Job Lust: A Lesson in Telephonic Purgatory August 21, 2009

Up until last week, I’ve been telling myself that I’m “not emotionally prepared” for a job hunt and that it’s best to wait until after my fella is settled down in Orange County and we’re past the busy fall season at work before I get serious about job hunting and joining my sweetie in California permanently. You might say I’m hesitant to start a new job/work relationship before breaking off the mostly happy long-term relationship I have with my current organization. We’ve had a lot of good years together, after all.

Shockingly accurate visual representation of why I'm not "emotionally prepared" for job hunting.

 

And then I saw it, the job posting to end all job postings. It is beyond perfect for me—the veritable Mr. Darcy of jobs; a non-profit leadership position in marketing & communications located within a reasonable commuting distance to our new house—and it’s with an organization whose video on YouTube literally made me cry because I was so touched by the idea of working for them. This is, of course, a prime example of how sometimes the universe takes all the pretty stories and rationalizations you’ve been telling yourself and laughs maniacally whilst tossing your plans and pretty stories out the window onto the unforgiving pavement below. All I can do is smile and laugh as I watch the meager few plans I allowed myself to have during this heinously transitional period shatter into a million pieces below. Plans, schmlans, right? Maybe destiny has a better plan for me. It reminds me of that Julia Sweeney movie from years ago, God Said, Ha!

 

When I first set eyes on this glorious piece of Craigslist-generated job posting beauty, I got all starry eyed, dreamy and tingly in that special place–that “special” place being the ambitious part of my psyche that’s ready for the next challenge.

 

Finding a promising job post is totally like dating. I feel like I’ve met Brad Pitt in a dive bar, except that not only is he smokin’ hot, but he also has Bill Gates income, John Stewart’s wit, and Obama’s idealism all rolled into a perfect package. It’s enough to make a girl swoon like *real bad* and instantly start plotting an exit strategy for how to leave her cheap beer-swilling, stained t-shirt wearing, unemployed slob of a current position in the dust. And all of this infatuation sprung from the least likely place to find job lust–the dive bar that is Craigslist. Now, my current gig is actually *really* not that bad at all, I’ve just outgrown it. I love my current job, the people I work with are family and the job itself is mostly fabulous. All that said, I *really* want to see if things work out with Brad/Bill/John/Barack.

 

Ever since I sent in my cover letter, resume and writing portfolio that I slaved over for hours one end, I’ve become more and more smitten as I’ve researched the organization online. I’ve “liked” their Facebook posts, I’ve read their annual report, read press about them…all that. I’ve been in la-la land and only half paying attention to things that genuinely matter the last few days. There are literally a hundred other things that I could be thinking about right now–an endless list of things I have to get done at work before leaving town, not to mention laundry, packing, clearing out a room for my friend who’s moving in–all that. And yet, I keep thinking about getting that call.

 

I feel like I’m in my early 20s again and have just “connected” with someone I met at a bar, given him my number and now I’ve launched into the torturous purgatory of waiting for the coveted phone call to book a first date. Between obsessively checking my email and incessantly feeling the phantom vibration of my cell phone, it’s amazing I’ve made time to do much else–and not for a lack of things to do! Still, I can’t stop myself from planning what I’ll wear and what I’ll say on our hypothetical first date/interview.

 

What I really need to focus on is that in a mere 36 hours, we leave town for a trip that promises to be the Bataan death march of road trips—over 20 hours of driving from Seattle, WA to Orange, CA without air-conditioning in a packed to the gills 1990 Toyota Celica. My mom actually believes this car is kept running by voodoo because there is literally *no* earthly explanation as to why it still runs. I’ll be jammed into the passenger seat with room for nothing more than a Michael Pollan book, a Lucky Magazine, my ipod, and perhaps a coffeemaker on my lap for fear of the carafe breaking as a result of my partners’ notoriously haphazard method of packing. Oh yes, it’s going to be a *swell* trip.

 

If you have any good juju to spare, please send a bit of it toward my job hunting cause (or even towards keeping my sweetie’s car running for the next 1,172 miles—I’m not picky when it comes to good juju).

If they don’t call, it’s like I’ll resort to boiling bunnies in retaliation or anything, but if a whole week goes by without hearing anything at all from them, it’s going to take some serious self-restraint not to email them a note with a subject line that reads, “I will not be ignored!!”

 

I really hope they don’t ignore me. I hope Brad/Bill/John/Barack calls. We haven’t even had our first date, but I know we’d totally have cute kids together.

I guess you had to be there… August 12, 2009

When something you’ve been anticipating for a long, long time starts being set into motion, it feels like a weird inertia. You see it coming, you’ve been preparing for it and braced yourself for it and yet once it’s here—it still feels like the car you didn’t see coming. Before you can slam on the brakes and get a hold of yourself, the impact of it nearly takes your breath away. I think that’s what happened in the midst of my last post.

 

I admit that’s a dramatic reaction to watching my partner packing up his DVDs on Friday afternoon, but it stirred inside me the fragile version of myself who’s watched so many people that I love leave town for one reason or another. In an instant, I was that lonely little kid who didn’t want to see her big sister leave, then the rebellious teenager who thought she was ready to be on her own and yet felt totally devastated when her family moved halfway around the world, and finally, the twenty-something who watched as her closest friends moved to the East coast one by one, leaving her social life a vast wasteland of acquaintances and co-workers.

