Welcome to installment five. The past week has been one of extreme highs and crushing lows. As usual.
I'd like to formally invite everyone to use this space to tell your stories, your rants and your prayers, your puns and pains. We're all in this together, more so now than ever before.
Caveat: I ramble, bitch and moan, and engage in a bit of sociological speculation along the way. Once more over the fold --
Tuesday morning, I was depressed. I snapped out of it in the grocery store and started pole-dancing to Phil Collins. Important note -- 40 year old overweight diabetic part-Cherokee men should never pole-dance in public. Or in private. It burns us.
Tuesday afternoon, I got a call from a local teleservices comany I had sent off an application to a few weeks before to set up an interview for Director of Training and Development. I was dancing (again, no pole this time). They set the interview for a few weeks down the road. I was so excited I called my friend at my old job to enthuse.
The company called me back a couple hours later and changed the interview to a phone interview on Wednesday.
I think I blew the interview. I'm not sure, because they said they had ten applications and wanted to narrow it down for the face-to-faces, but I am pretty sure they don't want me. It's just the attitude I got from the interviewer, the way he implied I was lying about being laid off, the way he acted like I was a temp rather than someone who had spent five years moving up the ladder. I could be wrong. It sounded like the kind of job I could have sunk my teeth into. I'll know by the end of this week, they said they'd call me and let me know either way. If they say no, I'll ask if they are going to keep my app on file for future positions.
I was thinking about my old job. I don't talk about it much here due to a combination of residual loyalty and a disinclination to burn any bridges I don't have to -- and sometimes you have to burn a bridge, especially if they are chasing you across it with torches and dogs. In this case, there's a bit of hope that having a good association with the old job may parlay itself into something positive down the road. But for about the last year I had had a bit of a bad attitude about the job. The thing that started the attitude, for me, was when the company changed the insurance from a normal, HMO-style (and in MN HMOs aren't quite as bad as they are in other places as only non-profits are allowed to operate here) to a high-deductible plan with an HSA. These high-deductible plans are, as far as I am concerned, another scam by the oligarchy to screw us, and I was disappointed when my company bought into it.
For years I have been vocal about my opposition to the 401k plan. I make no secret that, in my opinion, it was designed as a way to allow companies to get out of paying pensions and simultaneously inject everyone's retirement savings into the stock market where brokers and speculators could use other's money to leverage profits for themselves, and use these funds as a way to insulate themselves from losses. Privatizing profits and socializing losses. I've been saying this since the 90's. So many people tried to tell me I was just missing out on the free money of corporate matching funds. When the market tanked, I did not lose any savings. Of course, that's because I, like most real people I know (as opposed to Suze Orman and her ilk) didn't have any savings to lose. Does this mean that when I retire I'll be a pauper? If the economy doesn't significantly improve, none of us will be able to retire anyway, so it's moot -- to me, paying down my debt (including my mortgage) is the same as saving money.
I sent off a couple more appications this week. A couple days after, I saw one of the places I sent an app to is hiring a full-time baker. Maybe they'll call? It would be a career change, and I am OK with that. I've changed my career track so often that, really, I don't actually have one. I'm a high-school dropout (with the California equivalent of a G.E.D.) with 23 years of varied work and life experiences. I pick up new things quickly, but these days it seems like anything I could pick up in a month has a line of people with degrees waiting.
I am becoming a bit demoralized.
My plan to start my own business is balanced on the knife edge of doubt. 50% of the time I think it's the only way to go, that I would rather work 60 hours for myself than 30 for another. The other half, it seems like a fancy way to piss away months and set myself up for yet another humiliating failure. I can't afford very many more of those.
Tuesday was a big day for me. My friend Frank re-energized me about painting. I've sold a few paintings in the last decade, not many, but enough for me to state with confidence I have a bit of talent (I paint surrealist abstraction). So this week I went down in the basement and started smearing paint around. It felt good. Thanks, Frank!
Unemployment, the last time it happened to me, seemed to be very goal-oriented. Last time I was looking for a job, I didn't have anything but need to have some income, any income. This time it's become much more process-oriented. I have the fallback of unemployment insurance, so I can wait and look for a job that pays something closer to what I was making before, so I don't have to go out and pound the pavement for a minimum-wage any-old-job-will-do job. Not yet. Maybe when the unemployment runs out. I believe that if not for unemployment insurance, there would be a large, loud, and ugly revolution going on in this country. We'd be marching on Washington, burning down banks, and rioting. It may happen yet.
Floor's open -- what's your week been like?