Hello, Anybody There?

I have not written a post since last month and I have to admit that I probably would not be writing one today except that I am out of control cranky and I need to do something with the the 'stuff' in my head or I swear my brain will explode like an over-filled balloon.  If truth be known, I have refrained from writing because I seem to be caught in the unenviable position of loving the writing process to help me put things in perspective and not wanting those things in print because there simply is no good perspective to put them in anyway.  Basically, I just want to run away from myself but try as I might to escape, no matter where I run, I keep showing up, just like a bad penny.  I cannot seem to find a way to turn my brain off even for a few minutes.  I am like a computer with too many tabs open, working overtime trying not to crash.

The long and the short of it is that I am beyond being able to manage this seemingly endless job search any more.  I feel like a two-year old stomping her foot and having the worst tantrum ever (in the existence of life itself).  In the almost 7 years we have lived here, we have been unemployed 4 times and I am sick of it--exhausted from the worry, tired of having to plaster a smile on my face so as to not make the children any more anxious than they are, wiped out from the financial stress but most of all, confused and frustrated as to why we spend month upon month with no interviews in sight.  I know I have regaled you with my husband's networking prowess and his never ending optimism before.  He feels that 'you just don't know who someone you meet might know' and how a job might come from something so simple as a casual introduction.  At this moment in time, I think we have as much chance of winning the Powerball as we do an interview being scheduled--neither is happening.

Optimism was never my strong suit as I am much more of a realist.  I tell it like it is--often to my family's chagrin.  While I don't know what tomorrow will bring...uncharacteristically leaving room for a little optimism there,  I do know that today I could just scream.  Perhaps I will as I have heard it might be even more cathartic than writing--though much less socially acceptable I would think.

So. Freaking. Done!

The last two weeks have not been peachy so I suppose it is not unreasonable for me to be in a bad (understatement!) mood today, but my new 'job' has thrown me over the edge.  I am aggravated, frustrated and emotionally drained from this job and I have not even started it yet. So, dear readers, I give you the top three reasons why if my husband's lack of a job does not land me in an asylum, trying to start my own job definitely will.  Here they are (or no particular order)...

1.   The manual--this is the first job I have ever held that is exclusively online, which is exactly what I wanted, however, what I did not bargain for was the fact that I needed to learn how to navigate the system totally on my own, armed only with their 25 page 'how to get started' manual.  I am pretty computer savvy and heaven knows I am not afraid of words on a page but, holy heck, grab my bottle of Excedrin, this is a labor intensive endeavor.  Adding insult to injury, there are more rules to which the tutors need to adhere than Sr. Mary Richards had about our uniforms in high school...and she was in-tense!  I am afraid that if I ever do this get this program up and running, I will be incarcerated for answering a student's question directly, rather than referring the student 'to the appropriate reference material.'

2.  The email system--I love email.  I think the ability to communicate without bothering a person on the phone is a blessing.  That said, the system only works if the recipient has access, time or the desire to answer in a timely manner, otherwise, waiting for a response is torture.  Adding insult to injury, because this is a completely computer run endeavor, there is no phone number to call for immediate gratification.  Might sound weird, but it is true.

3.  The lack of viable practice material--Sure it is great to have a sample whiteboard (my means of communicating with my students) with lots of fun buttons and colors on it but, with no way to run through a few sample lessons, how am I supposed to know what to do?  Might be nice to be able to get a trial run in before I go live (especially with all the rules and regulations for my responses).

Am I really just that old that this approach to starting a job seems so frustrating and upsetting?  Trust me, the last thing I want or need is to have my hand held, but I feel as though I am totally flying blind and it is disconcerting.  I would love to share my concerns with the project manager and perhaps discuss options on how I can get started, but apparently he does not share my love of email nor he does not want to deal with me today.  Honestly, I don't want to deal with me today either.  I read an inspirational quote this morning that said 'always choose to be postive' and I will do just that.  I am positive that this is not working for me today.  I am so freaking done!

