California, 2007

Currently reading: Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum

All this free time is bad for me. Without full access to a computer, I’m going nuts. I can barely afford it, but $7.59 at the B. Dalton at the mall down the street gets me a little well-deserved time off. It was a toss-up between the Pratchett and Harry Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies. I guess I thought dark alternative history wouldn’t help with cheering me up.

Must get to a used book store. Although once I get there, I may spend far more than seven bucks.

Ever since high school, I’ve burned through an average of one new book a week. Once I start a book, any book, it’s an effort to stop. I don’t know why. I remember War and Peace took me two nights.

I loved those Goodwill Booksales, where I’d completed most of Ace’s Books entire English print run of Perry Rhodan for about P5 a pop.

And well, now I’m in Los Angeles. I’d probably be better off about three hundred miles north along the coast. This isn’t a reading town…

Los Angeles isn’t much of anything else for me. Sure, I’ve seen more limos and Porsches than anywhere else, but I’m not much of a car buff. I walk through the aisles of Best Buy and Circuit City, and the sixty-inch plasma screens and 3.2 gigahertz processors fail to move me. I suspect that for me, Disneyland will not be the happiest place on earth.

All I see are miles and miles of suburbia, in the distance disappearing into the smog.

My friends and family say once I have a little disposable income in my pocket I’ll be happier. Once I have a car, a nice apartment, and half the IKEA catalog, all my problems should go away.

I wish life was that simple. I wish I was that simple.

In the meantime, the money in my bank account is less than half of next month’s rent. We’ve given our 30-day notice, and now I have no idea where to go from here.

North to San Francisco, where we have relatives, and we can probably get a room for cheap?

Points further east? Places with a lower cost of living, but then fewer job opportunities?

Or throw everything we own into a rental SUV and head for the East Coast?

Ah, well. Nothing to do but put my life in God’s hands.

And hope he doesn’t squeeze too hard.

So. I’ve been in LA for a month now, and the only one to actually respond to my applications was a university, a hosting company and three recruiters.  University  called me in for an interview the week after I emailed in my resume (which come to think of it looks more like a CV). Haven’t heard from them in three weeks.

All three recruiters and the hosting company failed to respond after an e-mail requesting my salary requirements. What?

I’m not that expensive…

Tuesday night I spent 10 hours sending out resumes to fifteen ads.
Individualized cover letters for each one. Now I realize I should’ve
cut down my three-page resume to one page. Oh mistakes, mistakes… but hey. I wanted university jobs anyway.

So. Fifteen applications in a single night nets me a phone call the following day. It’s an agency, again, but this time apparently one of the bigger ones. They set an appointment, and we rent a car and drive off Thursday morning (more money down the drain).

It’s a temp placement agency. Temporary and short-term jobs only. The waiting room is filled with fresh college grads. There’s a couple of older people, but I am stuck competing with mostly twenty-somethings. Should’ve known - you move to the US, you shift careers, and your past doesn’t mean a thing. Zero credit rating. No previous jobs in-country.

Start from scratch.

And I get put through a set of standardized tests. I claim I am a Solaris and Linux administrator, and they give those tests to me. Thirty minutes later (for both tests) I am staring at my scores. I suck. I take tests with no preparation whatsoever (and I haven’t touched a # prompt in one and a half months) and I suck. The interviewer isn’t around when I finish, and the secretary sends me home.

Not good.

Me and my brother decide to hang out on the Santa Monica Beach pier for an hour or so. And then traffic on the 405 on the way home.

Two messages on the answering machine when we get to the apartment. Apparently the guy from the agency was looking for me after the exams, and he claims I "blew them away". Apparently, I’m "15-20 points above average".

Sniff. I am merely "above average". I suck.

Thing is, I’m on a clock here. Have to move before next month (this apartment is too expensive) but I have no idea where. I need a job before I can decide where to look for an apartment, and I need to find an apartment before my lease ends. My lease ends when I run out of rent money, and to get rent money, I need a job.

Something my sister said made me realize something.

This is punishment. This is karma.

I used to be a child prodigy. I learned to read before I was toilet trained. I breezed through school. Scholarships to high school, college, graduate school. Got a job I liked immediately after graduation.  Didn’t pay much, but it was walking distance from home. And I stayed with that job for eleven years.

I had lots of free time, I had lots of friends, and I had lots of fun.

I’ve had it easy for the last thirty-two years.

Now it’s payback time.

I hate packing.

It means you have to sift through all the things you own and pick out the things that’ll fit in your luggage, the things you can’t live without. And I always put packing off until the last minute, so that means I leave a LOT of things behind.

So. Stuff I wish I brought, but had to leave behind in the Philippines:

• Most of my CD collection. I have all my EBTG , but I’m sad I’ve left all the Suzanne Vegas and most of the new wave ones. Oh ok, I did bring my MP3 library, but it’s not the same.
• There’s this cruddy little blue soap dish that I bought on my first week in the dorm when I was a twelve-year-old high school freshman. First time away from home, first time on my own. I’ve kept that soap dish around for nearly nineteen years. They’ve probably thrown it out by now.
• My collection of science-fiction paperbacks. There’s hundreds of them, I think. All I brought along was Harry Harrison’s Galactic Dreams. I wish I’d brought the Pratchetts, or the Nivens. But no, nothing else was gonna fit. Probably going to cost a fortune to have them shipped over, too.
• Half my VCD collection. Oh, well, I think I brought the good half, at least. I think I left behind two seasons of Dead Like Me and three of Farscape.
• My computer. No way they’re letting me pack a 17" crt.  The video card’s crapping out anyway. But I still miss the stupid thing. This is the longest I’ve gone without my own personal computer in oh, fifteen, sixteen years? Damn.
• My cats. Yes, I miss the stupid things. The way they’d quietly tag along behind me when I can’t sleep and I take a walk around the house at three AM. The way they always meet me at the gate when I come home late at night and walk me up to my room. Some people say our house is haunted, but all the eighteen years I’ve lived there, I’d never seen a ghost. I blame the cats.
• All the junk I’d collected over the years. Comic books. RPG modules. Bullet casings from 1987. Stones from various beaches. Two drawers full of old electronics. My first motherboard, with the NEC V20 processor. ISA cards. I’m such a pack rat, I never throw anything away.

Ah well. They’re just things. Objects I can someday toss into a box and carry over here. Leaving them behind doesn’t mean much.

Leaving people behind, that’s far worse. All the fun you’re not having, you’ll never have, because you’re not there with them right now. Being unable to share their grief, their sadness. Not being able to be there for them when they need you.

Those are the pieces you can’t pack.

I used to refuse to blog. Not about my personal life anyway. Didn’t wanna cross the TMI line.

And well, the less information my stalker knew about me, the safer I felt.

Now? I’m over seven thousand miles away.

7270 miles across the Pacific. Still don’t fully understand why I did it. Why I left a town I lived in for the past twenty-eight years, left all my friends and family, left a job I liked which paid reasonably well.

The reasons are myriad and mysterious, and none of them make any sense to me right now.

I’m probably crazy. But then I’ve known that most of my life.

Never had this particular flavor of insanity before, though. Something that makes you cough up all your life savings, borrow money from your parents, and launch yourself as far from your home as you possibly can, on the slim chance of being able to make a new life for yourself halfway around the world.

Ah well. My sister tells me to relax and enjoy my vacation. Extremely expensive vacation, but hey. I’ve done far more boneheaded things before, this is just par for the course.

So. Enjoy the sand and surf of Southern California. Try not to think of the future too much and concentrate on the here and now. And hope that somehow, someway, it’ll all turn out all right.