Category: Deeds

The unemployment website is broken today.

However, I’ve gotten an email from someone asking if I want to make up to $100,000 or more! The initial email was vague on the nature of the business, but invited me to an interview in Woburn.

The company has no website. I wrote back to ask what they do– they claim to sell insurance to small groups and individuals. Vault.com surveys indicate that they’re a multilevel marketing scam.

Which really makes me wonder, how hard did they read my resume before inviting me for an interview? The obvious keywords of “Woburn,” “sales,” “dupe,” and “sucker” are totally missing. What keywords are they looking for?

Nat IM’d me last week to persuade me to join him in a trip to Tremblant, about an hour and a half northwest of Montreal. I didn’t have any snow gear, I hadn’t been snowboarding in six or eight years at least, but on the plus side the ride up would be free and I didn’t exactly have any obligations for the weekend. So, I went.

The theme song for the weekend turned out to be “Jenny”, from The Mountain Goats’ album “All Hail West Texas,” and its defining line “900 cubic centimeters of raw whining power, No outstanding warrants for my arrest. Hi diddle dee dee! Goddamn! The pirate’s life for me.” The lyrics, vocals, instrumentation, and production quality are all decidedly low to absent in that song, but it’s evocative of freedom and fun. Most importantly, it’s hilarious, especially when seven people sing it out loud while rolling down the windows in their overstuffed SUV as they pull up to the Canadian border in a snowstorm.

I guess you had to be there.

Why haven’t we begun impeachment proceedings?

It seemed like a good-natured bar-crawl in Boston but the New Zealand edition ended in assault, theft, and arrest. Some reports described it as a protest while the others just said it was drunken hooliganism.

Today I had the second half of my career seminar. Fully half the people there said that health insurance was their major concern in finding a new job.

I’d expected I’d have more free time when I was unemployed, but this week has been nonstop so far. Tomorrow I have my first job interview since the summer of 1999, and I haven’t even had time to think of five examples of times I overcame obstacles in the past, and how they relate to ways I can solve problems in my new employer. Nor have I printed up business cards for my new, independent self. Nor have I read Blink or The Tipping Point, both of which seem to be required reading for job-seekers this year. The rest of my to-do list is now in Mozilla Sunbird, which seems great so far.

I’m finally getting around to things I’ve been meaning to do for awhile: removing myself from the mailing list of every catalog that comes to my door, pruning the shrubs that have begun to grow on my shoulders, reading the blogs of old high-school friends. But the world has an uncanny way of filling up my time.

For example, today I got a letter forwarded from my parents. It was a result, indirectly, of the first time I ever visited Boston.

I think it was 1997 or 1998, but I do know it was very cold and snowy, and that I got a ride up with my friend Cheryl, and that my girlfriend at the time was incredibly jealous. She didn’t need to be: I got a horrible case of strep throat and ended up spending a snowy evening in the ER, and the rest of the time on my friend’s couch watching bad movies and drinking tea (admittedly, we’d have spent most of the time watching bad movies and drinking beer, not running out picking up girls, but whatever).

Nothing happened for a long time, until apparently in early October 2005, someone with a similar name, or perhaps a social security number close to mine, or even just giving my name or social security number, got some bloodwork done. A bill was mailed to the address on file: my parents’ house.

I called and talked to a nice lady who said she’d help me sort it out, and hoped it wasn’t an inconvenience. I said, oh no, I just lost my job, so I have all the time in the world. She paused. I know it’s rude to make people uncomfortable that way, but it’s funny to me.

And now, to vacuum.

I met a potential employment lead yesterday, at a dinner following a reading at the Harvard Bookstore given by Moorishgirl.com author Laila Lalami. Laila writes beautifully, and reads just as well. Plus, if there was ever a more beautifully alliterative name, I have not heard it– sure, silly alliterative names, but this is a good one. It was a rather odd little collection of people at dinner: three female fiction writers, Bookdwarf, and three guys: me, a software engineer married to one of the fiction writers, and a tech-writing manager married to one of the others. Hooray for continuing gender stereotypes. At any rate, tech-writing-manager guy said he didn’t have any openings at the moment but I should send him my resume just in case. There’s a chance that my skills will match their needs, and a chance that he’ll have budget to add someone. Many chances put together equal employment.

Before that, I cleaned the house and did laundry, and spent two hours at the gym. My non-career goals right now involve developing an intimidating look that can be cleaned up rapidly if I get an interview: lots of gym time, plus strategically groomed stubble.

