Wandering like the wild geese in the west

November 28, 2011

With the holiday week over it’s back to work, or what passes for work in my current world.  Last night I made a set of lists in anticipation: day-by-day to-dos related to the job search, ditto for everything else, priority projects for the entire week.  I did pretty much nothing most of last week and by yesterday was feeling pretty icky about it so the resolve for today is to hit the ground running.  First though comes the laundry, which isn’t on any of the lists because it’s a Monday morning routine.  I find there’s no better way to start the week afresh than a house smelling of Mrs. Meyer’s lemon verbena; it’s good to build in little sensory clues to help get yourself motivated, I find.

The only anything of note last week was new copy on The Novel.  Friday and again Saturday I went to my new favorite coffeehouse, settled myself in, and for the first time in months and months churned out fresh wordage in a non-workshop setting – about 2100 and 2600 words respectively.  Feeling for the moment back on track about that at least, and if I can make myself do this once or even twice a week from now on I’ll have the draft finished in a few months.

Presuming of course nothing intervenes, the way things so often do.  Mundane things like, ahem, returning to work, which of course I had hoped would have happened by now and still can at any moment.  After almost nine months off I don’t know how quick I’ll be to get my head back into that space, but never you mind.  That’ll be my issue to deal with, along with balancing the demands of my creative and bill-paying halves.

The mystery of how exactly I’ll end up bringing that back-to-work eventuality about remains a mystery.  Last week really slowed the initial momentum of this new phase I wrote about a few entries back, mostly because I let it.  Now I have to make up for it in the next three weeks, maximizing whatever opportunities they present before everything shuts down again for the Christmas/New Year stretch.  Which explains all those lists last night, and today’s subsequent spurt of industry.  (Though not why I ignored the alarm this morning, sleeping in an extra 40 minutes.  Probably I did it just because I still can.  I vow to do better than that tomorrow.)

Looks to be a light week ahead commitment-wise: job-seekers group today, writing class tonight, vocational service workshop on advanced LinkedIn use tomorrow and that’s about it.  Which means I’ll be at home the rest of the time in front of the computer, Pandora on the speakers (I’m liking the Loop Guru channel today) and Drupal on the screen.  Or InDesign or Tweetdeck or something remotely connected to my field and/or job search; anything as long as it’s not Sons of Anarchy episodes.  I watched too many of those while making yesterday pass.

At home is fine, at least when it’s work I have to do on the desktop.  Which is actually a relatively small part of my workload; for the rest there’s my new favorite coffeehouse, a place in the Temescal that opened less than two months ago and isn’t overbearingly Temescal-ish (read: hipster attitudinal).  Not yet, anyway.  I’ve been looking for a good Third Place to go for some months, somewhere to get me out of the house possessing a good interior that makes it easy to concentrate and where the management doesn’t mind that I don’t buy a fresh drink every other hour.  This would appear to be it, a nice wide-open space that reminds me more than a little of my high school’s dining room.  I’ll probably be back there tomorrow, even.  Their Earl Grey’s not bad at all, and with my sensitivity to caffeine a single cup will keep me buzzing for half the day.

That aside, home is indeed fine.  Home has mac and cheese and leftover turkey in the fridge and the cat purring on the ottoman and Nitin Sawhney on Pandora.  Good-smelling laundry drying in the picture-window.  Hot cocoa if I want it (and I probably will, as lately I’ve had a nigh-insatiable desire for chocolate anything – no idea what that’s about).  All the comforts, in other words.  Except for other human voices.

I guess that’s one thing some people need so much they’re glad to get to work every day.  I’m not one of them, but I confess I do miss other people being around.  Back here in my little cottage I’m pretty much in my own world as far as meatspace is concerned and I’ve liked that a lot and will again, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad for the excuse to get out and speak to others at least once a day.  Or at least look at them, and overhear them.  Today and tomorrow I’ve got built-in reasons for that; the rest of the week I’ll have to make something up.  I need to go back to Meetup and start looking for other interesting groups, it appears.

I stayed in completely on Thanksgiving day, not even venturing out to the restaurant as initially planned.  The closest thing to festivities was dinner with my sister and brother-in-law at their house two nights later and that was a suitably low-key affair.  Otherwise I read a few books when I wasn’t working on my own, or watched videos, or thought about the next section of The Novel to be written.  Didn’t think much if at all about finding a job or puttering around with websites, and that’s probably the only thing that made it feel like a holiday.

Well: holidays end.  That’s what makes them holidays.  I’m glad they do, and I’m glad to get back to work - my version of it.  With any luck I’ll still feel this way at the end of the week, too.

