Here I am!
Ay! It’s been an action-packed week.
I’ve been busy interviewing with a company for a
payroll position these past few days. Calls to a recruiter, a short phone
interview, a 40 minute phone interview, and, just yesterday, a two hour
in-person interview. I think I will be finally earning some money soon. Only
problem is child care. We have Patch in an aftercare program that ends 5:45 and
Little One, only eleven and technically not able to be alone legally (nor would
I feel a hundred percent assured if she could), gets out of school at 3 (unless
she has track practice, then its 5). We’re working on it, but that’s the latest
knot of stress keeping me up at night.
Counting a face-to-face meeting with a new recruiter
later today, I’ve had twelve phone, FaceTime, and in-person interviews in just
under six months. Most have vanished down the memory hole once completed. One
or two have been downright depressing. This last job has been positive. I feel
the hand-moving-chess-pieces aspect of it, though vast swathes of it still sit
on my chest like that X-ray-proof-leaden-vest-the-dentist-puts-on-you of Dread.
Gotta have faith things will work themselves out. They always have, for the
most part, in the past.
Still intending to proceed with the tax preparation
plan that would start sometime in August. Spent ten or twelve hours over the
past two weeks reading and reviewing some books on the subject recommended to
me. One thing that’s really come home to me over the past year is to never put
all your eggs in one basket. Something I’ve done, unfortunately, all my life.
Something I will pass on to my children in hopes that they will learn from
their dad’s miscues. In five years, in a perfect world, I’d like to see myself
making income from three sources. Should any source fail, the other two will
carry us until I can get another one back in play.
A free subscription to The Hopper if you can guess
what my other source of income will be.
Anyway, I’ve kept up the morning workouts, walking and
weightlifting, five or six days a week, and that’s helping me maintain a
positive equilibrium. I also visit my local church three or four times a week
for a quiet fifteen minutes of prayer and meditation. So very comforting to be
in a dark, peaceful, warm church in the middle of the afternoon. Serenity and
transcendence. A fortress of respite from the daily grind, the neverending
stress, the inanity of the work buy consume die culture we swim in. Perhaps the
best fifteen minutes of my day. That is, unless I’m cuddled up under blankets
on the floor with the little ones watching a really cheesy SF movie and eating
popcorn.
Oh, and speaking just of that, I recorded a classic –
CLASSIC! – movie from my youth, 1977’s The
Car this past weekend and watched it with Little One yesterday. Patch wants
to watch it, so I’ll be viewing it again (this second time with my hands ready
to drop over her eyes for the two or three scenes that might not be appropriate
for a seven-point-five year old). My brother and I watched this flick countless
times on the new-fangled cable TV of our youth way back then. If I have the
time and energy this week, I might do a big blow-out post on the movie a la the
one I did on Breaking Bad a few weeks
back.
Read an extremely intriguing and short book on the
Jungian psychology implicit in Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby Dick. (Still don’t believe I have a
hyper-eclectic taste in literature?) Now, theories of Carl Jung – archetypes,
the collective unconscious, the journey of self-realization – have interested
me off and on since I first read of them in the early 2000s. Haven’t written
much about it, here on the blog, since I legitimately don’t know enough to
write about it with any semblance of authority, and never really had the time
to delve into the subject. (I did buy Jung’s book on the UFO phenomena of the
1950s years ago, and am salivating in anticipation of his explanation to those
shiny metal objects up in the sky … but have never set aside time to jump into
it.)
Anyhoo, this book on Moby Dick inspired me to re-read the novel. I’m already a quarter
into it and it’s a much more energetic page-turner than I remember when I read
it twenty years ago. But more on that later, in another post.
I’ve been editing my second manuscript over the past
couple of weeks. Currently I’m up to page 290 out of 426. My goal is to finish
it before I resume full-time work. Shouldn’t be too difficult, as I’ve learned
over the past year that I enjoy writing / editing infinitely more than I do marketing
/ self-promoting.
Well, that’s all for now – got to get the girls to
school. Looking to post something of interest this weekend.
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