Write or Wrong

I am a magazine junkie, an addict in the true sense of the word.  I have many subscriptions in addition to 'needing' to purchase at least one or two magazines when food shopping or on a trip to Walgreens.  My addiction to fashion magazines started when I was around five years old and my grandpa put my first copy of Glamour magazine in my hot little hands.  He was a commercial photographer and he had just finished a project with Conde Nast, the magazine's publisher.  It was love at first sight and all the subsequent titles that have been added over the years have fulfilled some kind of need from style issues to a longing for celebrity information to my love of houses and interior design.  While my first love is the fashion magazine and I eschew the real tabloids (is anything at all  true in the STAR?), I have been known to poke around in such banal reads such as First and AllYou.  That said, last night I read an article in one such magazine that I annoyed me so much I actually wrote a letter to the editor which is something I have never done before.

The article was about...drum roll, please...finding a job online and while the article included a nice variety of potential positions from which to choose, I feel the writer was missing a major element to her discussion, namely facts or, shall I say, accurate facts.  Now, anyone who has read even a few of my posts knows that I know a little something about unemployment and trying to find a job.  To say that I have become a pseudo-job coach to my husband over the past five years is probably not understating a fact and my ability to navigate and query on job sites is somewhat legendary in these parts (OK, that might be a slight overstatement of the facts but not much) so to read an article stating facts that I could so quickly dispute was really frustrating.  The author claimed to have gotten the information straight off the same job sites I search daily but let me tell you, I would love to be looking through her eyes instead of mine as her salaries were far higher and her list of required experience far shorter for the same types of jobs to which i am applying.  I don't know if her information was outdated or guesstimated but it certainly is not the reality I see when checking the job boards.

So, how did an article like this make it through the editing and fat-checking process and into the magazine in the first place?  Is fact-checking at that magazine merely on the honor system?  The editor asks if the information is true, the writer says yes and BAM, the article gets published?  I hope not, but clearly something fell through the cracks this time.  I will say that it probably bothers me more than the typical reader because I am so embroiled in the whole job search process and have truly become sickened by it so seeing misinformation spread like this is upsetting.  I suppose it bugs me so much because the article makes it all seem so easy but that is not the experience we are having at all.  If I did not know how hard we were trying, reading the article in its simplistic form with its erroneous information would make me feel like such a loser.  How could we not get a job if doing so is as easy as the author states it to be?

While I can only assume this writer set out to write a nice, simple piece with some helpful job search suggestions, making no guarantees about finding a job after reading her article, I wish she would have checked her facts and accuracy or at least talked to me as I would have set her straight had she asked.

Little Things

For the past few weeks, a few of the bloggers I follow have been featuring posts describing 10 or 20 things about themselves, so I have decided to follow suit since imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, is it not? So, I give you...

5 Things About Me That You Probably Don't Know, Care About or Hope to Remember (in no particular order)

1.  I never, ever wanted children, ever--It took me almost 8 years of marriage before I would even consider it and then when I finally felt ready, I had a breakdown and told my husband I could not go through with it. He was totally supportive of my feelings but, the joke was on me as I was already pregnant.

2.  Once I had my baby, I wanted 10.  I was so smitten that when we had our second child, I told my husband that I wanted another as our baby was being bought over to the warming table in the delivery room. We have 4 children, but I would definitely have had 5 had we started sooner and if my husband did not want to have me committed for saying so.

3.  At one point during my college years, I really wanted to be a psychologist.  The irony here is that not only did I not become one, but I got recruited on campus to be a buyer for a major department store, landed a position in the male dominated field of electronics and could have seriously used some therapy by the time my tenure there had ended.

4.  I once needed to be escorted to my car after work by a couple of riot police, complete with shields, during a race riot. See #3. Just one of the many reasons why therapy might have been required for my retail experience, but alas, merely one of them.

