Where is Hopper? Where is Hopper?

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.