November 22, 2011

The earbuds didn’t need returning after all.  I tried to take them back to Radio Shack but, after being balked by not having the receipt and packaging with me, on the way out of the store I adopted desperate measures: hacking the instructions.  Specifically, I tried putting the bud marked R in my left ear and the L in my right and surprise surprise – they fit and worked perfectly.  I can’t believe it was that simple.  How often is it that the manufacturer is so completely wrong?

More to the point, how often do we achieve optimum results precisely by doing the exact opposite of what we’re told?  Some people seem to make such behavior their life’s work – I know one and she’s broken something like 16 iPhones so far not to mention losing enough neck vertebrae in a motorcycle accident that she could clinically be considered to have been decapitated – and while society may revere them as rebels, pioneers, achievers, bush-league Steve Jobses, they’re still overwhelmingly a pain in the ass to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  I generally strive to be not be one of them, which is why it took so long to hit on the idea of putting L where the markings said it’s not meant to go.

I really have to think about this and what it means to my approach to much in life.  It’s a small thing, but then it’s most often small things that serve as triggers to the biggest light-bulb moments.  How could it be otherwise?  Day-to-day life is mostly small things, after all.

I have a prickly relationship with following instructions.  On one hand I’m glad there are clear instructions for so much of life, the street signs and the user manuals and the video tutorials and so on; it’s comfortable to know there are specific, tried-and-true methods by which if I so desire I can achieve optimal results.  Some are mandated by law, others by common sense and the rest by the instruction-writer’s experience but in all cases I’m often only too glad to have someone else do the thinking and beta-testing for me.

On the other hand, a lot of the time I’m not much of an instruction-follower.  I’d say “What else would you expect from someone who was raised a Quaker?”, but it’s more than that – as a child of privilege I grew up thinking that any number of instructions I was going to encounter simply wouldn’t apply to me as a white upper-middle-class male, and embarrassingly enough life to date has frequently proved that entirely accurate. 

Also, I am by nature quite simply too impatient and/or lazy to make a good follower of anything, including instructions.  In the end this doesn’t mean I think outside the box so much as I often don’t end up getting much done, let alone done well.  In my early teens I put together a lot of models – airplanes first, then tanks and action figures in the Tamiya 1/35-scale line – and I didn’t care that the finished results lacked the parts left on the sprue or the pieces that were supposed to move didn’t or that the joints oozed drops of glue because I habitually used too much or that, horror of horrors, nothing ever got painted.  I only wanted the general shape of something put together quickly so I could play with it and, later, blow it up with firecrackers. 

I’m still that way.  A lot, I think.  I just do it with software now instead of molded plastic.  And, no surprise, I prefer to buy my furniture and other consumer goods pre-assembled when I can.

Being this way makes me, I fear, quite often a tremendous pain in the ass to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  And that’s without the conscious effort to do the opposite of what I’m told.  I may strive to not be one of those contrary types but I suspect that as long as I live I’m only going to experience limited success in this regard.

My mother had a lot to do with shaping me in this way - not my engineer father, who while highly process-oriented himself had little interest in teaching what he knew to his younger children.  Sometimes I think it was her nature as a rebel (she always was, and still is) and others I think it was her irresponsibility (ditto), but either way what I learned from her is now who I am.  Or that part of me that gets all prickly around instructions is, anyway.

This inner dichotomy is chief among what makes my support of the Occupy movement so problematic.  On one hand I like order – especially when it benefits me, and our current economic/power structure if nothing else is calculated to benefit white males - and the Occupy movement while it goes by that name is never going to be about order. It’s instead about overturning order, the order that benefits so few at the cost of the rest.  And that’s the other hand – I know that order is all too often used as a tool of oppression, and that’s exactly the case with our economic/power structure.  So the Occupy movement presents me with the choice: retain my privilege at the price of my conscience, or follow my conscience at the price of my comfort?  Fuck me.

Because sometimes you have to do the exact opposite of what you’re instructed to do, follow the most counter-intuitive procedure, to get the results you wanted all along.  On a small scale, yeah, no problem: I can skip steps in the model assembly process, or switch earbuds from one side to the other, easily enough.  Contemplating giving up my treasured place near the apex of our socioeconomic structure for the common good?  Not so easy.  I can think different, or like to think I can, but I ain’t no pioneer or rebel or hairshirt-wearer – and, I’m pretty sure, never will be. 

Which would seem to relegate me to being a follower, and as I said I don’t make too good a one of those either.  So what am I?

Damn those earbuds.  Made me go and get all thinking and shit.

