Wandering like the wild geese in the west

March 7, 2012

With gas now suddenly and precipitously at $4.19/gallon, the bus pass becomes an even more crucial part of life than before.  My truck gets something like 10mpg for city driving, no lie, and plodding around town is stressful anyway even without the additional parking costs.  So $80 for 31 days of AC Transit is a quite the bargain in comparison.  I carefully track my pass usage each month and so far it’s always paid for itself - on average, 25% extra, in fact.  As always, as long as I have nowhere to get in a hurry the bus is great.

Today I definitely have nowhere to go in a hurry.  Nowhere to go at all actually, unless you count a stroll down to Lakeshore to pick up some meds and an avocado or two.  It’s a good thing too because, in direct opposition to the last entry, today is going to be one of those struggling-through-molasses days; been sleeping poorly all week so far and the effects aren’t pretty.  The best thing I can do is stay home, enjoy the sunshine, and get things done at the glacially-slow pace my energy permits.  I know, it really does sound like a dirty job, doesn’t it?

It’s now a full year I’ve been out of work.  “New phase,” as I wrote at the time.  I didn’t expect it to go on this long but who ever does?  If I’d known it was going to be an entire year… well, it’s hard to say what I would have done different.  Probably not too much, only enjoyed the time off more.  Maybe concentrated on my writing more heavily and sooner.  Easy to say that now, even if it does give short shrift to the idea that everything naturally unfolds in the time-span that it’s supposed to.

Two days ago I mailed off paperwork to cash in the Roth fund I started three years ago during a stretch of feeling flush and optimistic.  If all goes as planned the proceeds from that will take me through until mid-May or so.  After that?  Why, I’ll be working again, of course.  Just as I’ve said every time upon arranging each of the separate infusions of cash that’s gotten me through this last year.  And just as each time I’ve believed it.

I didn’t get the job offer I hoped for from the place where I had a third round of interviews last week.  Disappointing, but not 100% a shock since the last round was with senior management and the vibe was off throughout.  I’m presuming it’s to make room for other possibilities, whatever they are.  I had another interview yesterday with a different place and while I’m now pretty sure it’s not one where I want to work it’s always good to keep the options open. 

Got an interview scheduled early next week at yet another place – face-to-face this time after two rounds of phone screening - and the vibe there so far feels pretty good.  So: just stick with it.  All the effort will pay off, and hopefully before the Roth money runs out.

I’ve got other things on my mind, and as usual many of them revolve around money or the possessions that it enables.  A few days back the Applecare on my MacBook expired, which means that my laptop is now three years old.  I’m going to have to upgrade it to 10.7 in the next few months if I want to keep my cloud access (formerly obtained through the now-defunct Mobileme service), which I do even though collateral damage is that some of my old-standby applications will doubtless no longer run on the new OS.

Worse, I discovered recently that 10.7 won’t run at all on my iMac with its archaic chip.  So I’m going to need to replace that hardware some time in the not-too-distant future - a prospect I appreciated a lot more when it was only a matter of desire and not necessity – if I want to keep even modest pace with the march of technology.  Which, again, I do.  One more hole in the pocket coming right up.

You can drive yourself mad thinking about this stuff, especially if in this context "thinking" is synonymous with "worrying."  So today, I hereby declare, is a day neither for worry nor insanity but instead for enjoying the sunshine.

Or the cat in the sunshine, or both.  It’s like this: last week I bought a new orange blanket because you can always use more colored fleece around the house and/or campsite.  (Recycled colored fleece.  From REI at 40% off, no less.)  I wasted no time in spreading it out on the window-seat and now Sadie has a new favorite place to spend her sleeping hours. 

Seeing her there so peaceful and carefree warms my heart the way the sunshine itself warms my toes. I expect there’s a lot I can learn from her in this context at least: Find a suitable spot, claim it and dwell there for as long as the dwelling is good.  Cats are good teachers if you let them be.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m not still in the spot-finding phase despite all indications to the contrary.  I’ve settled in Oakland, with a nice place to live and a favorite coffeehouse to work from and an expanding personal and professional network and a profession that each month I feel less hesitant to call my own.  (You ask whether by “profession” I mean designer or novelist?  The answer is yes.)  I expect to be where I am for some time to come.  (Who was I kidding, two years here max?  By that timeline I’d be packing up come next August.  Nuh-uh.)  So have I claimed my spot or what?

Good question.  Seriously.  I guess that depends on how long I find the dwelling here to be good.  Like a cat, that can change for me in a second.  All I know is with gas prices the way they are and my prolonged unemployment, going anywhere like I did the summer before last (or even out to the desert for a full week like a year ago at this time) is off the table for the time being.  Knowing that makes enjoying the sunshine all that much more crucial.

