The Ride

It's like a roller coaster or a see-saw. Hope-despair. Optimism-pessimism. Up-down. High-low.

Yeah, I know. You get it.

Long ago I decided that having those great highs were the cost of some abysmal lows. I see those people who are even-keel all the time, and I guess that's a choice, but it's just not the choice for me. It seems like a sort of walking rigor mortis.

Even when that flat line is way above me, I'll navigate my way out of the valley and head back to the pinnacle. But it's tempting to want to settle for something ordinary and still.

I'm trying to climb out of one of those holes right now. There are too many life stressors working on me right now and they're ahead. But the game isn't over. I've always been a fighter.

However, there is a time when it's wise to just retrench. And that's probably my best strategy right now. Just lay low, strategize, and find the right moment to battle back.

But at the moment, I'm not a happy camper. Hope your day is going better.

A New Hope

One thing being a sports fan teaches you is how to deal with disappointment.

Only one team per sport gets to be champion each season. Everybody else is a loser.

Harsh.

In that reality, being second-place -- or "first loser" -- is pretty tough for a fan to take. You make it all the way to the final, only one win away from ultimate glory -- only to watch someone else be crowned champion.

This is akin to what I've experienced in my job search the past two years. Granted, I've actually had some freelance activity, won a part-time job that I could have kept indefinitely prior to the move, and after the move landed the substitute teaching work.

So technically, I've had some employment. But nothing that was steady, nothing that stabilized not just our family finances but the gnawing worry that goes along with being unable to seal the deal.

What's really hurt has been the near-misses. The job editing the alt-weekly that should have been mine and instead went to an underqualified flake who bailed after nine months. The California jobs that I came so close to getting. Those three stand out, but there were others.

It's not like pro golf or tennis or other sports where you can win money without ever winning an event. Finishing second in a job hunt pays the same as finishing 20th -- zed.

Against this backdrop, I'm not letting the successful first two steps make me too giddy. But oh how I want to win this time.

A business here that matches my ideology needs someone with my skillset. I'm 90th percentile, at least. There is a Web component that I'm confident that I can master, but, it will be new, so I honestly have a potential issue there. But otherwise, I'm perfectly suited for this job.

After seeing my resume, they agreed, and mailed me Monday about setting up a preliminary remote interview.

That happened today. And at the conclusion, I was told I will be invited for a face-to-face downtown.

Everyone's process is different, and I've heard of long dances consisting of up to three direct interviews. I've been a part of something like that myself. But this situation seems to me to be one in which if I ace the next test, I'd be within perhaps only one more hurdle of getting the job.

Like the sports fan hoping for the best but guarding against the worst, I am doing everything I can not to be too hopeful, not to agonize over every possibility. Don't count your carp before they hatch.

And of course now I have to wait for an unspecified number of days before I not only know when the interview is, but then wait for it to actually take place.

To stay level, I will keep applying for good jobs, keep my head down and my spirits up, and hope for the best.

April 23, 2009

I cried.

It completely blindsided me. I was part of management, and knew that layoffs were coming. I just didn't know one of them would be mine.

So when I was called in to a meeting with my supervisor, her supervisor and the HR person... I figured it out pretty quickly.

The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. I was told what was happening, told what my severance situation would be, and a few minutes into it, I was overcome with emotion and began to cry.

Unprofessional. I wish I had handled it better. About 25 months later, I'd get laid off again. I didn't cry then. It still hurt, but I did better.

Losing a job sucks. It makes you question yourself in soul-shaking ways, even when you have no reason to. On April 23, 2009, among more than a dozen others, the most qualified person in his position was also let go. Personally, I feel like I was the far-and-away most productive person at my level. In fact, I was basically doing three jobs in one. And I guess that's why getting the axe shocked me so much.

