Tomorrow – or in about seven hours – my life will change. Goodbye finance. Hello new life.

It’s been a long work week, my mind elsewhere and not much work to do since I passed on my responsibilities to others.

I spent my time surfing the web and doing things usually not allowed at work:

* Skobee is a new web service that offers an alternative to Evite. Try using it for your next party.

* BillMonk is a great way to track shared bills, rent, and your borrowed/lent items online. We started using it for our cable and electricity bills, and I used it for this Korean drama DVD that I let Pam borrow.

* Two years ago, I wrote a story called Seven Hundred Thirty Letters. I revised it at work while using ALT-Tab to hide my work whenever co-workers walked by.

* I read this Paul Auster story – “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” – and learned that it was the basis for his screenplay for Smoke. I added Smoke to my queue on Netflix.

* I made lunch reservations for JoJo on Saturday with Graceface. In the evening, I will eat at Houston’s with Sergey and Jeremy and watch Avenue Q. Excitement!

* I read up on the 25 greatest Calvin & Hobbes Strips and got all nostalgic in my cubicle. I used to have a huge collection of C&H books in my bathroom when I was a kid and read it every time I had to poop.

* I took long lunch breaks at Duke Cafe two days in a row. I had their soon dubu jigae the first time and an avocado BLT today. I’ll have to make my own sandwiches going forward.

So my life, which consisted largely of bonds, loans, Moody’s ratings, spreads, defaults, waterfalls, prepayments, offering memorandums, marketing books, warehouse agreements, breakevens, and other CDO-related things, will quickly turn into websites, logos, typefaces, paperback fiction, and lots of activity not confined to the desk. There is, of course, the inevitable tinge of sadness which comes with leaving something so familiar and secure, but I’ll keep in touch with my co-workers and cherish the moments of shared Seamless Web dinners, late-night mini-hoop contests, and dorky jokes about the credit rating of third world countries.

Well, I still do have to go in and break the news to my MD…

when i was in middle school, my parents bought a new dining table, replacing our round dark brown wood table that our family had been using for the past few years. they told me i could take the table and put it in my room. for the next four years, the table was a centerpiece of my room, occupying a big chunk of the space and effectively turning my room into a home office. whether i was doing my math homework, studying for SATs, holding a meeting with my teen magazine staff (most often just wally), or hosting friends for cheating preparations on the next calculus test, the table was always in the middle of the action. it was usually cleared on top except for a mug of pens and pencils and a desk lamp. since then, i have always sought out spaces with large desks or table tops. for me, this is THE essential element to my concept of a desirable space.

i mention this because i came across a new business venture near union square that touts itself as a space for writers. it is called Paragraph: Workspace for Writers (via kottke) and it has a really nice website. the place offers membership access (over a hundred bucks a month) to a very well-planned space (at least from the pictures they have up) that caters to those who want to sit down and seriously write. i was almost tempted to join but realized i am barely home enough to take advantage of such a membership. furthermore, i have a spacious apartment room with a very large desk. while i was at first skeptical of such an idea (who the hell wants to pay so much dough for some place to sit?), i realized that in New York, space is hard to come by and so many distracting elements (roommates, noise, crappy furniture) can take away from a writer’s concentration. after browsing the site, i began to miss Butler Library and how much i had loved the various spaces there – the Reading Room, where the lighting usually sucked but a comforting feeling of being with others who were studious, the 4th floor, where I often swore I went to school in Korea because of all the international students, the cafe lounge, where you can eat smelly food and talk loudly while studying and be guilt-free, and the stacks, where I sometimes found myself when I really needed to hunker down and crank out a paper. and to think – i never ceased going to Butler even when I had a very spacious room my senior year, the quietest roommate ever (hi Grace!), and of course, a very large desk, from Ikea. sometimes spaces grow on us and you find yourself going an extra seventy blocks uptown just to sit down in a familiar spot to get some studying done (as I did this past summer).

this is a very loosely written entry, i admit. lots of rambling and nostalgic waxing, but i should attempt a tie out (as my CDO group often does with their carry calculations): there are many dimensions to the concept of space (no pun intended) that are interesting to consider. in what ways do we arrange our own spaces, and how does this affect the way we behave? how do different people react to different spaces? why do people like to hang around Starbucks? how does space reflect the construct of power in our society? (haha, that last one was just a weak hark back at Foucault – I just remember the way he talked about the way prisons, hospitals, and schools were arranged and how they all seemed to have that panopticon type of construction where the customer – inmate, patient, student – is monitored and moved about regimentally). or to put things simply, what sort of spaces do you like? what spaces do you dislike?

my likes/dislikes: the privacy of a cubicle or a bathroom stall is nice sometimes, but i also like the bustle of a cafe and the open air of an art studio. outdoors are always nice, but not always convenient. i love places that feel homey but also like sleek places that aren’t too overboard on minimalist design. well, i guess like just about any place that is comfortable and has space for some books, a laptop, and a notepad. as for spaces i dislike? seats on the train (not the MTA subways, but NJTransit), seats on the airplane, lecture halls (they are napping spots for me and desks are too small), and the back seat of cars. i guess i like stationary spaces.