5.  Our wedding reception was held at Tavern on the Green in NYC, but I did not want it to be.  I really wanted it to be at Maxwell's Plum, the long since closed, poor sister of Tavern on the Green, but in my estimation, the far superior choice for the type of wedding that I had wanted.  Begs the question why was it not held at Maxwell's, no? Because 38 days before my wedding, but after the invitations had been mailed...and when my fiancé was flying to a business meeting and was unreachable...I received a call at work saying that the new chef at Maxwell's refused to do weddings. Yup, you read that correctly.  My assistant grabbed my purse and keys after he heard me screaming on the phone so that I would not drive into the city and do something I might later regret.  Long sorry short, the reception was moved to Tavern on the Green and while it was beautiful, I did have to completely change my vision to accommodate that chef and it irks me to this day.

I could go on, but I suppose if I get some positive from feedback from this post, I will need some material for a Part Two of my list.  Questions and comments are always welcome!

2015

I had wanted to start off the new year in a better emotional state, but since we are starting this year with the same unemployment stress and financial difficulties as last year (and the year before that and the year before that...see the trend?  note the sarcasm?), I grabbed the bull by the horns, took control and made the only change that was there for the taking.  Yes, folks, I changed the template on my blog.  Now I know what you are thinking.  Radical, right?  How could I possibly have the guts to change the lovely, striped rosy background...my controlling personality love the rigidity of those stripes... to this orange hued, swirly mass of squiggles.  Well, the decision did not come easily for me.  No, I ruminated and pondered the idea for a whole three minutes, conferring with my daughter about this massive change in my life.  I must have perused at least ten different templates contemplating deep questions such as do I really want birds flying across the page or will the raindrops on the window motif be overly depressing for my readers?  Heavy stuff, this blog design.  Is making this change reflective of bigger changes that I would love to see happen during 2015? Heck, yeah!

While I might be making fun of my decision to change my background this afternoon, the choice to do so stems from a feeling of inertia I am experiencing in other aspects of my life.  Last year was filled with some nice highs, but the lows we experienced were significant and threw us back into the unemployed masses with all the stress and worries we used to have, compounded by our needing to 'buck up' and deal with  the issue all over again.  So while other people might be looking at 2015 as a blank slate, I am still seeing the same old writing on the wall (or blog) that I saw last year and the previous year, etc. and seemingly ad infinitum for us (at the very least, it feels that way).

So, here we go again, another year, more challenges and, hopefully, more highs than lows.  If nothing else, my blog got a face lift and maybe that bright and cheery citrus color will equate to a brighter and more cheery tone to my writing with happier news to share. It should be noted that I did not choose the lemon motif for the blog design as I have already had more than enough of those in my life. This year, I would like to take my life off repeat and add a little swirly craziness to it for a welcome change.

Symbols

I originally started this blog on a lark.  My husband pressured me because he thinks that I write well and so he thought that this might be fun for me and it is,  but more than just being fun, my blog has become sort of an online form of therapy for me (and these days, I need it).  It is cathartic for me, having people read the blogs and make comments about them is great, but the opportunity to void my mind of some 'mental noise' of which I seem to have an abundance, is welcomed.  The blog I had planned to write today stemmed from an incident in which woman in a store asked me if I had grandchildren.  Briefly, the gist of the post was going to be centered around that fact that while chronologically (had I started having children earlier in my marriage), I am old enough to be a grandma, the word 'grandma' does not necessarily evoke feelings of youthful exuberance to me and basically makes me feel cranky, annoyed and in need of a serious make-over.  That said, a comment made this morning by my husband so far superseded the granny dig that I decided to write about it instead.  Take a moment and get some coffee or a cold drink, I think this might be a long post.

