catching up

The updates are not as frequent these days. That is for multiple reasons. One is that for years now, my chosen instrument for blogging has been Red Sweater Software’s MarsEdit, which has been reliable and easy to use for more than a decade – but which is not installed on any of the work computers. Part of the price of moving houses was giving up the office, which means that for the moment I don’t have a desktop computer. The old iMac is the family computer and in a not-very-convenient place for me. Which is fine! It’s for family use, not for me to noodle around on watching YouTube videos of walking through London all day. But it has made blogging a lot less spontaneous.

I thought that might be fixed with an iPad, but the more I think about it, the more I think that I really do need to be waiting for the forthcoming new MacBook, if only because a fixed keyboard and an upright display is better for blogging, video conferencing, and all the things I think I need something bigger than a phone to work with – plus equivalent battery life thanks to Apple Silicon. Then again again, with a possible trip abroad on the cards for spring, I may not want to wait. I don’t know. I’m in that age-old position of knowing the money is about to be tight and wanting to spend like mad on everything and anything, which is how we’ve wound up with a 4K OLED television and hopefully an electric crossover on the way.

We are mostly settled into the new house. The back yard has been very useful just the way I hoped it would: on a foggy morning, I can walk out with my coffee, light the fire pit, and sit in an Adirondack chair warming my toes under foggy 49-degree skies while on the morning Zoom call. It’s also served as the Sunday night pub space – either that or under the overhang of the porch in a zero-G chair watching and listening to the rain, lost in Irish and British podcasts or perhaps reruns of the Eddie Stubbs show. For whatever reason, the actual RTE in Irish has sort of gone by the boards in recent months, possibly because I’m not actually reading as much as I need to on pub night.

Now there’s the matter of whether I want to make an effort to get out there and find a viable space. The new downtown is void of just about anything that would meet my needs; there’s barely any place open past 8 on a Sunday night at all let alone one that approximates a pub. But the bars of my occasional frequency that were one stop away on the light rail are now only a couple miles away by Lyft or cab or Wife, including the one that acted as our spirit grocery at the beginning of the pandemic and which was my first pub pint of the After. I should probably give it a try, although for some reason, I have a mental block about crossing the city line for it now in a way I didn’t have a problem going to the next town the other way before (possibly because there were at least two and sometimes as many as five viable drinking establishments on the one block).

The thing I’m going to struggle with more than anything in this place is that for the last twenty-eight years of my life, some sort of walkability or transit has been the defining characteristic of where I live. Whether the Overcup or Hillsboro Village or the various offerings on 21st at Vanderbilt, or the various things along the Orange Line in Arlington, or on foot or light rail to Castro Street in Mountain View, it’s always been at least broadly feasible to walk out for a meal or a pint or the like – even during the pandemic, I could hit 7-Eleven or the taqueria or the deli or the coffee shop or the liquor store or a haircut without any significant effort. Now, matters are more constrained, and I need to alter my perspective and be willing to explore by riding around, either in a car or on a bike, in a way that I’ve let go by the boards in the last decade.

Which brings us to the other new thing I need that is not on offer: I’ve applied for five different jobs since Labor Day and been rejected or ghosted by all of them. I have two or three more applications in flight at the moment, depending on how you look at it – prompted by the wise words of a Spelman grad that sometimes you have to apply for the same job more than once – but the prospects of relief from my present employment and one more fresh start elsewhere are kind of grim at the moment. I thought I’d be coming into 50 as the proven veteran, the voice of wisdom mentoring the next generation of greater talent, and instead I’m faced with a) the prospect of twelve years of institutional memory and site-specific knowledge going completely to waste because it is not valued where I am, and b) having to hire on and make a fresh start at an age that Silly Con Valley generally thinks is only suitable for venture capital or the compost bin. 

So either I need a new job, or I need to find meaning in a way that is not compromised by the insecurity of not knowing whether I will still have a job this time next month, or year, or week. Which – after two years in which I’ve been laid off, furloughed, ignored and run roughshod over, in ways that only acting a complete and utter ass has successfully pushed back against – is not a consideration I can dismiss out of hand. 

It feels like I’m waiting for the curtain to go up on the next stage of my life. I just don’t know when, or how.

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