November 19, 2011

Because I’m generally anal about these things, I keep a record of my bus-travels each month to track whether I’m getting the full value from my pass.  At $80 the AC Transit pass is an OK deal but not a great one, especially if you don’t have to use it c. 20 days out of every month to and from work, and I worry about losing money on it just from being seduced by the convenience of zipping it on the reader instead of carrying the requisite bills and pocket change.  Miniscule trade-offs, maybe, but you know me – I like tracking personal data.  Like I said, I’m anal.

The ridership-month now approaching its end has been a modest one for the pass but I’m nonetheless satisfied because I’ve already taken the equivalent of $80 in rides with four days still to go.  Last month was up to $92 by this point and I gave up tracking then because a) I’d run out of page in my notebook and b) with that comfortable a margin, who cares?  This month I’ll be more scrupulous.  That’s just the way I roll – no pun intended - at the moment.

Bus-data is easy to keep: it’s all about numbers and doesn’t lend itself to ambiguity.  (Although I do sometimes have to decide whether to include specific rides in the total, usually ones where if I’d had to pay cash I would have walked or simply not gone anywhere at all.)  In contrast, more than once in the last dozen years I’ve tried to track my daily moods using a 1-10 scale but with the way they fluctuate even just during an hour I finally had to admit the futility of it.  Fifty years from now we’ll probably have implants that measure these things.  I’m not going to live that long, though.

One form of personal data I am going to have resume keeping is BP measurements.  A week from now I’ll have finished phasing out the Bystolic and then it’s time to see how essential it’s really been to keeping my BP under control; I’ve been taking it so long I can’t remember what the readings were like before.  (Or if I was even tracking them then.  Just because I keep all this data doesn’t necessarily mean I go back to look at it much.)  No doubts at all my doctor wouldn’t approve of this modification, but since she hasn’t returned my call to consult with her I’m not going to sweat it at the moment. 

I’ve got other things to think about in the week coming up.  Thanksgiving, for one, since I don’t have any plans for it and don’t expect to develop any beyond going to my favorite Sunday-brunch restaurant and paying them $20 to feed me.  Last year I was at Clive’s and that was pretty good but this year unless I stumble across a suitably unthreatening gathering of T-giving orphans I expect to be quite content alone.  That’s also the way I’m rolling right now.

Additional other things to think about: how I’m going to actually make all those new-phase changes described in the last entry start to manifest.  (Getting off my ass, which I’ve been sitting squarely on since writing that entry, would be a good start.)  Whether I can find a way to justify driving to Ukiah to set up installment payments for my traffic ticket (got $325 of it waived by letting the judge know I registered the truck in CA but the remaining $200 is still daunting as a lump sum) and in the process take a few days camping in the Mendocino Nat’l Forest.  Whether the upper-right molar that seems to be chipping away on its own is going to be enough of a problem to start worrying about dental care.  Whether I should return the earbuds I bought the other day, seeing as the only way I can get a semi-decent fit on the left side is to screw that one in so deeply it’s already half-clogged with earwax.  (Or for that matter whether I should start cleaning my ears more regularly.) 

And so on.  Days are long and, in spite of being busier-than-usual as they have lately, there’s still enough alone-time for plenty of thinking over these and other, usually more important things.  I just wish that when it comes to indubitably important things such thinking led to more conclusions is all.  Or, more specifically, more conclusions I want to act on straightaway.

When it comes to the moderately-important things I’d say it’s been a bang-up week.  Monday I submitted three applications and got calls on all of them, which has to be some kind of record.  I not only got on Twitter and built a decent incoming stream but in the process of learning to use Tweetdeck also started to get my LinkedIn account under control and if that isn’t progress I don’t know what is.  Met the deadline on the brochure’s first draft.  Organized most of those bothersome loose ends (see previous entry).  I even got Blanche’s oil changed.  Bang-up: absolutely.

If I had been tracking my mood day by day the week would come out closer to average, though.  Considering the time of year, especially the recent time change, I’ll take average with little complaint but still: I wish I had more energy, more enthusiasm.  Whatever spurts of either I experience generally are neither strong nor long-lasting.  And there’s a lot more I should be doing than I am, and that in spite of the overall productivity is what keeps things feeling only average. 

I make no predictions for next week, or none that mean anything at least.  I can say now that I expect contentment in solitude for Thanksgiving, for instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll actually feel that way when the day comes.  All I know for certain is I’ll be riding the bus some – can’t let the new pass immediately go to waste, after all.

