The first of the job interviews is out of the way as of noon yesterday. This was with the non-profit of lesser repute and they seemed to like me well enough; it’s a half-time gig doing content management/copyediting with decent (not great, but decent) pay and as such it’s got its attractions but I’m kind of hoping they don’t make an offer. I’d feel obligated to take it in spite of the murky vibe I get about the job or the people I’d be working with or maybe both.
The second interview, this time with the non-profit of major repute, is on Tuesday. It’s only for a 6-week contract and thus I’m hoping for a lot more clarity about and around the position. I won’t make any decision on the first until I check out this one, although with Monday being a holiday it’s doubtful I’d have to anyway.
A three-day weekend doesn’t mean much to an unemployed person. I’ve got lots of things to do every day, and if the post office isn’t delivering or potential employers aren’t scheduling interviews it’s not going to have significant impact on me. All it means is if I get the sudden urge to take off to Point Reyes – which I have lately, a lot – I’ve got to wait it out until later in the week when everyone else won’t be there on their day off. In some ways every day is my day off, although in others none of them are. If you’ve been out of work for any lengthy period yourself I bet you know exactly what I mean.
The recent desire to hit the road again, even for just a day, isn’t much mysterious in origin. With all the time I spend in the cottage there’s plenty of opportunity to watch my desktop screen-saver, a slideshow of my favorite outdoor photographs taken since I first got a digital camera almost six years ago. The bulk of them are naturally from summer 2010 because if that trip lacked one thing it wasn’t photographic documentation, but there are a lot of other times and places thrown in too: west Texas, New Mexico, Death Valley and Mono Lake, even Point Reyes itself. And of course my beloved Oakland, and some token SF too for good measure. There are over 1000 pictures in that slideshow and sometimes I catch myself sitting for five or ten minutes just watching them go by, thinking about the places I’ve been and wondering how many of them I’ll see again.
Or sometimes, by extension, what places I haven’t seen yet that I want to. The Skeleton Coast, the Atacama, the Great Wall, Singapore: the parts of the world I haven’t been to outnumber those I have by something like 9997 to 1 and I don’t think about it much because it makes me feel even more penniless and past my prime than I do already. I just need to content myself with having seen a lot of the U.S. (and not just the lower 48, I’ve been to both Alaska and Hawaii in my lifetime) and watching the pictures I’ve taken to verify it.
I take good pictures at least, I have to say. I do need to get a better camera though at some point - especially if I might someday against the odds actually get to Namibia. Or even just the Grand Canyon.
Lately I feel the same way I did my first couple of years in Austin: immobilized and reduced to staring at the same patch of ground with a magnifying glass, over and over. What a surprise! I was largely jobless my first couple of years in Austin, too. But at least if I’m stuck this time it’s a place I’m glad – still, and every day – in which to be so. A place I chose because I knew if I did get stuck I’d mind it a hell of a lot less than anywhere else.
Stuck here of course refers solely to location. I don’t feel stuck in other ways that matter more: creatively and in spirit. Hell, in those ways I feel like I might have just begun. I feel like that a lot though, and in many contexts, so take me seriously here at your own risk.
Anyway. The sole item on my list for today, the first of this putative three-day weekend, is to write 2000 words of new copy for The Novel. I think I can manage that; last week I did over 1800 without blinking. Wait, wasn’t that the week before? Last week I was at that thing at Adobe in the city. Or maybe those 1800 words were the week before that. Crap. This is embarrassing. And it points to one or both of two things: 1) I need to learn how to unearth the “last modified” info on a section in Scrivener, and 2) I haven’t been working on new copy frequently enough. Well, gonna do something about that one at least starting now. Once I stop puttering about on my blog, that is.
And once I figure out which section to attack first. By current reckoning I’ve got eight or nine sections to either complete or write from scratch before I can stick a fork in the first draft. On one hand it’s a relief that I should have so little left (although I suspect put together they’ll amount to somewhere around 50K words, which isn’t little at all) and on the other it makes me kind of squirmy to have so little latitude left: no more thinking up wild plot developments on the fly and sticking them in because I can always iron it out later. Later has suddenly become now and funny life does that so often in so many different ways.
Bah. But I’m enjoying myself with The Novel, whatever else I may say. I’m still amazed that I’d even tackle a project of this scope, let alone get this far with it. It does a lot to help combat the perception that I’m past my prime. With any luck, one or both of the job interviews will help combat the perception that I’m essentially penniless too.
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