Oh, y’all.
Nothing too strenuous, just your garden-variety nutso, but all in all, my life has been a flat-out whirlwind for the past month. Or so. It’s hard to pinpoint when the madness began.
My office is once again on the move. Our lease has expired and we are boxing up all our crap and moving to a new (read: less expensive) office across town. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around it. In fact, I’m sitting here right now looking at four empty boxes that have my name on them, so marked because that’s where all my personal/desk crap needs to go. I can’t seem to make myself do it.
The problem here is this: my boss has said, repeatedly, “one and done.” Meaning, he has signed a one-year lease on the new office space, will work one more year, and then the end.
Which is all well and good except that means I will be out of a job. And I don’t know if you’ve looked lately, but jobs are pretty scarce.
And I knew all of this, yes, over a year ago. It’s amazing how fast time goes.
Which is not to say that I haven’t been looking for a new job. I have. I’ve applied all over the place. Competition is pretty fierce, and I haven’t even gotten an interview. All I have is a sheaf of “thank you but we hired someone else” letters.
That whole business this summer about me taking the GRE? Yeah. I don’t know how I’m going to afford grad school. So I’ve set the idea aside. My GRE scores are good for five years. At this point it seems a little more important to oh, pay the mortgage and Spawn’s tuition. And eat.
I often fantasize about retirement. That’s what it’s come to, folks. I am, as my grandmother would say, wishing my life away. But at least by fixing my eyes on retirement I am assuming that at some point there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. I hope to god it’s not a train.
And yes, I am battling my seasonal depression right now, too. So that’s fun. The temptation is there to lose myself in a bottle of wine every night but this isn’t college and I don’t bounce back like I used to.
So, yeah. Unicorns and rainbows and happiness all around. And that, my friends, is what I came here to offer you today, as a way of apology for not checking in more often. Bet you’re glad I did, huh?
Blech.
— Mox
Sorry ’bout the job. Yes, they’re few and far between. My son went to apply for a job as a waiter. The guy pointed to another guy waiting on customers and said, “He was a lawyer!” It was all very demoralizing. Although at my school we’re all bemoaning increased class sizes (28!), truth be told, we’re just glad to have a job.
My friends came from England for a three-week stay. The last five days you’d have thought we were living in Seattle with the overcast skies. I received a text after they landed in London, that they were back in “sunny England.” Ouch! If we’d stayed in Seattle, I would have needed one of those light boxes to scare away the mental goblins. On that note, I’m going to watch “Dexter” to cheer myself up.
My comment creativity is at such a low ebb right now that I’m grateful for the new feature of clicking “like” on a post. I hope you find a new job that you enjoy. My son-in-law has been looking for a while. He was in a touring band for almost a year, so he has a resume gap. He doesn’t want to mention the band to potential employers (unless the job is music related) because he doesn’t want them to think he’ll quit to hit the road on tour again, which he swears he’ll never do again. He and the band spent a couple of nights on the floor of Alwaysjan’s older son’s floor while they passed through his town.