California, 2007

And this has been the busiest couple of weeks I’ve had so far, what with tracking down three different job leads, which involves hoofing it to what feels like the ends of the earth. Or at least the ends of the BART and MUNI systems.

Yes, I’ve spend most of the week commuting around the Bay Area. Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton, and back. Then down to Fremont, to a data center. Apparently "near the BART" means thirty minutes away by bus, plus two blocks on foot.

Getting my hopes up, then dashed, then up again. They call me up to tell me they’ve gotten someone else… then a couple of days later, call me in for an emergency interview, ’cause their first choice seems to have backed out.

Anyway. Three interviews per week is far better than the slow drag of the two months we wasted in LA. At least I’m too busy going around the city to mope about in an empty apartment. Especially since the phone company hasn’t gotten us a dial tone two weeks after they told us the line was up.

And I’d prefer not to be left alone on my own for too long, as I don’t know how to cook anything except greasy fried stuff. At least I’m learning a lot about the proper application of garlic. And cheese. Lots of cheese.

French toast and bacon, for example. Typical brunch. I know I should have more salads and less grease, but you know what they say about living forever…

Oh,
well. Still trying to get used to the extreme change in temperature
once you cross the Bay Bridge, going from the sweltering high 90’s of
the North and East Bays, to the chilly fog of the Outer Sunset and Lake
Merced.

Still, could be worse. At least we’re getting far more fresh air than in the smog down south.

The weekend isn’t any less busier, but at least we’re having fun noodling around downtown San Francisco with friends. Must remember not to drink too much coffee while on a hangover, though. I have a really slow metabolism, which means the effects of any beers I have on Friday night do not go away until Saturday evening, and any caffeine I take will keep me up for the next twelve to sixteen hours.

So in this post-alcohol caffinated state, I take a couple of minutes to sit in Union Square and listen to some long-haired bearded gentleman speaking on why despite having gone to several universities and other educational institutions, he believes that the big bang theory isn’t true, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise hates Jesus.

American society has a troubling contempt for education in general, and scientific education in particular. You read about all the debates about putting Intelligent Design into schools alongside (or instead of) the Theory of Evolution.

Other people hang rosaries or scapulars on their rear-view mirrors. We seem to have Great A’Tuin hanging from ours. I wonder why, we aren’t Omnian.

Turtles all the way down. Sounds better than what I hear on TV these days.

I mean, there’s an unspoken assumption that scientists are all godless atheists, intent on driving the steamroller of Big Science over the sacred beliefs of God-fearing, right-thinking folk everywhere.

I remember when we were in grade school - a friend told me that I shouldn’t want to be a scientist when I grew up, because scientists didn’t believe in God. I told her, "your father’s a scientist, right? And he takes you guys to church, right?".

Thing is, there shouldn’t be an argument in the first place between Creationists and Evolutionists. Pick apart Genesis, and you’ll see a pretty clear description of evolution - they’ve even got avians evolving before reptiles, as recent studies indicate - as long as you accept that one "day" in Genesis corresponds to hundreds of millions of years in human time.

It all boils down to people refusing to accept that they descended from apes. And that, by most definitions, falls under the sin of pride. Why do you think a chimp has less of a soul than you do?

The guy on the podium, he says he refuses to believe that Man came about as a result of random chance. He says that fossils are a load of bunk, that evolution did not happen.

Me, I think God was just giving everybody, even the trilobites and dinosaurs, an equal chance at reaching sapience. Every organism, past, present or future, extinct or existing. Everyone deserves an equal chance of getting into Heaven.

Of course, that also means everybody has an equal chance of getting into Hell.

California, here we come,
Right back where we started from…

Yeah, I know it’s a stupid show, but there are days when I can’t get The OC’s theme song out of my head. Right back where we started from.

Me and my brother, we were born in the Bay Area. Family left to go back to the Philippines in ‘76, despite martial law. Haven’t been back in the US for over twenty-seven years, until I decided to buy myself a vacation in San Francisco two years ago, on my thirtieth birthday.

And now we’ve come back. Of course, things are a lot different after thirty years.

Things are a lot different since my last entry here - a lot can happen in two weeks.

Moved to a new apartment, in San Francisco, for one. My brother found a job, for another. He wasn’t going to commute from Fairfield to San Jose every day. Hence the move to SF.

New car, for another. Cheapest Honda we could find. Sure, my brother claims we can make the payments. I’m not that confident we’ll make the rent, insurance, utilities and other expenses by the end of the month, but hey, he’s the one bringing in the money, who am I to argue?