November 17, 2011

The second hardest thing is getting everything organized, the notes made during workshops and group meetings and one-on-ones.  The hardest thing is getting all the items done that the organization process reveals need doing, the follow-up website visits and calendar revisions and email inquiries and so on, ad finitum and etc.  While this is just as true when you’re working as merely job-seeking (and trying to keep your personal life/business under control at the same time), somehow it seems easier then – maybe because when you’re working at least some of your priorities and deadlines are determined by other people and circumstances rather than your own ragged half-distracted ass.

This time the getting-organized component wasn’t that hard, even if it did take the better part of the other afternoon.  That was the goal for the week I set on Monday in the weekly job-seekers group I’ve been going to: synthesizing all the input I’ve had in the month-plus of my first thrashing attempts at building a coherent network while generally trying to go about the job search in a new, more productive fashion.  Now I can drop it from my to-dos: I am well-organized for the moment and you’d better believe it.  Evernote has come to my rescue once again, acting as a handy repository for lists galore .  Now comes the hard part of actually crossing off items on those lists.

Yesterday was my formal intake appointment at the vocational service.  It kind of served to put a cap on the latest phase of shuffling around and exploring that began with all those “let’s network” emails I sent out in late September; now I actually have a counselor, and even if I don’t do any more than send email every few weeks updating her on my progress, that still acts as a dividing line between before and after.  That and the fact that yesterday I received my quarterly disbursement and, skimpy though it was, added to the retirement fund money last week it gives me just about enough to get through the next three tightened-belt months without further aid (barring of course any unexpected catastrophic expenses).  So: one phase ends, another begins.  Yay today.

During these next three months I’ll be doing more than just looking for work.  I will be performing the all-important task (according to various literature I’ve been reading) of building myself as a brand: a marketable, sound-bite-able, sharply-defined professional identity.  I’ll be not just Drupal-ing, getting a site of my own that I want to show people in order, but Twitter-ing and LinkedIn-ing and Meetup-ing and, of course, face-to-face networking.  All of which means, of course, that week by week I’m only going to end up with more stuff that I need to organize and then take action on.  Busy busy.

This whole idea of building myself as a brand is kind of funny to me because for the first 40 years of my life I had no clue who I wanted to be and consequently what I wanted to do, which as you can imagine makes representing yourself a tricky thing.  I’m still getting used to knowing myself as someone who knows what he wants, what he’s doing and where (after a fashion) he’s going; it’s a me I frequently don’t recognize.  I suppose I could get to like him well enough eventually, though.

Something I’m going to need to find out is what this me has to say to the public, via the professional blog I want to set up on the commercial side of my new site and my professional Twitter account.  (I just got on Twitter two days ago and immediately set up two accounts: one for the sort of stuff I like to put out on Facebook for my friends, which considering my political leanings could be, uh, a little controversial, and another for my business contacts.  As always, compartmentalization is the name of the game in my little world.)  It’s relatively easy to churn out entries in this blog you're reading; I’m writing about something of immediate interest to me – my life – and next month I’ll have been doing it for 12 years, plus because I’m writing primarily for myself it doesn’t matter much if I have a significant readership.  A business blog/tweet is a whole other thing,: not only will I have to find/generate content I hope others (and lots of them) will appreciate, but I’ll have to articulate why I think that content is relevant enough to present. 

I suspect learning to articulate thus will further serve to make me into someone I have trouble instantly recognizing.  I also suspect that that, in the end, is what growing into yourself is about.  And if I’m having trouble recognizing myself, at least part of it is because the current me is a more powerful, self-assertive person who’s got a better idea of who he is and what he wants than he ever before was or had.  So in that case: bring it on.  I’ll learn to adapt.  This is why I cleaned up over ten years ago.

And I figure with so many people online now there are bound to be at least a few hundred interested in the same spread of things I am: OS X tricks and hacks, innovative design principles and theories, the intersection of technology and psychology, the pace and limits of progress, resource conservation.  Perhaps even the redistribution of wealth, in the form of knowledge.  Or maybe that’s all a bit too wide a net and I’ll have to focus more tightly as I go along.  Either way, it’s a new start for me and a part of me is chomping at the bit to get to it.

Meanwhile another part is whispering in my ear: Caution.  Get organized first and know what you’re doing before you start doing it.  Not sure if that’s the traditional me, the habitually procrastinatory one, or the newer me keeping in mind how much trouble I’ve made for myself in the past by leaping in unprepared.  I may never be sure; caution’s a useful practice except when it isn’t, and I suspect I’m by nature the sort of person who has trouble telling the difference.  But I am sure that I’ve got three months starting today to learn a lot more about it than I know now.