I have a number of conspiracy theories about who got cut and why. It won't do me much good to review that. What's encouraging is that among my friends who suddenly found themselves without work that day:

* One has taken his extraordinary skills on a cross-country trek and gotten far, far away from those people. I still think he could play in a bigger arena and truly shine -- he's that good. But as long as he is happy, I am happy for him.
* One who had a very sick child has managed to start a career path with a reputable company and is advancing. In a place with limited opportunity, I'm very proud of his accomplishments. He's finally getting the respect he deserves.
* One who was actually torn about fulfilling her professional obligations and pursuing her dreams had the decision made for her, and it was the best thing that could have happened. She took a life-affirming trip, got an advanced degree and is just now starting to make a major mark. It's exciting.
* One exceptional young talent used the opportunity to develop his skills online, starting a mini-movement in his community and leveraged that into a reliable gig with a promising future.

Unfortunately my career has stalled to some extent. I landed a job about a month after the layoff, but it only lasted two years before the economy claimed it (and that of a few others). Snakebit.

I got a part-time job last year but had to leave it when we moved. Here, I've been able to substitute teach a little, and that not only brings in some income but rewards my heart as well.

Yesterday, I got a callback for a preliminary interview. It has sparked my hopes but a long period of underemployment makes me temper my enthusiasm. I don't want to hope too much.

No News is Good News

I've read two stories in the past four days that I tried to avoid but couldn't.

Both of them talked about the grim prospects that the "long-term unemployed" face in getting back on the horse. The first one I read added in the variable of workers in their 40s and 50s.

It wasn't a pretty picture. The first one I just kind of rolled with. The second one was like a punch in the face.

I know it's bad out there. Since getting laid off (twice), I've scrambled. I took a job working overnights in 12-hour shifts that basically had a chief requirement of staying awake. I tried to be as professional as I could given the situation that didn't exactly call for initiative. I mean, this was a contract job that nine folks were hired for, and two of them couldn't even hack it. One figured he could go to his car in the parking lot and sleep for a couple of hours at a time. Another rubbed someone the wrong way and the resulting bunched panties jeopardized the whole contract.

Since relocating I've landed another freelance job with occasional work. But the "real" job has yet to come.

Yeah, I am worried. So worried that as I sit here, I wonder if even taking a few minutes to jot these thoughts down is counterproductive.

I can't *make* someone give me a job. That's really beyond my control. So what I have to do is just work harder at finding an answer, at giving myself chances.

So that's what I will do. The next few days I am going to hunker down and cast a wider net. Maybe that will work.

The other thing I have to do is forget those damned stories. Yes, people in my situation are mostly screwed. I have to find a way to be the exception rather than the rule.

Guilt

It's so hard to stare at long-term unemployment or underemployment and not feel like a failure.

The pain was mitigated for a while with the $276 a week I got in Unemployment Insurance. Then, I was able to work a blue-collar gig for a few months; that paid about $400 a week. Then came the move, and since then, I've not been able to land anything sustained. I've landed a contract freelance job that throws the occasional $60 per day at me. It's helpful, but really, it's just been a bandaid on a skull fracture.

And the bills have piled up. We borrowed a big chunk of change from her parents, a little from my mom, and still it hasn't abated. We've had more than $2,000 of unexpected expenses in the past five months, and now we owe more than that in taxes.

We don't have it. Austerity looms.

There's the tiniest part of my hope that flickers in the gale, refusing to go out. It's incredible in a way. I see a path to security regardless; if things stay the way they are, then it's just going to take longer. But it hurts me mentally. I just feel guilty. I feel like a failure.

War is Hell

Chris Kyle was murdered Saturday night in Texas.

He lived in a little town not far from where I used to live, and I have some friends who knew him. They're upset.

Which is understandable, but every death is sad to someone.

Or is it?

***

Kyle was the author of a best-selling autobiography called "American Sniper," which details his career as a sharpshooter in the military. He claims 225 kills, and it's said that 160 of those are confirmed, although actual Pentagon statistics have not been made available yet to the general public.

Saturday, Kyle and a friend were said to be attempting to assist another veteran said to have PTSD. Their therapy was to go to a shooting range in Glen Rose, Texas. Something happened, and the troubled vet turned a weapon on Kyle and the other man, Chad Littlefield, killing both.

So much for Wayne LaPierre's theory that all it takes to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.

***

The gun argument is raging in America, although the gunnies right now desperately want the flames to die down. Their best hope is to let as much time elapse from the Dec. 14 horrors of Sandy Hook Elementary School as possible.

Good luck with all that. Newtown was just the latest mass killing in this country. This chart from Mother Jones shows the sickening, bloody trend.