March 3, 2012

What an absolutely, spectacularly beautiful morning it is out today. There were some just as lovely in Austin – many, in fact, before the day’s heat had a chance to properly set in – but there’s a quality of light in the East Bay when the sun’s just up over the rim of the hills that can’t be matched anywhere I’ve been and it’s on display even more than usual right now.  I love mornings period, I admit it.  Today shows why.

Of course a spectacularly beautiful morning needs to be felt as well as seen to be truly appreciated and I have alas wasted more than a few because this piece wasn’t in place.  More mornings than not I just don’t feel that great: tired (in spite of how well I might have slept), sluggish mentally as well as physically, apprehensive about the day ahead.  It’s a shame, because I really do love mornings. 

Today is one of those rare ones where the weather inside is as good as out.  I never know what brings about this confluence: evidently I got just the right amount of sleep, or went to bed with the right thoughts, or both.  All I know is at least for the next few hours my mind is clear, my body doesn’t hurt (mostly), and I’m not looking to pick a fight with someone on the street.  “Spry” would be a good word to describe how I feel, and as a result I’m ready to have a splendid day, productive and forward-looking and maybe even insightful.  When you have a morning like this you really don’t want to let it slip by un-grasped and un-squeezed of potential.  I don’t, anyway. 

This is not to say I have any special plans for the day that further differentiate it.  In fact it’s going to be pretty much like any other Saturday of late: have breakfast at my favorite spot in the Temescal and chat a little with my favorite server; walk across the street to my favorite coffeehouse and (if I get there early enough) grab my favorite table where I’ll spend 3-4 hours generating new copy on The Novel; head home in the afternoon via Rockridge, doing my week’s shopping at the Trader Joe’s there and picking up the books on hold for me at the library; and, finally, settle in for the evening with a new book or a needing-done project or both.  Routine, all of it, and sometimes it gets stale but I don’t expect this to be one of the days where it does. 

(Tonight will be a deviation of sorts in that my friends who moved from Emeryville to Richmond last year are having games night at the new house and that’s one of the few things could get me out on a Saturday night.  Today’s picked-up books will have to go unread just a little longer, evidently.)

This is also not to say also that my body is 100% ache-free.  It never truly is, and today added to the usual background aging-noise are the scrapes and bruises picked up yesterday when I tripped over the raised edge of a seam in the sidewalk and came this close to doing a complete face-plant.  Those scrapes and bruises are all where they should be in such a circumstance – on my knees and hands, which fortunately are what at the last moment prevented my face from hitting the concrete first – but they nonetheless serve to chasten me suitably.  It’s true that the bigger you are the harder you fall, and I’ve gotten pretty big.  My balance is, quite simply, not what it was at 100 or even 50 lbs lighter, and I suppose I’m grateful to gravity for its efforts (un-gentled though they may sometimes be) to inform me of this.

(Often the worst part of such a fall is having it witnessed by strangers.  Yesterday a well-meaning person at the bus-stop I was hurrying to when I tripped called out as I slowly, resentfully picked myself up to ask if I was all right.  “You didn’t see that,” I told him, and I guess I pitched my tone pretty convincingly because he wouldn’t look at me for the entire bus ride that followed.  People do all kind of things to compensate for humiliation.) 

Today I can’t see the bruises but I can feel them.  They sing out at unexpected moments when the affected patches of skin come into contact with something.  It would hardly be worth comment – the body is made to bruise and heal, after all – but I suffer so little injury in this phase of my life it almost seems like a big deal.  I no longer bicycle so I don’t fall off moving machinery at speed – that used to be a big hazard, bruises and scrapes galore resulting.  I don’t miss them and for the most part I don’t miss biking either, though not entirely for that reason.

I no longer swim either, which essentially leaves only bus-riding and walking as possible sources of injury.  The hell with it, though: I’m not going to live forever, and on a splendid day like this walking would be a great thing to do, even a brief hike around the perimeter of the Mountain View Cemetery.  Risk another fall.  Live a little, Mr. Mitty.

I’m almost certain that’s exactly what I’m not going to do, though.  What I am going to do is sit in a coffeehouse for the rest of the morning and then part of the afternoon, all the while pounding on the keyboard of my laptop.  The words just keep on coming, which is gratifying but simultaneously makes things somewhat difficult because with less than a month to go to my self-imposed deadline for finishing the first draft I’ve begun to suspect I won’t make it.  Still many sections to write and they all end up being longer than expected. 

At least if I do miss the deadline it won’t be for doing nothing.  That’s a small consolation.

A day like this is its own consolation too: consolation for whatever sacrifices I’ve made to have my current life, whatever certainties arise (daily, as they do) from taking the path I have.  I’m looking forward to exploiting it exactly as such.

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.