November 11, 2011

Rain on the roof.  Intermittent, and not particularly heavy, but still: friggin’ rain.  I expect to be hearing it all day, a repetitious patter-patter as the sky waters this little patch of greenery and everything beneath it: cue the oncoming winter, and all that. 

This is only the second day this week I’ve stayed home: been busy out running around, and how.  When the week began I’d thought I might take off Tuesday to go for that already-deferred walk in the redwoods across the bay and wear some more of the tread off the ol’ hiking boots, but that was not to be.  When the day came I realized how irresponsible it would be to go play what with me currently working against a deadline, so: maybe next week, when said deadline is past and the skies clear up again.  Responsibility’s a bitch.

Thus Tuesday was designated an official Get Things Done day, as is today.  Not that with the day now stretched out yawningly before me and the sound of rain on the roof and the heater going full blast I feel much like doing anything other than crawling back into bed, but tough shit.  What did I just say about responsibility?  With this in mind I need to find a way to wake myself up properly as it would appear it didn’t happen on its own when I first rose over three hours ago.  Maybe just moving my sluggish ass over to the window seat, where the chill air leaks in everywhere around all those panes of glass, will be enough.

The not-at-home days have been almost too hectic to track.  Monday was the job interview at the law firm mentioned entry before last, then the weekly Meetup group for local job-seekers, then in the evening another Meetup group, this time devoted to website critique.  Wednesday was a job strategy group sponsored by the vocational service I signed up with and in the evening the Occupy Oakland General Assembly for a discussion of the encampment’s policy regarding non-violence.  Yesterday was into the city in the morning for a vocational service workshop on the proper uses of LinkedIn (something I cop to being largely clueless about beyond simply having an account and a hundred-plus contacts) and then downtown in the afternoon to deposit some money that came in the mail.  Followed by an almost complete collapse, as I’ve been sleeping poorly all week on top of this frenzied activity.

Which makes this an excellent day to stay home, rest and listen to the patter-patter overhead.  I’ll probably be bored as hell by the time night falls, but once again: tough shit.  I got things to do so suck it up.

Admittedly, if it weren’t for the looming deadline – that website/brochure thing also mentioned entry before last – I’d be using today for some low-key celebration, rain or no.  The money in the mail was the cash-out of my UT retirement fund that arrived some weeks (perhaps months) ahead of schedule: very very welcome because now I’m covered for the next few months if I don’t find work.  Also because I can buy laundry detergent and a box of pens and get the oil changed in my truck and pay my neighbors back for the PG&E bills and for a little while at least do all those other things a person not staring at the dregs of his bank account can do.  It’s a good day, no matter what I do – or don’t – to observe it.

(Yeah, yeah, I know.  To achieve this I looted my retirement fund.  All you sensible stably-employed types shaking your heads as you read this, please be assured I didn’t do it blithely, not any more than will I spend the resulting cash now in my pocket.  Let’s just leave it at that, please.)

In fact I’ll go so far as to say it’s been a good week overall, and would have been even without yesterday’s infusion of cash.  I got out more than usual and in the process talked to lots of people, made some interesting contacts, and got some good feedback.  The job interview went well, well enough that I’d hoped to have a second higher-level callback by now but you never really know about these things, do you?  And one of my temp agencies called with a job nibble that, even if it is brain-dead admin work at Kaiser, could at least put food in the cat’s bowl through the end of the year.  Very satisfying when you add it all together.

Of course, the result of running around all week is you end up with a lot of business cards, not to mention tips regarding useful websites and notes about things on which you want to (or at least should) follow up, and it’s all a big jumble that has to be sat down and made sense of at some point, preferably soon.  Which is also what today’s for.  Or will be if I can get suitably awake or at the very least prevent myself crawling back into bed.

I fear though that in the end, said sense-making business may prove a little too ambitious for the day.  It would be nice to end the week thus caught up but as it stands I’m not going to make the goal for myself I set at the Monday job-seeker’s group, which is to port most of the content I didn’t strip off my personal site into the new Drupal version.  I doubt I’m even going to touch that project, in fact, not with this deadline staring me down and after that a piece of my novel to prepare for next Monday night’s class first and a half-dozen other things too including spending part of tomorrow at an Occupy Oakland site cleanup. 

An impartial observer might say I’m having trouble getting my priorities in order and sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t be right.  Today at least though I’m pretty clear on what is most important: staying in out of the rain.