At first I was afraid of all the effort that strategically groomed stubble would require, but really I can spend up to an hour on it every day, and still be bored and out of things to do by five.

Hint to anyone looking for a brilliant writer: I’m available. (Note to parents: I am also applying for jobs, not just hoping they will appear.)

Today I applied for unemployment. They let you do this by phone, and the lady on the phone was quite nice to me. They said to go to their website on Sunday and fill out another form to update them, and that from then on I would have to do that every week until I got a job. Benefits don’t kick in until my second week with no work, though.

So to be productive, I took all my rolled assorted change to the bank and deposited it. When I got home I vacuumed the apartment, and mopped the floors– and not with that wimpy swiffer-wet thing. I used the real mop, with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and plenty of elbow grease. Then I scrubbing-bubbled the sink and tub and toilet, and the floor of the bathroom. Then I took a few drops of essential eucalyptus oil M had for putting in candles, and I put it on the sponge and went over the bathroom floor and the outside of the tub and toilet again. Then I took the bristly brush and scrubbed the mildew off the shower curtain. Then I had to go back over the bathroom floor because while I was doing the shower curtain, I had got footprints and sweat all over the floor.

Then I went back to the kitchen, and washed the mop and the bucket, and filled it with clean hot water and six or ten drops of essential lemongrass oil, and re-mopped the whole apartment to make sure I hadn’t left any soap on it. This house has not been so clean since we moved in.

Now I am going to start on dinner so that when M. gets home it can be ready.

I plan to be wearing either an apron, or a dress made entirely of plastic wrap.

I am in Barcelona, at Brainshare. Somewhat to my surprise, my Spanish hasn’t totally disappeared, and I’m having a lovely time being everyone’s translator. I even manage to understand the people who ask questions in Portuguese, as long as they talk very, very, slowly.

However, this morning, I tried to get out of bed and my legs were asleep, and I fell over, and hit my face on the edge of a table, bruising it badly. Combined with Sunday’s shaving mishap, this now makes two days out of three that I’ve been at the show looking like I’ve just come out of a rather nasty fight.

Also I read “Willful Creatures” by Aimee Bender. Excellent.

Three anecdotes:

On the way to work the other day I saw a very pale girl with very long purple hair and a tiny tiny black dress walking up the street. I wanted to stare but the light turned green. I wondered where she was going.

At work I saw a red bumper sticker that said “If this sticker is blue you’re driving too fast.” Get it? It’s a joke about the Doppler effect. See, if you approach the sticker at close to the speed of light, it causes the red wavelengths reflected from the sticker to appear blue, so if it’s blue, you’re going about a hundred eighty thousand miles an hour too fast, and… let’s just say I work near MIT.

Last night at around ten I was on Mass Ave and I pulled up next to a man and a woman on heavily-customized Harley Davidson motorcycles. I said nice bike, and the guy looked over at my scooter and said “… thank you.” The woman looked over and laughed and then we all laughed and she said “that is a nice bike.” I said, “It works.” They roared ahead but of course we were all in traffic so I kept up with them all the way from Harvard to Porter, the three of us taking up both lanes.

That’s pretty much the highlights of the week there.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, people are at their best. Something bad happens and people rise to the occasion. They suffer, but they overcome, and it is a tale of triumph and beauty. Other times, people suffer and overcome, and it’s not beautiful at all. It just sucks. They don’t see things in a new way, they don’t learn an important lesson, the stress doesn’t inspire them to new heights of creative achievement or heroic endurance. They keep plugging away until they drop, and then they rest a little, and they get back up and plug away some more. We all know there’s no point to anyone pushing this rock up this hill, but what the fuck else are we going to do? You can’t just leave it there and go back to bed. Can you?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that every day for awhile now I’ve been waking up and wishing I hadn’t. And every day I get up, with more or less prodding from my girlfriend and the hungry cats. And every night I lie in bed and try to make my mind shut the hell up and it won’t. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, and it’s not that I enjoy it all that much, but it makes everything else go away for awhile.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hate this feeling, and it’s not inspiring, and it’s not pretty, and I’m not overcoming or triumphing. I’m just slogging through and I’m fucking sick of it. Eventually it will go away and I’ll feel better. And then eventually it will come back. Things will go on like this for fifty or sixty years, and then I’ll die, and someone else will have to deal with the design-win pipeline spreadsheet and the hosting invoices and the cat hair clogging the radiators. Circle of life.