January 30, 2012

The neighbors three doors down are doing some semi-major renovations on the house and the weekdays are filled with its noise: a hammer pounding, a power-saw whining, and this morning the snap of a roofing gun as shingling is attached.  Mostly not intrusive, and I can’t see the workers for the vegetation in the way so it’s all good back here in my quiet little corner of Oakland.  Actually it’s better than good: I like knowing people are around, and busily at work.  Some places I’ve lived in this city the only sound you heard during the day was the rattling of shopping carts filled with empty cans as the neighborhood derelicts made their daily rounds of the dumpsters on the block.

It was a lot noisier over the weekend, Saturday especially, and most of the noise came from helicopters circling overhead.  Occupy Oakland at it again, in other words, also in a semi-major way.  It’s already been covered to death in both the mainstream media and the independent so I won’t bore you with details (though this first-hand account is a welcome alternative to the story being repeated ad nauseum by the regular news noise machine and this covers the difficulty of getting a story out at all for some journalists).  Hell, by now you may have as many of those details as me, and I was there for part of the day.

Participating in an OO march wasn’t part of the plan when I left the house that morning.  Having breakfast at Aunt Mary’s and working on The Novel at the coffeehouse across the street was, and that was about the extent of it.  But I made good progress with the writing, 2100 words in a little over two hours, and when noon rolled around and I was all noveled-out but not ready to head home yet I stood outside on Telegraph, considered what an absolutely spectacular day it was (I apparently had to choose the only day all week that wasn’t beautiful to go to Point Reyes), and contemplated my options until I remembered the flyers I’d been seeing on the poles: something about a Move-In Day March where OO claimed it would occupy a vacant building that would become the movement’s hq and/or social center.  Hmmm – dubious but still worth a look.  It certainly had to be better than spending the rest of the day indoors, as I knew I’d do otherwise.

So a little while after that I was at 14^th and Broadway watching the crowd boil out into the intersection.  (OK, more than a little while since the protest was already snarling bus service and I waited more than a half-hour in the Temescal for a #1 to arrive.  I could have gotten there faster walking but since I hadn’t planned on marching I left my hiking boots at home.)  And a little while after that the fun began and it didn’t let up the rest of the day.

 

Milling at 14th and Broadway

For others, that is.  I lasted all of about three hours and when I arrived home around 4PM I was footsore, exhausted, mildly dehydrated, and fed up.  Disgusted by some of what I’d experienced: people tearing down fences for no apparent reason at all, way too much “fuck the police” invective, the OPD’s predictable overreaction, the general aimlessness of it all.  Occupy the Kaiser Auditorium grounds?  What the hell were they thinking?  Some foreclosed house somewhere – yeah, that would have been within the day’s reach.  It would have made a positive statement consistent with the Occupy movement’s goals.  The Kaiser, though, had little value but sheer provocation. 

 

So, OO provoked and the OPD reacted and we got another chapter in the nice little dance that stands in for reasonable protest in this city.  Argh.  “Disgusted” just about sums it up for me two days later as well.

I mostly stayed out of harm’s way and on the march’s fringe: partially because that’s my style anyway, and partially because I didn’t want to risk arrest and possible physical abuse while carrying a 15-lb. daypack containing my laptop and all kinds of other things I couldn’t replace if lost, stolen or damaged.  As it was I got shoved around a little anyway; stopped to turn and watch one of the first arrests, one of the foot escorts for Larry The Bus on the march’s trailing edge, and a cop grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me not very gently in the direction I was supposed to keep going.  I didn’t fuss about it, but after that I made good and sure to stay outside the police cordon.  Not 8 blocks into the march and it was already evident the OPD wasn’t going to be fooling around this time.

After that I also got out my Flip and kept it on almost until the recording time ran out, fixed mostly on the police in case something happened – you can never have too many cameras in such circumstances, as last fall amply proved.  When I got to the Kaiser I filmed protestors instead; everybody gets their turn on camera as far as I’m concerned, even if I plan on never making the footage public.  In the end it just isn’t that interesting. 

(Not even the wild-eyed long-hair who sat cross-legged facing the police line at 10^th and Fallon chanting “boingboingboing” high-pitched.  He was flat-out weird and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was later involved in the flag-burning.)

What I most wish after what I witnessed Saturday is for someone - me, if it comes to it - to form a group of concerned Oakland residents to act as adults at these marches: to call out the vandals and the provocateurs and expose them to the rest of the crowd for what they are, which is jerks who fuck up the Occupy movement for those of us who’d see it do something besides get scornful headlines.  The fence-busters I saw at the Kaiser were mostly little cowards in black masks who hugged each other like they’d achieved something worth celebrating; I wanted to take them over my knee for a good spanking.  The movement has to police itself and slowly, steadily, cut the OPD out of the loop.  I hope others see the need for this too, but if so I haven’t heard much about it to date.

That’s what I’m thinking today, anyway.  Thank god for the quiet that makes it possible.