November 7, 2011

With the onset of the recent chill weather – nights in the upper 40s and days in the low 60s, you know how it is in California – I’ve started wearing hiking boots again because sandals just aren’t going to cut it in the cold and rain.  The boots are Montrails, made for extra-wide feet, and after three-plus years of fairly heavy urban wear are comfortable enough but I’m nonetheless waiting for signs of them starting to spring in the weak spots, whatever those will be.  Or maybe I don’t have to wait, as an examination of the soles yesterday revealed most of the tread is gone and the right heel, always the first to wear down, is starting to show patches of whatever lurks beneath the Vibram there.  They’ll be good for one more winter but I suspect that’s about it.

I have five pairs of shoes to my name.  The boots and sandals (Tevas), which now I’m in CA are essentially all I need for year-round leisure wear; one pair of tennis; and two pairs of work shoes, one for everyday office wear and one reserved for interviews.  I’m not much of a shoe person, in other words.  I don’t like the way they constrict my feet and would spend my entire life unshod if I could.  But I can’t, especially since I like to spend time outdoors and need nice heavy boots that provide adequate ankle support, and thus I worry about how I’m going to replace the current pair when the time comes.  Not with what, because I plan to swap them out with more Montrails (it’s a lot harder to find a good fit for plates of meat like mine than most will ever know), or for that matter where, not when there’s my old friend the REI store at Gilman and San Pablo.  Just how, and that’s plenty worry enough.

I have the same worry about other mission-critical possessions that are nearing the end of their lifecycle.  My iMac will be five years old in January, for instance, and if there’s one thing Apple believes in besides elegant design it’s planned obsolescence.  (Not to mention that it’s just plain slow a lot of the time now.)  My primary backup drive makes a painful whirring/grinding noise when it’s turned on and the fact that the noise goes away after it warms up does little to reassure me.  My CPAP mask is coming up on a year and showing it, the Velcro in the straps just about useless and the gel padding in the face-mold squashed down to where each morning it takes several hours for the marks left by the mask on my face to fade. And so on.

Clothes, even.  I’m writing this in a pair of Wranglers I’d never dare to wear in public for all their rips in unseemly places because my only pair each of sweatpants and blue jeans are in the wash.  (Those jeans have started to rip in unseemly places themselves. I buy cheap; this is what I get.)  I heard my sole pair of interview slacks give a small tear when I squatted in them a few weeks back but I haven’t been able to find where yet.  And, once again, so on.  You own things and use them, they wear out.  That’s just how it goes. 

I think about material possessions a lot, though almost certainly not as much as I would if I had less of them.  As it is I’ve got few enough and I once thought having fewer possessions would lead me to care better for the ones I do have, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way.  Mostly when I think about them it’s not about how to retain what I have but how to get more, and of which.  This is not the mark of a self-reliant person.  It’s the mark of a habitual consumer.

It’s useful to stop and confront these facets of yourself every now and then.  Keeps you from getting too preachy when the subject of excessive material consumption comes up, which far as I’m concerned is nowhere as often as it should.

A few weeks back I was hanging out at the Occupy Oakland site and some guy sat down next to me and asked if I had a blank CD.  I gave him one – blank CDs being one of the many items I carry in my faithful old North Face daypack, which fortunately shows few signs of needing replaced anytime soon – and he then asked if he could use my computer to burn some of his music off the internet.  I said yeah, sure, but I was having trouble getting a strong enough connection for downloading.  He then asked if I couldn’t use my phone for it.  “Sorry, I don’t have a smartphone,” I told him.  He muttered that he didn’t have a phone at all, or a computer, and wandered off clutching the CD.

Fucking loser, I thought watching him go.  Try to make me feel guilty, will he.  I’d seen this guy around the encampment and he always looked barely there – shuffling around dazedly in tattered sweatpants, sleeping sprawled across the sidewalk where you had to step over him to get anywhere: a real lost child of the movement, whatever movement that might be.  Still, he was the one camping out night after night, truly Occupying – something I’ll never do – and thinking back on that encounter I realize that if he were coherent enough to have a dialog on the subject he might have some pretty interesting things to say on material consumption, excessive or otherwise.  We ignore the message of the have-nots at our own risk, I’m fond of saying, and it seems this applies to me as much as anyone.

Since moving back to Oakland, where poverty (and the race/class divide behind it) is a lot more prevalent and visible than it ever will be in Austin, I think a lot more about how I appoint myself in public – my shoes, my clothes, my gear, my portable electronics – than I used to, and in a different way.  One of the reasons I prefer to ride the bus is so I’ll keep thinking about it, too.  It’s a small thing, but it helps keep it real in a way that doesn’t come easily to me. And it should help balance out the fact that sometime soon I’ll be shelling out $200 (more, probably) for new hiking boots.

