July 29th, 2006, 11:15 am

Occupation: unemployed self-employed

Oh, and I have like four days to pack everything I own and put it into storage, while running a million trip errands.

Yesterday marked my official last day at Creative Loafing. Since I work online, I have the luxury of telecommuting - which I’d been doing pretty hardcore in the past couple of weeks. (You know, throw a load of laundry in the machine, come back and write 100 emails… )

So it shouldn’t surprise me that leaving was anti-climatic - after all, I don’t work face to face with people every day, like I used to when I was part of a traditional newsroom. After getting my last minute things done, and clearing off my computer, I stood up. It was about 7:30 on a Friday, so of course most everyone has left.

I think we all have fantasies of what will happen when we leave a job … that everything will stop functioning, employees will latch onto our legs, begging us not to go, tears and hair pulling and shouts of sweaty desperation …

Yeah, none of that happened.

No one did an exit interview with me - which apparently is standard procedure. They didn’t even take my key. (Muah ha ha - when I return broke from Europe I will sleep in the conference room!)

I’m going to be checking my CL mail for the next 30 days to forward stuff of importance to my replacement the person-who-will-have-my-job-title. And I’ve got a couple of projects that aren’t quite wrapped up yet, like Charlotte Best Of and the Beer contest.

So I guess the question is, can I stop working?

I’ve thought a lot about the trip … am I doing the right thing? Christ - it’s hard to know. We set up hollaBackpack.com as a legit business, and because of that, there’s a lot of work that has to be done. And, since I’m LauraFries.com, blog publisher extraordinaire, I jumped right into doing all those tasks.

Articles of Organization, filed. Bank account, set up. Trip, mostly planned.

But am I burying myself in a mound of work to avoid the real challenge - becoming a writer again?

I really have no way of knowing. My friend Max told me not to overthink it - to do what it is that I am interested in doing.

But in my heart I know that if I go and all I do is edit other people’s copy and write half-hearted, silly things, and organize, plan and promote, I’ll have failed myself.

This risk is worth taking, but only if I make the most of it. Only if I push myself as a writer, stretching clumsy muscles back into shape.