Wandering like the wild geese in the west

February 28, 2012

Awhile back I wrote about how, now I reside again in Oakland, the past is so frequently with me (willing or unwilling on my part) simply because so many places I see or go have some associative memory from the 12 years I lived here before.  For instance, every time I walk to the bottom of the hill on my way to Trader Joe’s I go right past the Grand Lake Theatre where I saw dozens of movies over the years: Die Hard with Kimber, Broken Arrow with my brother-in-law, Mystery Men with my burner crowd, Roger Rabbit and Batman and who knows how many others with my ex-wife.  I haven’t been inside the theatre since I returned; for the time being at least I’m evidently no longer the sort who treasures the full movie-going experience.  Nonetheless I do wonder to what degree I would be overwhelmed with memories should I step inside again. 

 The past is with me not just in Oakland, of course.  Take me to virtually any community in the greater Bay Area – by my definition, a rough sphere with Novato, Pleasanton and Palo Alto as its outer borders – and chances are better than even I’ll be able to find my way around from having field-managed the Greenpeace canvass operation there in the mid-80s.  “Sure, that’s the deli where we ate lunch every day while we were doing Danville in 85.”  “That neighborhood in Concord, yeah, that’s where I trained Sabrina on her first night as a canvasser.”  “Benicia – that’s the corner where Jack missed his pickup and we found him an hour later in a cell at the police station.”  And so on. 

This shit never really goes away, and with each passing year it gets spookier when it pops up almost in ambush.  Not that I share it much, because I really doubt anyone wants to hear my old canvassing stories except other old canvassers and those are pretty few and far between in my life these days.  Yet it’s all there, just waiting for a trigger.  Which is both gratifying and a little intimidating at the same time.  Being reminded of how the intervening years have piled up invariably serves also to remind of how old you’ve gotten in the process.

Once I left Greenpeace in 87 I didn’t have much reason to see places outside the usual major metro-area suspects (SF proper, Oakland-Berkeley-Emeryville-Alameda), with a few notable exceptions.  Walnut Creek, for instance, as I’ve been reminded the last month or so since I started going to the Experience Unlimited (EU) meetings there.  EU is an organization sponsored by the CA Employment Development Department to help job-seekers find jobs via networking; WC has the nearest chapter to me, which as it happens meets in a temple at the bottom of the same cul-de-sac that houses the Mt. Diablo Peace Center. 

These days the MDPC makes itself at home in the Unitarian church right across from the temple but once upon a time it had its own quarters in a house up the hill at the turnaround.  I went to that house virtually every workday for three months in the winter of 87-88 when I had a contract fundraiser position with the Nuremburg Actions project based there.

Funny how these things come around again, isn’t it?  That’s three months of my life I’d like to forget but know I never will.  The last time I stepped out of that house I vowed I’d never come within a mile of it again if I had the choice.  Yet here I am, week after week, attending meetings just a hundred yards or so away.  It really is a small world, at least in the Bay Area. 

 EU holds its new-member orientation sessions at its headquarters in north Concord, on the Port Chicago Highway – within spitting distance, as it also happens, of the former gates to the Concord Naval Weapons Station and the train tracks (now removed) coming out of those gates where Nuremburg Actions held its 24/7 vigil that winter of 87-88.  Where those tracks cross the Port Chicago Highway is another place that once I left I wanted to never see again, if possible even more than the MDPC house.  Yet I will tomorrow morning when I go out for my orientation.  Small world, etc. etc.

In a way though it’s good to be forced to revisit the scene of your failures (and my involvement with Nuremburg was definitely a failure for me, in case you haven’t inferred that).  It helps keep you humble, or should.  And in an odd way I’m looking forward to being so close to the scene of that one tomorrow, if for no other reason than to mark what distance I’ve been able to put between the me of 24 years ago and the me of today.  (I’m pretty sure I have.  By now it’s only on the rare truly bad day I have my doubts.)

In a John Sandford novel I read a few years back, a Russian visiting the US observed that Americans have an odd habit of commemorating our disasters – the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and so on.  I myself get a bitter enjoyment out of seeing an old train crossing.  (Or the house I lived in while my marriage was slowly disintegrating.  Or the street where an ex-girlfriend, once she’d calmed down and stopped pummeling me, stood on the sidewalk and while her dog took a big smelly shit a few feet away told me chapter and verse what an asshole I’d been to her, and when.) 