Things change, things stay the same. I’m back to the same situation I was two months ago. Sitting in a nearly empty apartment, looking for work. Right back where I started from.

San Francisco is a little better than LA in this regard, though. Better mass transit systems, for one.

More jobs advertised, of course, here in Silicon Valley. Even in the aftermath of the dot-com crash, there are still quite a few startups. A bit more cautious, of course, and paying far, far less.

Of course, far, far more people looking for work. Jora tells me it’s just summer, lots of new graduates, job market will loosen up in a few months.

At my last interview, I was told there were fifty other resumes on the table for the same position. Of course, he also told me most of them weren’t as qualified as I was, but still… among fifty people, there’s bound to be a couple who are smarter, better than me.

And it only takes one resume better than mine before I get that rejection call. "We’re sorry, but we’ve decided to go with one of the other candidates."

Everybody keeps telling me to buck up and to not lose hope. I guess that’s the standard response to learning someone is out of work. I just wish someone would tell me the cold hard truth for once.

    There is nothing for you here. Go back home.

Feh. In the meantime, I’m here to empirically answer the question: is it easier to be a wealthy person in a poor country, or a poor person in a wealthy country?

I’ve never been much for materialism. I’d had a low-paying job for most of my life. People here are shocked when I tell them I used to work for less than $300 a month for over ten years.

Never owned a car. Lived with my parents. Got by on less than $20 a week.

But the quality of life… fresh air. Walking to work. Lunch and dinner out three, four times a week. Out for drinks or partying every weekend.

Enough disposable income to maintain a state-of-the-art computer system. DSL. Sixty channels on cable. My own personal phone line. A nice cellphone.

All nice. But then, there is nothing in life so precious that it cannot be taken from you.

Now, I’m here in one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Studio apartment. No computer of my own. Just enough money for bus fare. Barely enough income to keep up with the bills.

Back to where we started from. I am thirty-two, and I am starting my career from scratch.

I guess I need to get out more. Take a walk in the park. Go to museums. Do the tourist thing.

Heck, just enjoy the view. Our apartment has a balcony, overlooking the golf course to the west. Beyond that is the beach, within easy walking distance. Or Lake Merced, just across the street. One of these days my brother wants to try hang gliding from Fort Funston.

Thing is, it all boils down to money. In a poor country, there aren’t too many things to enjoy, but the best things in life are cheap. Here, there are lots and lots of things to want, but you need money to play.

Ignorance may be bliss, if you’re happy in some third-world country, as long as you don’t know what you’re missing. But here in the First World, there isn’t much to do if you’re not keeping up with the neighbors. Bigger cars, bigger plasma TVs.

An apartment is just a box you rent to keep your stuff in. Once you get more stuff, you start looking for a bigger box. Get enough stuff, and soon you’re looking to buy a box of your own, out in the suburbs.

Spend all your time making money so you don’t feel bad about your neighbors having more stuff than you. Throw your old stuff away when you’re tired of it. Buy bigger, better, shinier stuff.

I’d hate to end up like that. Which is why I’m probably going back home to the Philippines someday. Maybe to work, maybe to retire.

Maybe soon.

They say San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in America. I’d probably agree with that.

Heading north on 101, as it crosses Mission Street and turns onto Van Ness, I look out of the car window to the left, and see the sunset burning the fog off Mount Sutro, great billowing layers of gold and gray.

Breathtakingly beautiful.

Heartbreakingly beautiful. Heartbreaking, as I remember that I don’t know how long I can stay here. I don’t know how much time I have left before I have to leave for yet another city, looking for work.

It’s the uncertainty that gets you. Waiting for word on yet another interview. Yet another recruiter calls, and you can tell she’s reading buzzwords off a checklist, ticking off your career in a dull monotone that tells you that to her, you’re just another out-of-work schmuck stuck in the debris of the dot-com crash.

As Manuela, the Chinese apartment manager we met in Richmond says, "You in IT? You come at bad time."

There’s the requisite re-reading of your resume over the phone. Ten years of Solaris, nine on Linux. Eight years of script programming, seven of Perl and PHP. And a partridge in a pear tree.

And the uncomfortable questions that inevitably follow. Why did you leave your old job? What were you doing outside the US all these years? Why did you come to the US just now?