I feel the need to interject a disclaimer before I get started because at face value, the comment was so banal that it probably would not have even registered as an issue for most people.  Additionally, I am passionate about everything, both positively and negatively, so things usually get to me more than they do the average person.  Living with revolving unemployment (it has become like a boomerang, we get rid of it, but it keeps coming back) and underemployment over the past almost five years has truly not been a walk in the park by any means.  The situation works on your psyche over time, it erodes your self-esteem, heaps on the self-doubt and makes you question your self-worth.  Long-term and repeated unemployment necessitates 'doing whatever it takes' to land the next job from attending endless networking meetings and events to revamping your resume a hundred times so that it is tailored to each and every job to which you apply.  Basically, you need to act like a marionette, dancing along to whatever change the headhunter or HR person pulling your strings wants you to do next.  Then, this morning, my husband informed me that he had been speaking to an HR person last night (at his networking function du jour), and she had mentioned he would need to shave his beard because he would probably not get hired where we live if he were to have one.  Seriously?

Frankly, I am so not okay with that for so many reasons, none the least of which is the beard itself as even I realize that he can grow it back.  For me, it is what the beard represents about which I take issue.  What I resent is that this is yet another string being pulled, another ridiculous and inane step that this man needs to take in order to have a chance at a job. Let me preface this by saying that his beard is not of the 'John Lennon during the Let It Be phase' nor does he resemble anyone from Duck Dynasty.  I am angry that he needs to alter his appearance as if by doing so, he will somehow become a more qualified candidate for underemployment at a particular company.

If effort to find another job--again and again and again--could morph into a real job with a salary, then my husband should be a CEO by now.  He has raised the job search bar so high he is even harnessing his search efforts and giving back to the community by volunteering his time as the head of a networking group at our church.  He certainly never expected anyone to hand him a job, he has put in an incredible amount of time over the past years trying to secure a stable position in an unstable economy.

So, yes, I know I need to 'put on my big girl panties' and deal with the loss of his beard--for the record, that I love-- because he will continue to do whatever it takes (and I will continue to be ticked off about it our lack of choice in the process)to land a job.  Let's face it, desperation is not sexy, but apparently,  it does seem to need to be clean-shaven where we live.

Jinxed

I had a revelation this morning while putting away the laundry. Before I tell you what it was, however, you will need a little back story to completely understand the excitement about it.  When we purchased our house, the realtor told us that the original owner had been a newly engaged man who was buying the house for his soon-to-be wife.  He had had the carpet removed on the main level and had replaced it with beautiful inlaid wood flooring with a pretty inlaid medallion in the center of the great room.  Additionally, he had had the carpeted stairs replaced with hardwood and if that was not enough to impress his fiancee, he had a medallion installed of two intertwined hearts just outside the master bedroom on the upper landing. Clearly, this guy was a romantic, however, his fiancee was not impressed as she dumped him just before the wedding.  While I have no idea as to the complexity of their issues nor am I suggesting that some inlaid flooring had anything to do with the couple's demise (if so, wow, the girl must have really loved carpet, huh?), as I mentioned I did have a revelation as I stepped on those hearts this morning.  Basically, I have come to the conclusion that my house is jinxed.  Yup, bad juju abounds here.

Allow me to explain my theory.  Not only did Romeo get jilted, but he could not wait to unload his precious 'gift' on the first buyer who came along, a house flipper who knew less about home renovations than I do about rocket science.  When the flipper decided to sell, in we walked all stressed out and frantic that one, we had to move to a place that would not have fallen on my top 200 list of places to live if I sat down to think about them and two, we had about 20 minutes to make a decision about a house before we needed to return home to deal with the move.  Long story short, ever since we moved in we have faced a years' long series of unfortunate events including but not limited to four bouts of long-term unemployment, me testifying for the prosecution in a criminal trial (don't ask), the complete loss of water in our house as a result of some sludge issue in our pipes (which happened the very first weekend after we moved in), and not one, but two major water leaks resulting in replacing not one, but two ceilings.  I could go on but I would bore you and I am already depressed enough as it is these days.

So, there you have it. i am in dire need of an exorcist or my local 'bad juju remover' ASAP.  The moral of this story...and this is really important so listen up...before you get engaged, think long and hard about the commitment, because if you reconsider your decision, you could ruin the lives of a lot more people than just your ex-fiance(e).