In the end, I’m pretty sure it’s the same thing.  It’s not why I moved back to CA but it’s part and parcel of the experience of being here again- just as much as for instance smelling fresh-smoked chronic on the glaze-eyed youths who board the bus and remembering what it felt to smell like that myself - and I knew I’d be letting myself in for it.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.  Damned if I want to be someone who does.

February 23, 2012

At last, a weekday fully to myself and nothing scheduled.  Such days are not as frequent as you’d think in the life of an unemployed person.  I don’t watch TV all day; I don’t even have a TV.  I do have the computer but I try not to sit around the cottage staring at that all day either and usually do a fair job of it.  If all else fails I can take it to a coffeehouse instead and stare at it there.

Which is the plan for part of today: the first part, the good part.  As for the rest, it’s going to be another beautiful day – unseasonably warm and sunny to beat the band – and I suppose in the usually-less-productive afternoon I could drive up into the hills and go for a walk and I might just do that too if I feel like I get enough done during the morning.  Today’s Professional to-do list has seven items and if I hit four of them I’ll be satisfied. 

(More than four and it probably means I’ve had too much black tea.  A guy with my hypertensive issues needs to watch these things.)

The Personal list has only one item of consequence: haircut.  My hair’s not bushy, not yet, but with the warm weather I can feel how close it’s getting.  Also I want to give it a few days to grow out before the follow-up job interview I have scheduled on Monday; a week would have been better but you rarely get that kind of notice on these things when it might matter.

The interview is at the same place mentioned last week, what I hope will both be the final in the series and lead to a job offer.  At this point, anyway; the people I’m slated to meet Monday are top management and my impression of them might sway whether I want to work there.  For now I do; most of my interview last time was with the person I’d be working with closest, the position’s manager, and I felt very comfortable with him.  Also with the dynamic it appears he’s set up and wants to maintain in his section.  It’s rare –very – that I feel so relaxed in a potential employment situation and I’m thinking that augurs well.  We’ll see if I still do come Monday’s end for sure.

The other solid lead from last week – develop a working relationship with my old friend and the organization he runs – is going to take awhile to solidify, or at least a few weeks and maybe even months.  No problem.  One thing at a time far as I’m concerned, and focusing on locking down this Monday job is a pretty big one thing at the moment.  Ideally I will get that job, which is a reasonably well-paying half-time gig, and supplement its steady pay with freelance work for my friend’s organization.  And still have sufficient time to work on The Novel. 

Is everything going to come together so smoothly as to permit exactly that?  I kind of doubt it.  The reality rarely equals the fantasy, if ever.  But seeing how close it comes is one of the things that makes life interesting, isn’t it?

Don’t answer that.  I want an interesting life but not entirely in that way.  Just because I know the above scenario is likely a fantasy doesn’t mean I don’t want it to come true.  I do, and a lot.  I have what my Buddhist friends would call a potentially unhealthy attachment to outcome here.  So be it.  Far as I’m concerned such attachment is the way people eventually get what they want, healthy at first blush or no.

Like I wrote last entry: possibilities.  They’re why I returned to California, and a year and a half later they feel stronger than ever.  Whatever happens Monday can’t be at the worst more than a small speedbump.  I hold that thought close to me and it’s very comforting.

So far this week has been even better than last for possibilities.  A job app I submitted last night after close of business has already netted a phone-screening interview tomorrow morning.  Yesterday I read about a conference this weekend for local progressives – ironically, including the word “possibilities” in its title – and inquired about volunteering as a way of getting in at a discount and now I’m in for free in return for a 5-hour shift.  And Tuesday a member of my job-search action team loaned me her copy of the SF Business Journal’s Book of Lists, East Bay edition, that I was prepared to spend several hours at the library poring over (if it was available there at all) and once I finish writing this entry I plan to spend some quality time with it at a lot more leisurely pace. 

This last could be very fruitful: most of the job nibbles I’ve been getting have been across the bay and I want to work in Oakland someday, dammit.  Or Emeryville, or Berkeley, or even Alameda.  Commuting sucks when it requires more than a simple bus ride.  So it’s time to start identifying and then targeting potential employers within a 5-mile radius.  No doubt I should have done this a long time ago and I would if I’d known about this info source sooner.  Possibilities out the wazoo, or so it seems at the moment.

But they’re for after I’m done with today, afternoon walk or no.  It may be too nice a day to get all sweaty or risk sunburn.  Or it may be ideal for exactly that.  The best thing about possibilities is you often don’t have to assess them in detail until the last moment prior to deciding which one you’re going to explore.