November 4, 2011

Muscles are sore this morning in unaccustomed places from unaccustomed motions: crouching, reaching above my head, bending over.  I spent a couple of hours yesterday using a small wire-bristle brush to scrub off graffiti painted on walls the night before when the general strike called by Occupy Oakland devolved into Black Bloc-dominated chaos and don’t regret one second of it, today’s minor discomfort included.  Said discomfort just illustrates how little exercise I get lately, which is a valuable reminder in and of itself.

I hadn’t planned on centering my day around cleaning up after some testosterone-poisoned, fuck-shit-up types who think hiding behind masks is cool, but rather delving into the workings of Drupal as it pertains to my personal site I’m still slowly getting back up.  However I was pretty upset by the morning’s news of the small-scale riots that sprang up in the wake of the huge lovely-spirited march that had briefly shut down the Port of Oakland the day before, and even more upset when the media chose to concentrate on the window-smashing and fire-setting and paint-bombing committed by a few dozen weenies instead of the peaceful behavior of thousand and thousands that preceded it.  And when the call went out for volunteers to come downtown and wield wire-brushes in a small gesture of reparation I was only too happy to sign up as it seemed the best way to channel, and address, that upset I felt.

It was good for me that I did.  It’s certainly the most constructive thing I’ve done since getting involved (however peripherally) with Occupy Oakland: an action directly in its defense, startling me with the degree of investment I feel in the movement.  There have been times in the last month when I’ve felt like the Occupy phenomenon is what I’ve been waiting for all my life - a viable expression of the need to change the way our society does things, an expression might actually lead to a partial reversal of our self-destructive patterns (debt, environmental destruction, social injustice) in time to make a positive difference for the next few generations – and that’s why I’ve felt so conflicted about not getting more involved, practical reasons notwithstanding.  But even I can show up for a few hours to visibly do a little work that says, “Those guys who like to fuck shit up?  They don’t speak for me.  Or for the movement, for that matter.” 

(I did get the chance to say that out loud as well.  While I was scrubbing the stone of the building housing a Tully’s – and for chrissake, Bloc-ers, if you must hit a chain coffee-shop at least seek out the nearest Starbucks rather than its smaller, relatively benign competitors – I was approached for a sound-bite by two different TV network news teams.  I only spoke to the first, Channel 2 [Fox], because I was particularly pissed at their choice to emphasize the night’s events rather than the day’s and I made sure the mike got my full message: those vandals don’t represent us and we deserve better than you making out they do.  But since I didn’t speak for attribution I doubt it’ll ever get used, which is just fine with me.  That’s not the way I want my fifteen minutes.)

Today there’s something I feel in addition to physically sore and emotionally less conflicted: clearer in my mind.  The Occupy movement is very good in some ways for bringing things into focus, in this case my priorities.  When in the last entry I listed reasons why I wasn’t too interested in the job I was interviewing for, I omitted a particularly salient one: it was with a wealth management services company, and that is so not where I’m at.  I would have been working with, as I found out during the interviewing process Wednesday, people drawn from places like Wells Fargo and the idea of taking money from that kind of employer while at the same time espousing the anti-major bank sentiment of Occupy is ultimately just too absurd for contemplation.  While I don’t have to be a Black Bloc-er to see that, I certainly had plenty of time to contemplate it further while scrubbing away and you know what?  Feeling pretty good about this little bit of discernment I’m practicing.

Clearer.  I like clearer.  Also I’m feeling optimistic, since I have another interview scheduled for Monday.  This one is with a law firm that, if it lives up to its PR, expends a lot of effort promoting social justice and that, my friends, is a lot more where I’m at.  As ever, no clue whether it will lead to anything but it sure is good to be getting some calls on all those resumes I’ve sent out. 

Optimism and clarity aside, today it’s back to the ordinary.  In this case that means futzing with Drupal, or rather sifting content from the old site for inclusion on the new and putting the heavy-duty futzing aside for the moment.  I have a number of technical questions already that I’d planned to ask at the Meetup the other night but didn’t for the excellent reason that I never made the damn Meetup due to a calendar glitch and now I have to either wait another month to ask them or get the answers on my own.  Either way I’m glad of the learning opportunity; just not very excited about it this particular morning.

As usual I’ve got ever-so-much other stuff to do as well: a website/brochure project for a spinoff of Clive’s group due mid-month, a possible website/brochure project to start immediately after that for a friend I made in Texas, The Novel that I want to get back to writing, and so on.  Tomorrow is the monthly all-day workshop that should prove good for another 3-4K words and I’m looking forward to churning them out but hopefully it won’t be the last time for it this month.  I could complain that there’s just so little time but in fact the problem really is that I just move way too damn slow.