Guns and violence and killing and blood are revered in this country. We are saturated with these images. Our most popular shows are about murder and crime. The sugar that makes it all go down so easily? The bad guys almost always get caught by the time the hour is up.

What bullshit. If we were so good at fighting crime, why is there so much of it?

***

That noted liberal rag, the Wall Street Journal, put together an interactive series of charts looking at American murders from 2000-10. The numbers exclude stats from Florida, a generally murder-friendly place, because the state doesn't conform to FBI methodology. It's pretty safe to assume Florida's exclusion only serves to enhance any positive conclusions from the research.

NB: The three lowest murder-totals in the sample span are in 2000, 2009 and 2010 -- years in which the White House was occupied by a Democrat. That's probably just a coincidence, right?

The CDC says there were more than 16,000 murders in 2011, of which more than 11,000 were by shootings. Interestingly, compared to the WSJ data, those breakdowns are statistically consistent: 111,289 of the 165,068 murders between 00-10 were gun killings.

Then there's this: 24/7WallStreet's list of the most and least "peaceful" states based on violence and its costs to communities. Seven of the top 10 are in the blood-red-state South; Missouri, Arizona and Nevada fill out the list.

Not every top 10 murder state is on the "least peaceful" list. New Mexico, Illinois, Maryland and Alabama round out that dubious bunch. Chicago and Baltimore are known as killing fields. So the blue states aren't without problems.

Having said that, the "most peaceful states (with the exception of Utah and North Dakota) are all blue: Maine is first, followed by Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Utah, North Dakota, Washington, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Iowa. Yes, Iowa has gone blue in three of the last four general elections.

***

I have several relatives in law enforcement. Two of them have been deeply immersed in the field, one has lived a particularly dangerous life because of his work.

I've never heard them anxious to tell me about what they've seen or done. I'm confident if pressed, they'd tell me, and I'm confident they would reveal that the job has brought them in close contact with the worst of the worst, and that blood has been spilled.

Their work has done more to improve the lives of Americans than they've ever gotten credit for. Both military veterans have helped keep our streets safe and sent criminals to jail. They're true American heroes and I am honored to share lineage.

Many others in my family have served in the military and as firefighters. All have served with honor and done what needed to be done to save lives, protect their units and co-workers, and defend the nation.

AND NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE BRAGGED ABOUT IT, TOOTED THEIR OWN HORNS OR MADE MONEY OFF OF IT.

Could they have? I'm certain of it. I've even floated the idea to some of them. It was not embraced, but not rejected.

Fact of the matter is, they didn't do the things they did to draw attention to themselves. They did it because they felt it needed to be done, that the work was important. They sure didn't do it for money. They did it because they had the balls to do it, and they weren't afraid.

And no one's beating down their doors to hear their stories, even though they are no less important than those of anyone else who served our society in some capacity.

***

So Chris Kyle is now seen as a fallen hero. I'm appreciative of his service. But, he's no more a hero than anyone else who has taken on a dangerous job on the streets of Fallujah, Iraq, or Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Indeed, while his skill as a marksman is unquestioned, I don't think he's particularly special. This excerpt is from the New York Times, which cites a passage in Kyle's book:

He was deployed in Iraq during the worst years of the insurgency, perched in or on top of bombed-out apartment buildings with his .300 Winchester Magnum. His job was to provide “overwatch,” preventing enemy fighters from ambushing Marine units. 

He did not think the job would be difficult, he wrote in his book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.”

But two weeks into his time in Iraq, he found himself staring through his scope into the face of an unconventional enemy. A woman with a child standing close by had pulled a grenade from beneath her clothes as several Marines approached. He hesitated, he wrote, then shot.

“It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it,” he wrote. “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.”

That last passage troubles me, a lot.

Not incidentally, our entire reason for being in Iraq was phony. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and its citizens, while repressed, had done almost nothing to beseech the great liberators of America to ride to their rescue. They weren't clamoring for the overthrow of Saddam or the institution of Western democracy.