February 18, 2012

Yesterday I had five items on my Professional to-do list for the day.  Today two of them are checked off and the others are rolling over, just as they have for most of the week.  Had three items on the Personal to-do list, with none of them checked off today so they’re all rolling over too.  So it goes.  

This early in the morning I can’t vouch for how productive today is going to be.  The to-do list on either side isn’t that lengthy but then again it wasn’t yesterday either.  If there’s only one item that does need to get checked off it’s Write 2000 words on novel, which was also on yesterday’s list and was one of the two items ending up checked off then.  No negotiation on that, no way.  I know what my truly important work is right now.

As usual, I’m just doing my best to maintain my focus on that important work and keep my shit together in every other aspect of this scattered – I’m sorry, “multi-faceted” sounds so much better, doesn’t it? – life.  A week like the one just ending shows just how energy-intensive that is.  No wonder I felt exhausted when it was barely even halfway through.

And that was before Thursday, which as far as this week is concerned was The Big Day.  In the final evaluation a good Big Day, a very good one actually, but still Big and consequently tiring on its own.  The networking lunch, over industrial-strength Chinese food on 9^th St. in SF , was a 90-minute full-on gabfest that led to the strong possibility of freelancing work with my friend’s nonprofit, which is exactly what I’d have hoped for if I’d let myself dare.  And the job interview following it was another gabfest, two hours this time, with me coming out thinking chances are better than even that I’ll be offered the position.  Very good, like I said.

And after all that goodness I had trouble winding down even by bedtime so I stayed up too late reading and then tossed and turned through much of the night.  The resulting exhaustion-plus the next day might explain why so little got done.  It was worth it though, and those 2K words are nothing to sneeze at either.  Satisfied, I am.  It’s a nice change, however temporary it may prove. 

Thursday afternoon as I walked down Spear Street on the way to the interview I spied a dollar bill just hanging out on the sidewalk and snapped it right up.  The only other person there to witness commented on my good luck and it’s true – how often do you see unclaimed money in the Financial District?  I couldn’t help but interpret it as a good omen: not just for the interview (which it seems like it very well was) but for some other as-yet-to-be-specified things about to happen.  That afternoon, anything seemed possible.

Feeling comparatively back down to earth today.  It’s only natural, inevitable even, and my sleep pattern pretty much demands it anyway.  But the sense of possibility remains, or should I say it remains stronger than usual.  I’ve had that sense ever since I returned to Oakland – boundless possibilities are what people come to California for after all, aren’t they?  It’s just been kind of weak lately, my focus on creative endeavors notwithstanding.  And it may go back to being weak a day or two or five from now, since that’s just how it is in a, um, multi-faceted life.  If/when it does my duty to myself is to remember that everything more or less evens out and that possibilities remain strong whether it feels that way at the moment or not.   And to keep calm accordingly.

My duty to myself, and to those around me.  I’ve been my own sort of high-maintenance person all my life and will almost certainly remain so but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my best to mitigate it: to pull my weight, so to speak.  I’m pretty sure that cultivating The Divine isn’t the only situation where I’m required to meet someone/something halfway; it’s good policy in daily dealings with fellow humans as well.  (Makes sense, since Quakers believe that all of us contain a measure of The Divine.  …oops, theology tangent.  Better change the topic quick.)

The temptation for the day or two after things go so well as they have is to kick back and enjoy it, tell myself the pressure’s off for a little while, and as temptations go it’s a pretty strong one.  My having given in to it also might explain why so little got done yesterday.  By all rights my nose should go back to the figurative grindstone today. 

Or maybe tomorrow, which is what I meant by not vouching for upcoming non-Novel productivity.  Whatever.  Is this going to help me keep my shit together, or meet the necessary someones/somethings halfway?  Not necessarily.  Again: whatever.  I’m doing my best with what energy I have to spread around.  I just hope that the week about to start and whatever it’s going to bring doesn’t require more than I have.

February 15, 2012

Today marks the end of the three-month grace period I bought by cashing in my UT retirement fund.  Haven’t decided yet whether it also marks the end of the phase begun at the same time, the one intended to be about building my personal brand but mostly has felt only like more shuffling around.  Which is to say I suspect this phase could, and likely will, go on a bit longer.  Quite a bit, even.  Issues of personal and public identity are no great respecters of arbitrary demarcations of time.

