the chaos

I have lost my job again.

Yes, again.

For the second time in a little over a year, I am unemployed.

To describe how this makes me feel in detail would require me to give lots of information about my last job, so obviously I can’t do that here. And my two job losses are of a piece anyway, since they occurred so close together. I guess I can describe how it feels to be let go from one job, get another one a year later, and then get let go from that one the year after THAT.

I feel out of control.

The one detail I can share is that in neither case was it my particular fault. I was a good employee in both cases, and I didn’t do anything wrong. I know this intellectually, and most of the time I know it emotionally, too. But even if it wasn’t my fault, what could I have done differently? Surely there was something I could have said or done that would have changed things, right?

And that’s where the emotional part gets to me.

I am applying for other jobs, of course. Lots of other jobs. I have phone interviews and in-person interviews and all that. I weed the yard and clean the house and sew myself some new clothes. I do laundry. I go for walks. I apply for yet more jobs. I do everything I can.

My boyfriend was laid off on the same day I was. That didn’t matter much, because he had another job lined up, and there were only three days between when one job stopped and the other one started. He likes this one better already, and we’ll still have health insurance, so that’s good.

Two weeks after my boyfriend and I were both let go, my sister was laid off from her job. Then one of my boyfriend’s family members had to go to the hospital. Then a friend’s dog got a brain tumor and had to be put down.

4380159995_01e2e0e7baHang on, that doesn’t really describe that situation very well. How does one indicate that one was close to a dog? The dog’s owners are old friends, and my sister and her husband used to take care of the dog whenever they would go out of town, which was often. He got along well with Maude and Moki, so my sister would even bring him over to our house sometimes. He was in fact one of just five guests at my sister’s wedding, and I made him a flowered collar for the occasion. So how do I say that? A dog friend of mine had to be put down? A close dog friend died?

He was the same age as Maude is (thirteen), so that’s not great either.

It’s got me thinking about what people deserve. As an atheist, I don’t think there’s an entity that doles out things to people based on merit or anything, so it’s a strange line of thought for me to have. But all I want is to have a job that doesn’t suck and makes me enough money to live on, travel on (good god I miss traveling so much), and maybe buy a house with someday. That’s really all. Don’t I deserve that? Is that too much to ask?

Ask who, you say, and you’d be right. There’s a separate post in there somewhere about how, despite what most believers would say about atheism, I find mine to be enormously comforting. Most of the time.

So that’s how I feel about it.

big brass tejones

What’s up, party people? Long time no talk. Here are some things that have happened.

1. A series of circumstances have resulted in my being unemployed. Longtime readers of this site will recall that this is not the first time I’ve ever been unemployed. But it is the first time I’ve become unemployed suddenly after four years at a job. So that’s different.

I spent those four years doing web design work in a pretty traditional office, an office I will now cite as one of the reasons for the absence of posts on this site. Bluishorange is the first result in a Google search for “Alison Headley,” and working in a large conservative office in a position that was not particularly low-profile meant that there were a lot of things I felt I couldn’t talk about. It’s not anyone’s particular fault, and truthfully nobody at work ever mentioned this site to me. But some of my coworkers might have read it, etc etc.

In a way, I sort of felt like I was lying to myself. Or lying about myself, or something like that. As my (awesome) former boss said to me, “Bluishorange is something you’ve had for so long that it’s a part of who you are. To live a life where you can’t do it is wrong somehow.”

And she’s right. I’ve nearly always been able to talk about whatever I want here, and I’m almost sure that that won’t change with whatever I decide to do next.

Almost. What if I become a spy or join the foreign service? Shut up, it could totally happen.

2. I’m currently in Cancun, on a vacation I booked and paid for before said unemployment occurred. It feels weird to be going on vacation from nothing, but I love to travel so I’m not complaining. We’re here for the 30th birthday of a friend who deserves nothing less than to have his milestone celebrated on vacation with a bunch of his friends. Happy birthday, Dusty! Hope your 30th year is much better than mine was.

We got here (where here is an all-inclusive resort-type thing that isn’t usually my style, but again, not complaining) last night just as the sun was setting. On the golf-cart ride to our rooms, we passed these little animals I’d never seen before. They were about the size of Maude, and they looked like some sort of rodent-marsupial-anteater hybrid. The driver told us they were called tejones, which I was able to remember because it rhymes with cojones. I’m going to look those animals up later.

Then late last night after dinner and drinks and some time on the beach, my sister and her husband and I walked past a palm tree, and out of nowhere a coconut fell out of it and hit the ground with a THUD. I thought that only happened in commercials.

In October I became a certified scuba diver, so I’m planning on doing lots of that while we’re here.

3. At the moment I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel room, watching the sun rise over the Caribbean. It’s 5:30 a.m., and I’ve been awake since 4 despite having gone to bed at midnight. This is a new thing I do these days. Ariel calls it the freelancer’s alarm clock, where you wake up suddenly in the dark, thinking about money. I might call it the money alarm instead, since I’m not currently a freelancer per se, and “money alarm” sounds cooler.

At any rate, I wake up every day by 6 or 7 a.m., regardless of what time I went to bed, and despite not having anywhere to be in the morning. Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I’m in the final stages of becoming my father. I don’t know. It kind of sucks.

But I think it’ll be to my advantage here. I came out to the balcony at 4:30, took some long exposures of the waves crashing on the beach in the dark, and now that the sun’s up I’m going to go for a walk. Not many people will be up, so I can pretend I’m not surrounded by a bunch of entitled American vacationers like myself. Maybe the tejones will be out.

I’ll see you later.