Well, I was going to blog more tonight but after an hour of looking through loan and closing documents — and finding them replete with errors and highly confusing disclosure statements — the life has been sucked right out of me. And all of the documents and the tension and risk associated with the transaction has engendered friction and anxiety with The Wife. Justified, of course, especially given that so far, no employers have had any interest in my services. As if I’m not anxious enough, buying a house; I now get to have guilt thrown at me if we have to bail out early and relocate to California in order to secure our survival.
Suffice to say, Loyal Readers, that I have had an absolutely punishing* schedule for the past week and now this, that it’s no surprise I’ve been unable to fall asleep without reaching the frontiers of exhaustion, typically by one or one-thirty each morning. How can it be that after I get my pink slip, I enter the busiest phase of my practice at this law firm? There is no cause-and-effect relationship between getting notice of an imminent termination and a desire to work longer hours, I can assure you all of that.
Where we’re at and what we’re doing comes down to hope — hope that I will find work (here) and hope that things will work out. Maybe, at the end of the day, hope is all we have. But I feel a lot more anxiety than I do hope at the moment. Hope seems unreasonable and contraindicated by the evidence; the last time we relied on hope it took a long, uncomfortable time before things worked out right. If we hadn’t made commitments to do certain things, back when the future looked bright, maybe we wouldn’t be doing this now. But we are where we are and right now I don’t think we have much choice but to grit our teeth and make the best of it.
* You should really avoid doing a Google Image Search for the phrase “punishing” if you do not have Google’s adult content filters turned on. Just trust me on this.
I’m amazed at the difference between the job market, there and here, for insurance defense. Here, as you probably know, there are always tons of those jobs open — not necessarily great jobs, but jobs nonetheless. Your experiences remind me of my time in Visalia. The problem there wasn’t *getting* the job — I was lured there — but *doing* the job among hostile, provincial sources. I finally clued in that my reporting skills were worthless against the desire of three council members to feed anonymous, confidential information to the reporter on the other paper, who was their buddy and a hometown old boy. My attempts at professional interaction only spurred lectures about the need, as an outsider from L.A., to first prove my commitment to the local “community” (or, at least their political faction) — not as a reporter, but as a participatory resident who had “the community’s best interest at heart.”Stories like that abound regarding Central California, which has a fairly large population. So, I can imagine how much worse it is in smaller states. I don’t know if people are any less clannish in big metropolitan areas, but at least there’s more to go around. Also, I think people nowadays often have an inferiority complex about living in those non-metro areas. So, they try to even the score by tightly controlling the little that’s available there.It wasn’t until law school at Davis, though, that I really got a handle on the often-underhanded social/professional dynamics of a small community (the law school, more than the town) where the supply of good things is very limited, and people are unable to leave for greener pastures (at least for three years).Tellin’ ya, the AV is a veritable Shangri-La compared to some places I’ve been.