Obviously I’m not bringing this three-month period to a close by having found employment; you’d know it by now, and/or this entry would have begun quite differently.  That is, as they say, how it goes.  Under my skin I’m nowhere near so sanguine about this, and grow less so every day.  But as I see it there’s no point to belaboring that fact in this forum; if you’ve never been in this particular set of shoes then good on you, and if you have you don’t need me to tell you what it’s like.

Over this last week I put together a summary of my job-seeking efforts to date, seeking to get a statistical grip on where I’ve been in the hopes that it will inform where I’m going next.  Some of the resulting numbers for the period starting 6/1/11: 

• Jobs I’ve applied for: 100.  (Comprised of 85 responses to postings on Craigslist, 11 responses to other online postings, and 4 of miscellaneous origin.)
• Of those 100, applications that led to some form of interview: 11.
• Of those 100, applications that received no response at all: 75.
• Additional applications for contract assignments made through agencies: 50.
• Of those 50, applications that resulted in my resume actually being submitted to the client: 3 (that I know of).  1 of those resulted in an interview.
• Responses to my own Craigslist ad: 3.

Discouraging.  Or that’s the effect it’s had on me, at least.  When I presented these numbers to my accountability team in our meeting day before yesterday they said, “Well that’s good, you’re getting interviews at least.”  It’s true, and in early January I was still taking heart from that very fact. 

Not so much lately, though.  Perhaps it is time to begin a new phase.  I just wish I knew what. 

I keep busy, and plenty.  You know that’s not the problem.  Today, for example: I was planning on heading into SF for a lunch meeting with my old volunteer manager at Burning Man to catch up and, I hoped, discuss networking opportunities.  When that got rescheduled last-minute – hardly a surprise, since anyone even remotely highly-placed at B-man has likely had plenty plenty more pressing stuff to deal with in the last week or so – I thought instead to trek out to Concord for an overdue orientation session with the EDD-sponsored job-seeker organization I’ve joined, and which my accountability team is part of. 

Then I just decided to stay home because there’s just too damn much to do (including this blog entry, which to me is just as important as scanning the Craigslist postings).  Not going into SF frees me up for a networking workshop at the vocational service in Berkeley later in the afternoon and tomorrow I will be going into SF: a networking lunch with another old friend and a job interview after that.  And so on. 

And looming over all this is The Novel, which is currently refusing to allow sufficient progress no matter how much time I manage to divert to it.  Last weekend I piled up 6K words and still don’t feel appreciably closer to the end of the section I’m slaving over.  I doubt I’ll get back to it again until Friday, if then.  

I’m productive in other ways too, or at least have the opportunity to be.  My sole client has asked me to manage not only his website but his social media strategy.  (Me?  Well what the hell, I seem to know more about it than most of the people currently around him.)  I’m working up wireframes of possible site designs for another potential client.  I daily accumulate all kinds of links from my tweet-feed relating to design and user experience that I put aside, hoping to come back to them later.  Sometimes I even do.  

Plus there’s the meditation group.  That, and working to build connections with other writers locally, and other designers too.  Learning how to improve the functionality and appearance of my Drupal site, so I can move on and do the same with Wordpress.  Setting and meeting my weekly goals for the accountability group.  And some day – some day, I swear it – I’m going to do all those how-to exercises in Illustrator and learn how to use the damn software with confidence.  Good lord.  Who has time to actually look for a job?

Daily quibbles and mood swings aside, I like my life right now.  I like the people I meet and the discussions we have, I like the creative aspects infiltrating my existence, I like being back in California where all this is possible in a way it never seemed in Austin.  I like feeling like me, a me it hasn’t been OK to be before.

Of course, this life that I like so much is bound to change once I start working again, and part of me is in no hurry for that to happen.  That’s the part of me saying “Hell no, this phase can’t be over yet.  Take as much time as you want to brand yourself or shuffle around or whatever.”  Unfortunately, that’s also the part of me that doesn’t seem to have internalized how important a healthy bank balance is.  Argh.

In any case.  Time to stop navel-gazing and get on with the day, all its trials and tribulations and rewards.  Whether or not it’s a new phase, it’s certainly the end of a period and I need to honor that one way or the other.

P.S. Typepad tells me this is my 202nd entry in this journal.  Evidently I missed the 200th, but since 202 was the highway closest to my house growing up it's just as good a number for me.  Whatever.  Happy milestone.

