What a roller coaster the last six days has been. I'm not sure when it was that my estrogen levels hit rock-bottom—definitely between Friday and yesterday. Both those days I found myself considering things that were crazy enough, I finally thought to check the calendar. ("See?" one tells oneself. "It isn't all shit. It just seems that way right now.") As a consequence, I didn't run away for a few days to sleep on my mother's floor in El Cerrito and make her buy me Mexican food. I probably did the right thing, but a few tamales would have helped. I swear.

The employment-lead fairy has come, and not a moment too soon: I was really running out of money. Now I have three possibilities, all of them tantalizing. The one that is closest to home is also scariest: it would represent changing to a completely different industry, and doing a type of work I haven't done in 20 years. Because the fear factor is greatest with this one, I suspect it might be the path of personal growth. Another stroke of luck, though, is that it appears the job offers—if they come (and I think they must)—will line up in sequence, and that I won't have to do any tap-dancing (e.g., "that's an interesting offer? Can I think about it for another week?").

And I'm attempting to bust through my clutter by any means necessary. Preferably before a social worker shows up here to find out if our house is bitchin' enough for a child to inhabit.

It looks like I'll be having 10 or so people over in mid-July, as a sort of late birthday celebration. This is also a little scary, since the Attila the Hub and I haven't done a lot of entertaining in the past 2-3 years. It'll be my friends, so they probably won't judge too harshly, but it would definitely behoove me to clear this place out so that I'm halfway happy with it. We probably won't have the new piano by then—nor even art up on that bare spot over the couch—but it'll look better in four weeks than it does now. Trust me on that.

I even bought The Food Magazine today, partly for the recipes and partly because it represents coming to terms with a strange segment of my life. There were so many things I loved about working for The Food Magazine, but despite my best efforts there was one person with whom the chemistry wasn't good, and that was enough to destroy my chances of ever going back—even as a temp, doing jobs I'd been stunningly successful at. It seems so arbitrary, but it isn't: these things happen, and I'm likely better off for it. I certainly have more freelance clients now than I ever would have if I'd been temping for the foodies over the past two years. (And if I get a staff job I'll have to decide what to do about those clients. Keep one or two, I think, and foist the others off onto other L.A. copy editors.)

In short, things are looking up. Stay tuned.

Posted by: Attila at 01:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 528 words, total size 3 kb.