So imagine a nation where life already somewhat sucks, but at least had some semblance of modern living. It wasn't like Afghanistan, where most of the population lacked modern conveniences. Into this rough landscape comes a third war... after the devastation of a 10-year failed war with Iran and the failure of the foray into Kuwait that generated "Desert Storm." Only this time, the invaders are going to completely subvert the existing political powers. They're going to occupy and shoot up the country for nearly a decade. They're sometimes going to go house-to-house and roust out suspects -- some of whom may be troublemakers, some of whom are identified as troublemakers by political and religious rivals who sell them out to eliminate competition for the nation's own coming new world order.

In a country known for its religious conflicts, scores were settled. Best of all, they were settled by an outside force that no one wanted to be associated with, but everyone could blame.

Sunni and Shi'a don't like each other much, but they pretty much agreed on one thing: they didn't like Americans.

Americans were the enemy. Whatever problems they had were theirs to solve; American intervention was unwelcome. We weren't greeted as liberators.

Against that backdrop, isn't it perfectly reasonable to see the enemy as not just a rival political or religious faction -- but also, the Americans?

Yes. Yes. It is reasonable. If an enemy force invaded the U.S., overthrew the government and started taking people from their homes... would we sit idly by?

I don't think so. Instead, we'd fight back. Perhaps a woman would conceal a grenade and approach an invading threat with the intention to strike back against her nation's oppressors. She'd clearly be right to do so.

And perhaps a sniper would cut her in two.

But that wouldn't make her a twisted soul. It would make her a patriot. The same kind of patriot Chris Kyle anointed himself as.

***

Chris Kyle was an assassin, a hitman, a professional murderer. It's what the U.S. military paid him to do, and what thousands of readers ate up when they made his book a bestseller.

He lived by the gun, and he died by the gun. If he'd known that by refusing to embrace the American murder and gun culture, he'd still be alive today -- do you think he'd have done it? I bet his twisted soul thinks very differently today about the life it has left behind. And the lives of a wife and two kids.

Was it worth it?

Until we stop killing one another, we're just animals. Not patriots. Not heroes. Animals. 

***

The man who killed Kyle and his friend apparently had his soul twisted by the horrors of war. Some in this country believe that mental health issues are more essential to address than the easy availability of killing weapons. This case will provide a forum for that debate. Will we take mercy on the accused, or look for another reason to kill?

You already know the answer, don't you?

Things Are Looking Up!

When I got laid off in 2011, and having been down that path before, I hit the job search hard. Before landing a part-time job that I was grateful for but the chief requirement of which was being able to withstand six straight 12-hour overnight shifts, I must have applied for 500 jobs.

Most of those were in NWA, but many were not. I applied for jobs all over the U.S., including Hawaii and Alaska. I also applied for jobs in USVI and Europe.

Nothing. All that effort netted a total of only a few solid interviews. I applied for countless jobs at the Beloved State U., and only got a single phone interview for one of them. It certainly didn't make me feel the degree I had gone back to get in 2008 had exceptional value. I mean, if the U didn't think enough of it to hire me, what was anyone else going to think? I also had applied for the job the football coach wound up giving to his chippy (and hence leading to his firing), so maybe my "skills" weren't what was marketable.

Anyway. That was then. Now I'm in New England, and the market here is astonishing. It's so encouraging.

Less than three weeks here, I had an interview arranged for a substitute teaching job. (I tried to do this in Fayetteville, and couldn't even get a callback from the district.) On Dec. 10, I was working for them. I worked two other days, too, and could have worked another... however, I had another job interview that precluded that opportunity.

That interview is going to yield work; I met with a placement firm and they've got more positions than people to fill them. Starting next week, I expect to have even more options.

Today, I sent an application for a great job. Maybe I'll get it. But, I found it simply because I was interested in the organization and looked at their careers site. And I see usually more than one job a day that I am qualified for. And the best part is, there are so many possibilities that I can be a little choosy. I don't have to apply for *every* job I see. This is liberating. I can now work, hopefully, for a company or an organization that I respect and that has a compelling future.

In Arkansas, that was pretty much the U, and not much else. Of the few truly stable companies there, they each have issues that gave me pause. But, I still went after jobs there because I had no choice.

Now, in theory, I don't have that problem. I can pursue opportunities that pay not just a living wage, but  also are personally rewarding. It's exciting.