February 8, 2012

Another month has come and gone.  I can tell not so much by the full moon throwing its light in through the windows – and the cat’s attendant periodical paroxysms of craziness – but because this afternoon I have to move my truck for street cleaning.  It’s a minor pain in the ass first to remember and then to actually do it, sometimes for two days running depending on which side I found parking the last time I took the truck out.  It’s also an effective way to mark the passage of time, though, and for that reason I’m moderately glad for it.

Once upon a time I made the resolution: Count the days and be aware of them as they pass.  This period is finite.  I’m sure it seemed that at the time – two years in CA tops was what I had in mind then - and the resolution commensurately a Good Idea.  But lately, especially when I realize it’s been almost a year and a friggin’ half since I arrived, that little bit of wisdom hardly seems relevant.  I’ve settled in for the long haul.  And one of the first things that happens upon settling is you start to lose track of time’s passage.

Which when you’re over 50 comes to feel like a worse oversight – more of a cheat - than it ever did before.  I suppose that’s what the damn resolution was all about in the first place.  Yet nonetheless most days when I wake I find myself hoping the day will pass quickly so I can go back to sleep and escape myself again for a precious few hours. 

Or maybe not so much myself as the uncomfortable uncertainties each day brings, and the corresponding uncertainties that I’ll be able to handle them adequately.  …naw, I was right the first time.  It’s myself I wish to escape.

If those sound like the words of a depressed person: well yeah.  Hello there.  I’m the one coming up on five years on Lexapro, remember?  Sometimes the depression is worse than others; it’s definitely been nipping at my heels lately in spite of all the things keeping me busy.  I can tell because last Sunday was the first time in something like three months I vacuumed and dusted the cottage’s interior.  It needed it long before that and it’s got to be a depressed person who stares day after day at the unsightly accumulation of cobwebs and pet hair evident in every corner and doesn’t do anything about it.

(I can’t blame it on the weather either, much as I’d like to.  While it’s been rainy-ish the last few days we’re having a by-and-large dry winter with far more than its share of sunny days - today’s supposed to be one of those, not that you’d know it yet from the way the fog is lingering – and that takes away the usual excuse.  The easy one, anyway.)

Part of being depressed is being tired much if not all of the time, and I certainly am that.  The phenomenon I’ve written about several times of feeling mid-morning like there’s nothing I can do but go back to bed has proved to be a recurrent one, and the only way I’ve yet found to address it is to leave the domicile and spend a few hours in my favorite cafe drinking black tea.  It works fine when I can afford it (and if you overlook that it’s a method heavily dependent on caffeine), and it’s certainly better than moping around the house all day.  It’s just… me.  So tired.  Yech. 

Not to mention worrisome.  I emerged from the writing workshop Saturday wrung out, almost literally dropping where I stood, and the workshop wasn’t even that rigorous in terms of creative energy.  Much more so in terms of what it took to deal with other people, as I was one of ten students and, apart from Clive, the only male in the room.  I didn’t much want to talk to anyone, just get some writing done but for everyone else it seemed like the exact opposite was true and that really wore me down over the course of seven hours.  Being pressed into service as timekeeper because people just wouldn’t shut the fuck up on their own?  Even more so.  But I should still by my calculations have had more strength left at the end of the day than I did.  Either I’m getting old or my filters need cleaning even more than my house did.

Or I need a deeper recharge than I’m getting.  A few entries back I wrote that I felt a dam inside me was about to burst – something that for me, when it does, more often than not serves as a natural refreshing mechanism.  But that hasn't happened, and I don’t think it’s going to in the near future either.  Instead I’ve closed back up, a window slamming down in my heart.  The last two meditation groups have been unsatisfactory - poorly-attended and subject to external distractions – and I don’t think I’ll be going tonight.  It might help energize me if I do, get me to open a little again, but I don’t have the reserves to risk that it won’t.

(More to the point, I’m not sure I can govern my impulse to pick fights with people, so strong these days, long enough to attend.  And that group is one place I definitely shouldn’t be taking that into.)

Chances are I’m just getting too much time to think about these things.  This week is proving less busy than expected because things keep getting canceled: the Drupal help clinic I was looking forward to yesterday afternoon, a volunteer meeting tomorrow morning.  Today the only thing on my calendar is an early-afternoon Skype call with an old friend in follow-up to the one we had last week.  No shortage of to-do list items – there never are – but few if any that involve being face-to-face (even on a computer screen) with other human beings. 

