for myself...