 

My whole life I’ve felt like I’m always the one being left behind and now I’m on the brink of thirty and this time, I’m the lover being left behind–if only for awhile. I can tell you one thing, you never get used to it. No matter how much practice I have with saying goodbye, it never rolls off the tongue when it’s someone I love. It lessens the blow to know when I’ll see them again, but for the most part it sucks a little more every time.

 

I like to think of myself as independent, but every time this happens, it’s a glaring reminder that the people in my life are the most important thing to me. A phone call after a bad day helps but it can’t compare to crying on the shoulder of an old friend who doesn’t care if you get tears and snot on her shirt while you stutter through the tale of what caused it all. Emailing a lusty note to tell your partner that you’re thinking about them after a night of hot sex is good too, but is nothing next to seeing the outline of their face against a pillow in the wee hours of morning when you know they won’t wake up for hours. In the grand scheme of things, these tiny intimacies are the things we take for granted in our day to day monotony and yet they’re among the few things that really and truly matter.

 

Sometimes I think in this brave new digital age that we tend dismiss the distance as if it doesn’t really matter anymore because we have so many ways to keep in touch. See something crazy on the street? Text your pals. Boss driving you bonkers? Email your friend. Read a funny article? Post it to Facebook and share it with everyone you know. There are so many ways to keep in touch, but I don’t think it brings us closer; it just gives us the illusion of being closer.

 

I go visit my friends in New York and in the other 360 days of the year that I don’t get to see them, there are scores of nights out together, inside jokes and ridiculous occurrences that they have together and I know I’m missing out on them. It’s not like they rub it in my face; they usually explain it, but it doesn’t make me feel any less out of the loop. It makes me feel like I’ve lost my relevance in their lives purely out of lack of proximity. And it’s not just them. I had the same experience when my family moved to England. Suddenly my mom and brother who barely spoke to each other stateside would crack up over some random thing and whatever caused the laughter went totally over my head because well, “you had to be there”.

 

In spite of what anyone says, I have to question if all the messages we transmit in an instant using 1’s and 0’s can possibly measure up to the impact of a single hug or a smile or any other old school method of getting your point across. I think geography matters when it comes to personal relationships. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t bother getting on planes for Christmas.

 

The question I keep asking myself is “where is the lesson in all this?” because I believe that if something keeps happening over and over again, it must be because we’re supposed to learn something from it.

 

Here I am, 21 years after the first time someone close to me hit the bricks and I’m no closer to grasping the lesson than I was back then. And it feels like the stakes increase with each person who moves to another zip code.

 

This time, it’s my partner. What if I lose my relevance in his life because of geography? It’s easily the darkest of my fears, but there it is in black and white. I’m afraid I won’t matter as much to him anymore because I’m far away and he’ll be busy starting a new life without me. I know it’s ridiculous and I know I’ll adjust, but for right now I could really stand not to have anyone else disappear from my life or anything else disappear from our shelves into boxes knowing that void will be there for awhile. I hate voids. I hate feeling like I’m missing out on stuff. And I really hate the phrase, “I guess you had to be there…”

 

Maybe the lesson is that I need to just get over it.

If the devil is in the details, this must be hell August 8, 2009

Details, details, details…they’re coming out every available orifice and as I type, I actually might be having a panic attack. If I had any Xanax lying around, I’d be tossing it back like Skittles. That said, I’ve never actually tried Xanax; I just like the sound of it. Right now, it sounds about as handy as vodka at a family reunion.

 

I’ve been a pretty good sport about this whole ginormous move and up until about 45 minutes ago, I’ve taken to busying myself with the details. I’ve been making lists and spreadsheets of what needs to purchased when we get there (city of Orange parking pass), issues that need to be sorted out before my fella leaves (should I keep him on my health insurance, if so-for how long?), and how I’ll get around on my own (thank you, Zipcar for your convenient online application) since he’ll be in all-day orientation sessions the morning after we arrive. And now, there’s this icky feeling in my chest–like the muscles are as tightly wound as Martha Stewart and my head is throbbing. I feel like the only way to sort it out is to type a little faster in the hope that a resolution might come on the heels of vomiting my anxiety onto the screen in a bloglicious vent-fest.

 

Why do I feel so panicky? What’s with the heinous sense of dread? And why the hell is my magical cure no longer working??? Up until now, whenever I start getting itchy about the move, I find myself typing the address of the house we applied for into Google Maps so I can glimpse the street view and wander around the neighborhood–suddenly this magic cure isn’t helping anymore.

 

So why the anxiety now? I have no clue. I’ve been building up a healthy (and justified, I might add) rage against the Chapman University Housing Department for incessantly jerking us around for weeks on end–but anxiety? This is new…I feel like I have to be doing something because I can’t calm down.

 

We’re off to visit friends in Spokane for the weekend, a welcome distraction from this unwelcome guest that’s taken up residence in my psyche. I really hope a little whiskey on the rocks and poker with our old high school pals will get rid of this monkey on my back. In the meantime, I’ll cross my fingers that my next post is a little more cheery.