This is a problem.  I can get very depressed on such days; for one, there’s nowhere to go to escape myself.  On the other hand, I need the occasional day entirely to myself - tom myself with nowhere - to go to feel like I’m going to get anything done.   Maybe I’m not as settled in as I think.

We can talk about it some more the next time street cleaning comes around, I guess.

February 4, 2012

A new month and I’ve been too frantic to do more than barely acknowledge it, or the Facebook IPO or the Burning Man ticket lottery or the Komen-Planned Parenthood fracas or the Poff/Kamin killings or virtually anything beyond my little insular world.  Been busy running hither and yon to appointments all over the calendar and making note of the resulting action items on my Evernote tracking system and just generally having a busy life the way lots of other people do all the time.  I haven’t even had time to pick up the East Bay Express until today, and for me that’s noteworthy.  I can take it for a week at a time, or maybe two or three – next looks to be lots of the same and so for that matter does the one after it – but that doesn’t mean it’s not a shock to my typically lo-stim system.  So it goes.

Ordinarily Saturday is a good catch-up day.  Slow and leisurely.  I like it that way.  But last wasn’t, not even close, and today’s blocked out for another of those all-day writing workshops and that piled on top of this last week is leaving me feeling just a little pant-pant-pant this morning.  It’s all good in the end though – I’m under my targeted word-count for the week and today will not only catch me up but, if it goes as expected, put me over.  Way over.  So no complaints, even if I do have to run out to San Anselmo for it. 

Already I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to make the self-imposed end-of-March deadline.  I am, it seems, incapable of narrating anything in brief; the words just keep tumbling out because I’m not sure what’s important and what’s not.  Since this describes me in almost every facet of life it’s not much of a surprise, and anyway such winnowing as I will later be forced to do – deciding, however agonizing it will be (and it will), what actually is important - is what second drafts are for.  And thirds, I suppose.  All I know right now is 2K words/week doesn’t stand much chance against my mania for overwriting.

If I keep at this for some years I’ll doubtless learn to be more discriminating the first time around and save myself time then and work later.  Maybe my blog entries will get shorter too.  What a different world that would be.

In the meantime, though?  Just plugging along and trying to impose some discipline on myself, sometimes even successfully.  I think this is the last such workshop I’ll attend for a while, as the drawbacks – mainly it taking up an entire day, only a third of which at most is spent actually writing – by now largely outweigh the benefits.  I don’t need the audience, not for the time being.  Knowing that and adjusting accordingly is a form of discipline.  I’ll take it.

I’m plugging along on other fronts too: plugging along and running out of money, again.  I’ll be getting another cash infusion in a few weeks but as usual with these quarterly disbursements I won’t know how much until it gets here - whether it will be enough to keep me another month or more, or only a few weeks.  I suspect the latter even though February is usually the largest of the year. 

(Of course, as ever I’m lucky to get anything at all.  But since I’ve never lived without these quarterly infusions once I turned 18 it’s hard to remember that sometimes.)

And after that runs out?  I’d better think of something quick.  No more retirement funds to cash out, unless you want to count the Roth account I started a few years back and since I’ve been putting a minimal amount in every month after coming to CA I doubt once taxes and early-withdrawal penalties are dealt with it’ll yield much more than a month’s sustenance.  So: getting down to the wire.  Again.

And lately it’s been keeping me up at night.  Not as much as it could, or perhaps should, or very likely will a few weeks from now, but nonetheless enough to give me pause.  My sleep is a precious thing, and the fact that I’ve been enjoying more of it than I’m accustomed to, and that in better quality, since I’ve landed in this little cottage makes it feel all that much more so.  I wish some morning I’d wake up from one of these decent nights’ sleep to find I suddenly, miraculously, know what to do next that will put my mind at rest and money in my pocket.  But I’m not holding my breath.  Things have a way of not working like that.

So instead I strive for enlightenment in my own way, which mostly is to keep plugging.  Hoping each day that my luck will change, and looking for little things I can do to help it along.  (I believe that luck much of the time expects you to meet it halfway before it starts to manifest.  In this way it’s very much like The Divine.)  Paying attention as best I know how.  (Some days it seems like I don’t know how at all and others I feel like I pay attention better than most.  I wish I could predict which days are going to be which and schedule my job interviews accordingly.) 

And keeping the breath moving in and out, remembering to deepen it on occasion when needed.  When I say “keep plugging” maybe this last is really all I mean.

Breathing is good when you’re frantic.  I’m going to have plenty of chance to observe that in the next two weeks, something tells me.