California, 2007

Currently reading: Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Barnes

Finally got my library card. Wish the library was within walking distance, but I can’t complain - after all’s been said and done, I’m pretty comfortable here right now. Unemployed and everything, but I’m still getting one or two interviews per week. At least my resume’s getting read.

Back to the book. It’s a fairly standard Niven/Pournelle novel, loosely based on Beowulf… a bunch of interstellar colonists dealing with the local ecology. I tend to like hard science fiction, Niven, Sheffield, Bear, Clarke, Vinge… good stuff.

Talking about how much memorabilia each colonist was allowed to bring on their mission:

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough, because the behaviorists and sociologists and colony planners said it was enough. Because they, in their infinite wisdom, had calculated exactly how many pressed flower petals and class album videodisks were required to stave off depression: just enough to stimulate the fond memories, not enough to create an incurable homesickness.

Enough. Got me to thinking if I’d brought enough on my own mission here, this far from home.

Well, the moment you stop being homesick is the moment you make a home for yourself here. And I don’t see that happening for a long time. If ever.

But I haven’t brought much. School transcripts. A hardbound copy of my master’s thesis. My cellphone.

Two hard disks, packed with my personal data - my old course materials, ancient multiple-choice exams, Powerpoint slides. MP3s. Old save games. Letters I’d written to friends, journals I’d written to myself. Two years worth of digital photographs.

Photographs of the girls back home. They’d given me a bunch of pictures, in a fold-out wood frame last Christmas, when everybody thought I was leaving in January. I’d given them teddy bears. I’d thought I was leaving too.

What little news I get from home doesn’t seem to be enough. My sister-in-law’s pregnant, so I have another niece or nephew on the way. I haven’t spent enough time with my two nieces. Wonder if they’ll remember me when I get back.

Was watching the History Channel yesterday. Rescue At Dawn: The Los Banos Raid. Of course, watching WWII veterans talking, I was more interested in the background. Baker Hall. The Field. Mount Makiling. Laguna de Bay.

And it physically hurt. There was a hard, sharp pain in the bottom of my stomach, something that made me turn off the TV and go lie down for a while.

Ulcers? Don’t know. I just know that I’ve been having really weird dreams lately… ones I don’t remember in the morning.

Oh, well. Maybe I need to keep busy. Maybe this’ll all go away when I finally get a job.

Maybe someday it won’t hurt as much.

Well we’re finally in Fairfield, smack dab in the middle of the Capitol Corridor, exactly 42 miles from both San Francisco and Sacramento.

Which means both cities are an hour’s drive away. And there’s the whole getting to learn a new transit system thingy. I’m still digesting the Amtrak, CalTrain and BART brochures.

So.

The trip was pretty fun. Woke up at 5 AM Sunday morning, and spent the rest of the morning madly cleaning everything in the apartment (in the vain hope that we don’t lose too much of our deposit). Sunday morning, and the first thing I do is spend most of it elbows-deep in the toilet.

Cooked up a batch of pasta for the trip, plus a few snacks and eight-packs of Coke and Gatorade. Like I mentioned, I’m a last-minute packer, and we had to chuck quite a bit of junk to fit everything in the car.

Bags, mattresses, icebox… making sure we could still see out the rear view window.

As usual, I’m the navigator, with road maps on my lap, feeding
directions to my brother. "Right, err I mean left, no, the other
left…"

We swing onto the 405, which merges into the 5 north of Los Angeles, around Lancaster.

And onto two hundred miles of farmlands of Central California. Really hot 100-degree weather, too.

We stop for lunch at a rest area past Bakersfield. Unfortunately, there isn’t a gas station at the rest area, so we have to look for the next exit, about thirty miles down the I-5.

Pulling out of there, we get hit by a stray pebble kicked up by a truck we’re following. It leaves a nasty-looking crack in the middle of the windshield. A few frenzied minutes spent scrabbling through the rental contract indicates that yes, we did spring for the Loss Damage Waiver add-on to the vehicle insurance, and no, we weren’t going to pay for damage. Whew.

So. Two hundred and eighty miles north of Los Angeles, and we pass a couple of signs that remind us of home.

Near Tracy, I-5 continues on to Sacramento, while we merge onto the I-580 heading northwest to Oakland.

And from the 580, we head north on the 680, past the windmill farms of Livermore.

More farms, hilly country. Still pretty hot, and we’re halfway through our second tank of gas.

We get our first view of the Bay, and the Naval Reserve Fleet.

North of the 680, and the sign "Fairfield City Limits" greets us as we attempt to get onto the I-80. We take the Green Valley  exit by mistake, and spend several minutes fiddling around looking for the onramp.

We miss the correct exit, and have to backtrack southwest on the I-80 before we finally get ourselves to the correct street.