 

[Addendum 1/31: This sums up my disgruntlement best of all so far.]

January 27, 2012

I made it out to Point Reyes yesterday as planned but can’t tell you if the ground was indeed nice and verdant.  You need sunlight to fully gauge that, lots of it, and the sun just didn’t want to come out.  I did get a few nice pictures of various flora and fauna in the fog but otherwise I mostly wish I’d waited until some other time.  Like today, when the sun is nice and bright and ha-ha-in-your-face here in Oakland and, according to the internet, on the coast too.  Poop. 

Yesterday was alas somewhat characteristic of this week, which hasn’t been as satisfying as the one preceding.  I’ve been plenty busy, sure: meetings with other job-seekers, a Drupal user group get-together in SF, the meditation group - no grass growing under these feet, right?  I’m just not sure what all the busy-ness amounts to in the short-term.  I didn’t get one of the jobs I interviewed for and the other one hasn’t been heard from since that “still deciding” note last Friday.  I wasn’t heartbroken about the first and if the second doesn’t come through I won’t be either but nonetheless: your heart can stay intact and your feet always in motion but you still have to pay the bills, you know?  So if by “less satisfying” what I might actually mean is “discouraged,” yeah, there’s some of that.

On the bright side, it looks like starting next week I’ll be part of a newly-formed job-search accountability group: a small knot of people meeting regularly to discuss progress in their individual job searches and generally help stave off the isolation and apathy that comes with long-term unemployment.  I don’t know how well it’s going to work, me not being much of a group person when anything important’s at stake, but I know two of the members already and they’re both very on-the-ball types so I’m expecting to participate in kind.  It certainly can’t hurt to give it a try.

Until then I’ve got plenty to do today and tomorrow and the day after.  Plenty.  That’s if I have the energy for it; yesterday’s trip, a mere 7 hours, left me inexplicably exhausted and I’m still feeling it this morning.  Schedule-wise today is a light one - lunch with a friend and that’s it – for which I’m very glad.  But I don’t like feeling so drained, especially not on a day full of the promise of glorious California sunshine. 

However drab and spent I might feel, I’m probably still leaps and bounds above my sister now she’s returned from her emergency trip to PA.  She sent a long detailed email yesterday about her experience there and my mother’s condition; the news is not good and she’s 98% sure it’s only going to get worse.  I believe her.  None of us are looking forward to what comes next.

Regardless of what exactly that will be, I don’t expect to be writing about it again here.  Far as I’m concerned it’s a private matter from now on.  But if the frequency of my entries drops, or the tone grows darker than usual, or if it seems like I’m struggling with something I can’t talk about – this is likely why.  Family stuff.  You know.

The last couple of weeks have stood out from the regular pattern for me, in spite of the family stuff or maybe in part because of it.  (Probably because.  I’m often the last to see the link between cause and effect when it most matters.)  I wouldn’t primarily call this stretch trying though that’s definitely been one aspect; all weeks are trying when you don’t have a stable source of income.  I’d be more inclined to say simply that it's been emotionally charged in a way I haven’t experienced in a good long while, presuming that is the emotions range beyond anger and its kissing cousins.

And in this case they do, and how.  For two weeks now I’ve felt like a dam inside me is ready to burst in a way it hasn’t in years.  It may actually burst in the near future or it may not, I can’t tell – one effect of taking Lexapro long-term is that a lot of the time the breakdown you think you might be about to have or should be having just doesn’t come.  And while a lot of the time that’s a good thing, not all breakdowns are unhealthy; some are downright necessary, in fact.

All I know is that for months I’ve been praying – literally praying, and I’m not much the praying type – for help in opening myself, in letting drop some of the hard-heartedness I’ve built up during years of sobriety to compensate for being naturally thin-skinned.  Help in seeing clearly some of the lies I live by, foremost the one that says anything I do to protect myself from being hurt is justified even though it may result in someone else being hurt instead.  Help in simply not acting like an asshole so much of the time.

And two weeks ago in the meditation group I felt like I got an answer to that prayer.  Or the beginnings of one.  Got it just by being there, really; I guess I was finally ready for it.  But now I’ve got it I’m not sure what comes next.  I suspect it might be as simple as just staying out of my own way, or getting to higher ground if and when the dam does burst, and not being too much of an idiot while picking up the pieces afterward.  I don’t know.  I find it ever so much easier to write about in this journal than I do talking face to face.  I’ve kind of lost the nerve for that in my life and don’t know how, or if, I’ll get it back.

So yeah.  Out of the pattern.  The kind of thing that can really get in your way on a job search, right?  But you don’t get to pick when moments of enlightenment – or even just opening – are going to strike.  Maybe just dealing with it is what the busy-ness amounts to in the short term.  See?  I told you I have plenty to do.