It's Friday at 12:39 PM, and my first week in workaday New Jerusalem is nearly done. For the past five days, eight hours a day, I've sat here in my spacious, gray-and-cream-colored cubicle. I've met with supervisors and colleague, done "shadow-reviews" of reading passages, selected and typed my own passages from books I brought in from home, read and electronically signed a bevy of confidentiality agreements, begun studying for my scoring license, set up my voicemail, arranged my supplies in the top drawer of my desk, and pinned grading rubrics to my walls. Mostly, however, I've just sat here. I'll be training for the next several months before being assigned test items to write. This plus the fact that most of my colleagues are busy meeting their own deadlines means I have a lot of down time.

My first day was a whirlwind compared to the next four. I left my apartment at 6:50 AM, arriving 20 minutes early for the 8:30 Human Resources and Benefits Orientation. The orientation was predictably dry, but not even a sleepy PowerPoint presentation could quiet my excitement at the prospect of receiving actual benefits. Starting April 1, I would have medical insurance, retirement accounts, even discounted auto insurance! It's asking for the taking! I was coming to the edge, running on the water, blazing a trail of corporate, grown-up desire.

I've spent a fair amount of time this week imagining myself as Melanie Griffith's Tess McGill. Alas, I've yet to find my Harrison Ford.

Still bright-eyed after the orientation, I drove from the security building (where the orientation took place) to the building where I would actually be working. My supervisor led me past a long cluster of cubicles and into a clearing, at which point new colleagues emerged to greet me like so many woodland creatures in a campus casual, Walt Disney adaptation of Working Girl. Some of them I'd already met during my interviews; others said they'd heard great things about me and looked forward to working together.

I shared their enthusiasm. Four days later, I still do. I'm equally excited about the work I'll be doing and grateful for the training I'll receive to ensure I do it properly. As I continue to adjust to my 9-5 state of life, I also find myself feeling thankful for seven or more hours of sleep each night (before this week, I was accustomed to at least nine); two Venti Starbucks a day (up from one); Windows 7 (my computer at work runs XP - on an IBM-branded computer, no less); my new TomTom GPS (which does its best to route me around traffic and limit my commute to a still-daunting one hour and twenty minutes each way); and any leftover energy at the end of the day that keeps me from falling dead asleep the moment I return to my apartment.

The lack of energy concerns me. I need fuel to write, otherwise I feel as though I'm squeezing the words through a pin-prick in my brain, causing them to dribble out in achy fits and starts. I'm also concerned about the commute; two hours and forty minutes is a lot of time to spend in a car, and there are only so many podcasts I can download each day to make the time go faster. Finally, I'm concerned about Genevieve. I've left her home alone for the better part of ten hours a day for the last five days, and while she hasn't peed on any of the furniture yet, she did chew a hole in my pillowcase. At night I'm too tired to toss her ball around the apartment. She lays curled in her bed, chin flat on the cushion, her adorable puppy eyes gazing sadly at the sofa legs.

I've already contacted Ex about changing our custody arrangement: he can take Genevieve during the week (he works three days out of five) and I, over the weekends. The solution to my double-feature-length commute may not be so simple. Notwithstanding the endless dusting, cleaning, and floor-refinishing that I invested into my current apartment, if I can't stomach the commute, I will simply have to relocate. The one matter that really concerns me is my writing. If I can summon the energy to be creative only on weekends, fine. If I can write at work, sneaking in a few sentences here and there between projects, okay. The one thing I absolutely will not do is abandon my writing. I've seen too many friends sacrifice their artistic ambitions and talents to their day jobs. I've stayed true to my own ambitions for 12 years, and I'll keep on chugging for as long as it takes me to write the best play I can.

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I'm home now, finishing this entry in my apartment the day after I began it in my cubicle.

Last night after work, I saw Melanie and shared my anxiety about not having enough energy to write. She urged me to be kind to myself, reminding me that I'd gone through several, powerful transitions and probably just needed more time before I fully refueled.

It's Saturday night, 10:52 PM. As I write this, I'm realizing it's the first Saturday night I've spent alone in my apartment. Since moving in, I plotted my schedule so that Saturday nights were always spoken for. If I wasn't visiting my parents and seeing H, I was meeting up with a friend or going on a Match.com/OkCupid