Finally arrive, unpack, and settle in for some rest after four hundred miles and six straight hours of freeway.

Something tells me this is going to be nothing compared to the commute I’ll be facing once I start working. Ah, well. Someday we’ll all look back on this and laugh.

Or cry. It depends.

So we’re in the final stages of packing. We leave early tomorrow for Fairfield. 400-plus miles, seven or eight hours of driving. I’m not driving, of course, my brother is - still don’t have my license.

The local Hertz office loves us - this is the third time we’ve rented from them. Sure, they seem more expensive than Enterprise or Rent4Less, but the others don’t have service up to Northern California, and Enterprise doesn’t allow one-way trips. With judicious use of web discounts, it all evens out.

We lucked out though - that’s a pretty new car. 2005 Ford Escape. Ohio plates, which means someone took it on a one way trip cross country.

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate packing. I’m a very disorganized packer, everything at the last minute. This time is no exception. I’m almost done, which means I have no idea where half my things have ended up.

So. Time to hit the sack early. Time to bid Torrance and Southern California goodbye, and time to hope we find better luck up north.

Time to pack it in and be optimistic for a change.

When we first arrived here at the apartment, we needed to run down to the local mall for a few things. A telephone, for one. You call SBC up to have them activate your phone line, but they don’t actually give you a phone, you have to buy one yourself.

So we pull up Yahoo Maps, and hey, the South Bay Galleria is just a couple of blocks down the street. Having memorized the route, we set off. On foot.

I’m used to walking everywhere back home. Unfortunately, I’m also used to fresh air. Walking two and a half miles in LA smog is different.

The lack of pedestrians should have tipped me off. The odd looks people gave us from their cars was another clue. We should’ve taken the bus.

But then, I’d figured paying $1.25 for two and a half miles was a ripoff. Exercise, right?

We took the bus back, hauling three bags of groceries. Little did we know that we’d gotten on the 710 - the Metro Rapid. And the closest Rapid bus stop to the apartment was half a mile in the other direction.

We got better at it as the weeks passed. We learned the difference between Orange Metro Local buses and Red Metro Rapid buses, that the local Gardena line only cost 75 cents but you had to wait 45 minutes between buses, which were frequently late.

Last week we took the bus up to Westwood, for a meeting with the agency. This was new - before, if we needed to get to downtown (or Santa Barbara) we rented a car and took the Santa Monica freeway north. Expensive, but we needed it for the DMV road test.

So. I do what I usually do, which is open up mta.net and figure out the combination of buses we need to get somewhere. For some strange reason, the MTA website wants me to take the Gardena 5 south to the Galleria and get on the 210 there.

I say hang it, and figure it out on paper.

So we get on the 210, not at the Galleria, but at the Crenshaw-Cherry intersection across the El Camino parking lot. The 210 is the north-south orange Metro Local that runs along Crenshaw.

Despite equal opportunity and affirmative action, there’s a clear delineation between neighborhoods in this city. Torrance and Gardena are middle-class towns, and the bus is nearly empty when we get on. At the first stop in Inglewood, it fills up.

Wikipedia’s entry on Crenshaw contains the worrying sentence "…growth of the gang-dominated  crack cocaine trade in the 1980s made Crenshaw one of the most violent neighborhoods
in Los Angeles, with the stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard between Slauson
Avenue and Adams Boulevard remaining a virtual free-fire zone for years."

Nobody walks in LA. And as we pass Slauson, I see neighborhoods not much different from the one we’ve been living in for the past two months.

I look around, and realize that at this point, we’re the only non-black people on the bus. And I’m the only one wearing a tie.

Oh, well. Crenshaw must have changed a lot since the ’80s. Didn’t see a single gun-toting gangbanger anywhere. Lots of old people. A few in wheelchairs. Not very many our age, but then everybody our age is probably at work.

You can tell where Inglewood ends and downtown LA begins, however, by noticing where houses don’t have bars on the windows.

So we get off on Wilshire. The bus is mostly empty again at that point. Downtown LA, and we get on the 740 heading west.

740 on Wilshire takes us through Beverly Hills, straight through the Miracle Mile. The contrast between Wilshire and Crenshaw is mind-boggling.

I remember stopping on the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire, blinking confusingly at the garish facade of some big store. I don’t really remember the name. Versace and Prada, they mean nothing to me.

Oh, the rest of the trip was uneventful. We get to Westwood, get to the agency thirty minutes early, have pizza and a salad for lunch, etc. Walking past the Hammer Museum, I can’t get over the realization that even in the heart of LA’s business district, in a place where penthouse condominiums sell for $20 million, the streets still smell like piss.