I suppose you could say it doesn’t help when I take a few hours out to scrub off graffiti.  But that… that was necessary.  The sore muscles will fade but my certainty about it won’t.

November 1, 2011

Today is all about rushing, or what passes for it in my relatively sedate non-employed life.  Rushing to get this entry written before I head off into the city to meet a friend, rushing through lunch with that friend to be on time to my workshop at the vocational service on networking techniques, rushing back to the East Bay to get the last of the season’s corn at the Tuesday Berkeley Farmer’s Market, rushing home to drop it off and then back to Berkeley for an evening Meetup group of Drupal users.  Busy day.  I’ve had so few of those lately I’ve almost forgotten how to get through one.

Tomorrow will be more relaxed, a little.  It was supposed to be a lot more so, as since it’s expected to be the last good day weather-wise for a while I was planning to take that hike in the redwoods I promised myself at the start of last month.  As it is though the phone interview mentioned entry before last led to another one yesterday and now it appears that having passed the initial screening I’m to go in for a face-to-face tomorrow.  Well fine then.  I’ve got my priorities, even if following them is sometimes like less-than-pleasant tasting medicine going down.

Which is to say that I’m not too enthused about the position I’m up for: a CMS jockey with a financial services corporation.  I’ll go through with the process anyway because that’s just what you do, especially when you need the practice interviewing.  Never mind that unless I see something on my visit to the site tomorrow to make me change my mind I’ll almost certainly end up saying “Thanks, not interested”; the company is too conservative, the work too one-dimensional - they’ve taken pains to make it clear there is no design involved, only data-shuffling - and the location in Pleasant Hill too far away to make it all that attractive.  It’s still the first real nibble I’ve had and as such I’d be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand.  So it’s off to the east I go, and the redwoods will just have to wait.

I suspect at this point you’re thinking, “Well what the hell.  Can he really afford to be that picky at this point?”  And frankly I’m wondering the same thing myself, even if I’m pretty sure I can - for a little while, anyway.  In 2003 I was desperate enough to take the first thing that finally came along, a job that was an OK fit but not a great one, and I made it work – often at considerable sacrifice - and kept on making it work until I got laid off two and a half years later.   So I know I can do it; I’d just rather not again if I don’t have to.

I’ve got too many options I want to explore first before I throw myself into something requiring such effort before it works (if it ever does), and most of them involve some sort of design.  Or overall front-end work, or some such.  This last week has seen my first Drupal install, on my personal site to replace the lazy-ass iWeb job I slapped up a few years ago, and a consequent theme redesign, and it’s all been vexing at points and continues to be but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give it up.  Hell no.  I’m only getting started. I’m looking forward to this Meetup tonight so I can learn more about this fascinating subject of CMS-construction and –administration now spread out on the table before me like a n exotic buffet.  I want to get in a few big heaping plates before reverting to plainer fare, if you know what I mean.

It’s not lost on me that the most vexing parts of the install/retheme process so far – meaning the ones that feel most pleasurable if/when I get them right – are often the ones involving Photoshop.  Design, in other words.  Should I be in a hurry to tie myself down for the next few years in a job that offers little to none of such work?  No.  Not this month.  Things might look a little different come December, but they often do anyway.  December is just that kind of month. 

In this context that’s not a compliment.  December is usually a month I want to rush through.  Meanwhile there’s November, which often is too: 30 days, one less to sweat at least.  Small mercies.  Since I don’t know what I’m doing for Thanksgiving, I’m glad it’s still weeks off – until today I’ve barely been aware it’s coming up.

October wasn’t a bad month, not at all. I made more progress in the job search than in any single month preceding, got going on my networking practice, saw more people on my own volition than I’m accustomed to, learned how to use Skype, legalized my residence in California, and had some folks come through with money when I really needed it.  I even got a little writing done on The Novel outside of the usual monthly workshop.  (Only a little, though.  Got to find a way to do better on that in upcoming months.) I’m kind of sad to see October go. 

But time rushes on as it will, and here we are in a new month regardless of how I feel about it.  Soon enough the same will be true of the year. What’s more, just a few short days from now I will have lived in this little cottage exactly a year and if that isn’t evidence of time rushing on I don’t know what is. 

However, just because time rushes doesn’t mean we have to spend our lives rushing to keep up with it.  I’d say this last year, when days like today are much more the exception than the norm, has been remarkably good evidence of that.  And that’s the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it.