And on, and on, until she’s satisfied. Follow up email comes in, and I can tell by the date stamp that it’s originated somewhere in Bangalore or Chennai. Offshored HR recruiters. Again, this tells me I am only one in a large stack of resumes, submitted by God knows how many other recruiting agencies, competing for a three-month contract position that has a small chance of getting converted to a full-time position.

So. I send off yet another copy of my resume (as they invariably lose the one I’d sent them in the first place), and it’s back to the interminable waiting.

Oh, maybe the followup calls in the days and weeks afterward, the investigative sleuthing through Google and the web to find phone numbers for HR, for department heads, for anyone who can tell you that your application is "still in progress".

And the long silences, answering machines and unavailable people, until the inevitable rejection e-mail. Oh, sometimes they don’t even want the speed of an e-mail, you get a formal rejection through snail mail, two weeks after you’ve verified through follow-up calls that yes, they’ve hired someone else.

And it’s back to waiting for the next application, the next recruiter, the next interview.

Nothing to do but wait for my ship to come in. Well, at least I could have chosen far worse places to do my waiting in.

Nothing to do but wait. And hope. And try not to dream.

I was planning on recounting the events of my first night on the town in San Francisco this weekend.

A phone call from Don this evening changed all that.

One of my closest friends had been living with kidney trouble this past year. Dialysis twice a week, and all the pain that entails. He’d been steadily losing weight every time I’d seen him (which was infrequently, ever since I left UPLB).

Tonight I find out that he’s suffered kidney failure this Saturday evening, and he’s being buried this Tuesday (tomorrow evening for me).

So.

Shock.

A few months ago, we were playing MU Online. We’d just leveled him up, and we were tearing through the mutants of the Tarkans plains together. He was happy, smiling. He was always smiling.

Denial.

Some miscommunication in the phone calls between Los Banos, LA, and here? No, I quickly dismissed that. Somehow I was expecting this, ever since I found out they’d increased his dialysis sessions to three times a week.

Bargaining.

No, that’s no good. He’s not coming back, and nothing I or any earthly power can do anything to change that.

Guilt.

He’d seemed depressed ever since the three of us, Jon and me parted ways. The three of us had been together forever - friends, officemates, drinking buddies, partymates, wingmen, teammates, occasional opponents - online and off. Through the catacombs of Tristram, hundreds of levels of Hell, on Big Game Hunters and de_dust, Davias and Atlans, there was no computer-controlled foe we couldn’t take down together. Overnight gaming sessions and weekends at the office. Billiards and beer.

Work - the three of us were the core of the Networking and Data Communications Division. Glorified name for the guys who pulled cable and fixed computers. Benj was always there for me to bounce ideas off of, whether it’s yet another of my unworkable schemes to load balance web traffic by inducing controlled cache failures, or when hard-swapping SCSI IDs on the peak-two disk chain. He’d remind me of things I’d overlooked, like if a particular Asus motherboard didn’t work with that particular clock speed, or when I’d forgotten to reset the IRQ before slotting in the third 3Com ISA card in the router.

And when Jon resigned last April to take that IRRI job, and when I left last December for La Salle, every time we’d meet up after that, I had the feeling he got a little bit more depressed. Maybe that depression was the little push that kept his treatments from working, that kept him from getting better. Maybe if I’d stayed on, took a lecturer position instead of accepting my non-renewal, he’d been a little bit happier, and he’d hung on a little while longer.

Anger.

No, that doesn’t work either. I can’t be angry at anybody. Not even God. Nobody’s fault, really. Things just turned out that way. He wasn’t even the first one to die of this - one of the techs in Chemistry I hear died in exactly the same fashion.

Depression.

Hell yeah. In spades. Although I’m not fully out of shock yet, so I have no idea how depressed I’m going to be over the next few days. I was so looking forward to buying him his own World of Warcraft account so Klynskyn and Dalmor could roam Azeroth together. No more getting together when I eventually get some vacation time back home. God-fuckin’-dammit.

Acceptance.

No, not yet. Not by a long shot.

Although it’s comforting to believe that somewhere, he’s sitting at a keyboard with a big smile on his face. No worries about pain or work or money, just an unlimited ‘net connection and all the games he wants.

All the games he wants. And it’s comforting to believe that someday, we’ll be there beside him, throwing the LAN party to end all LAN parties.

In Heaven there’s no games to play on Sunday
Doom is Doomed, right down to Pick-Up-Sticks
Cause if they let you sit and play, even on the seventh day,
How would you know you was in Heaven on the other six?
                                      - (c)1996 Z Burroughs, happypuppy.com