Like piss. Because nobody walks in LA, and wearing my cheap, ill-fitting suit, carrying my battered leather document case, my unemployed ass isn’t worth anything.

Not in this town.

In adversity, people often find God. There are no atheists in the foxholes.

Me? Right now, I’ve got a ticket on the emotional rollercoaster they call unemployment, and this weekend is one screaming plunge down into the depths of depression.

Flubbed the Google phone screen. Badly. Yes, I got an interview with one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, and yes, I got a second interview. That was 45 minutes of sweaty, stammering horror.  I am not optimistic about my chances. In fact, the whole Google thing is probably a write-off.

So friends tell me to pray. They tell me they’ll pray for me.

Kind of a funny time in my life to suddenly find religion.

Personally, I like iceowl’s take on the whole thing:

          You are not special. You will die here, too.

Puts a lot of things in perspective.

Oh, there are a couple more belief systems I’d like to subscribe to. There’s the quantum metaphysics stuff of Penrose, or the Socinian leanings of Dyson.

Or maybe the end of the world came in 1996, but nobody bothered to tell us that right now, we’re all in Hell.
 

None of your belief systems make sense to me right now.

In times of desperation, people will cling to anything that will provide comfort, will provide guidance, will tell them that no matter how bad it gets, everything will turn out all right.

Everything will turn out all right.

I’d like to believe that, myself. No, I’m not an atheist. I have a deep and personal relationship with my Creator. But then, like Heinlein, I believe that that relationship is nobody’s business but my own.

Everything will turn out all right.

I’d like to believe that. I envy people who have unshakeable faith in their God. 

And yes, I am such a baby. It’s only been a month and a half. Lots of other people have gone unemployed for longer stretches of time. Lots of other people have gone through, are going through worse. Lots of people go months without interviews, and I’ve plenty.

Maybe God’s telling me to give it all up.

The job market in LA sucks. Not very many IT jobs floating around. And most of those require experience in Siebel or Peoplesoft or a dozen other big software packages that someone who’s only worked for universities or government won’t ever be able to get at.

So. Move to San Francisco. Drop all my pending applications here and start the job search over again. Sure, Silicon Valley’s got more jobs, but there are also far more unemployed workers from the dotcom crash. Ah, well. Like I’ve got a choice.

Time to take stock of the losses I’ve suffered from bad decisions. Time to pack it up and move on.

Time to stop praying for miracles.

I am not special. I will die here, too.

Parking near the beach is extremely expensive on a holiday. Only slightly less expensive on weekdays, but you gotta know where to park. Parking anywhere in LA is usually a bitch, but that’s the only good reason for not having a car.

Had lunch at the Seafood Cafe on the King Harbor Pier. $3.99 specials, not including drinks. And my stomach is still not used to American-sized portions, so I spend the rest of the afternoon full. They have good calamari and clam platters too (which we had a month ago, the first time we went there).

Fireworks show at 9 pm, which meant we get to enjoy the beach for six hours. Coming back from the restroom I trip over a sign, half buried in the sand:

                       WARNING
           Water is contaminated with
     runoff from sewage and storm drains
            Swimming may cause illness

Good thing we took one look at the brown gack that passes for seawater on this beach and decided not to take a dip.

Anyway, it’s too cold for swimming for someone who’s lived most of his life in the tropics (although there were a LOT of people in the water). Most days I can’t even get into the pool outside our apartment door, and that sucker’s HEATED.

It starts to get dark around half past seven or so. Twilight in the tropics takes about fifteen minutes… one moment it’s bright and sunny, the next - BAM - it’s the dark of night. Not much in between.

Here dusk is a long, drawn-out process that takes a couple of hours or so. Takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t get really dark until about a quarter to nine.

And we settle back for the fireworks, and we realize that the fog has rolled in. About fifty feet or so above the pier. Really low cloud cover.

So the fireworks are going off - you’d see this gorgeous red or blue or white trail of sparks go up, disappear into the low-hanging clouds, hear a loud BOOM, and see nothing except a patch of cloud momentarily light up blue or red. Sometimes we’d get lucky, and see the lower half of a burst, but mostly it was dull thumps and clouds flashing different colors.

Ah, well. My brother’s going on about the fireworks he’d watched last year over the Washington Monument - Don and Bench say they enjoyed the display last year at the Angels Stadium in Anaheim. I’m a little disappointed, after freezing my butt off for several hours, to watch this slightly soggy display of American patriotism.

But then I realize that I’m not that patriotic to America yet (not like the flag-waving college students we kept running into, wearing shirts Magic-Markered "Fuck Osama"). So it’s probably a pretty good indicator of how I feel about the Fourth of July.

Cold and slightly damp. At least I’m not going hungry. Not yet.