I’ve been feeling guilty lately, because I haven’t been hammering out the emails to Craig’s List job postings. What can I say, I’ve been busy.

Actually, I have a hard time focusing on sending out new letters when I’ve got a few fires lit and am waiting to see if they bear fruit (to mangle a couple of metaphors). With my sister visiting and the job the recruiter lined up, I slacked off. Hence the guilt of the title.

Looks like, though, I might have nailed the interview. Holy hell, I might actually stumble back into the grown-up, employed world. The recruiter tells me there will be a flurry of reference checking and whatnot starting this afternoon and into tomorrow, Friday the 13th.

It is the prospect of employment at a real live, fancy, expensive, not-for-profit, changing the world, environmentally sound and enriching office that leads to the other words in the title of this post.

I have regret that in the worry about finding employment and managing my funds and not ending up in the gutter, I may not have sufficiently lived the high life of unemployment. OK, I have pretty much milked it for about as long as anyone could literally getting my house in order. And, in the end, given the utter, sheer laziness of a theoretical pile of months of looking, I am one fucking lucky sonofabitch. (OK, lucky combined with some kickass skills.)

Nonetheless, now that I am in a sunny place in a sunny almost summer and haven’t done all of the sightseeing a traveling chick can do, I regret the sudden narrowing of the sand in the hourglass.

And, then there is fear. New jobs and the prospects therein exhaust and worry every ounce of my god-given neuroses. What if all the other kids hate me and no one will let me sit at their lunch table and they beat me at recess and the teacher won’t look at me and thinks I’m stupid and I can’t do the work and it goes on my permanent record?

It seems like such a mixed bag of feelings to begin working again and to do so in a fairly legit job. (As opposed to some of the ridiculous shit I’ve applied for or the glamorous fantasy of temping I’ve entertained.)

I’m trying to focus on the good shit. Like the building itself in which I might find myself. Stunning building, really, and award winning. Vaulted beams and glass with warm woods (from certified forests, no clear cutting there) and the kind of carpeting that softens into a slight, quiet thump the tap of the heaviest heel. The building is so green even the cleaning supplies are nontoxic. As I waited in my car early for the interview, I parked in a non-petroleum paved parking lot surrounded by native species landscaping across a rolling campus and watched lizards scampering over a log and rock while a duck flew over head to a small pond. Idyllic is the cliche that comes to mind.

In the midst of the tasteful and natural, a driver paced around a bit, waiting outside his livery vehicle. Again tasteful, an understated, black sedan. Next over was a Porsche Carrera.

Just walking into an office in a sunlit and solar paneled, clean, green space will be a marked improvement from the crumbling, neglected poorly windowed and more poorly lit office I had in a building slated for several years for demolition. To say that building was a shithole would be too edifying; one of its architectural features was the not completely repaired hole left by a car accident, which dented the office within and left a pile of brick on the sidewalk.)

And, I have to have faith that I have some instincts for determining good folks from bad. Everyone I met seemed A-OK. I heard no histrionics or loud voices or sturm and drang as I waited for the director. They talked politely, but it seemed honestly, about one another and the work. It was as the hackneyed California description goes all quite “laid back.”

Really, laid back would be the phrase, even to the point where no one referred to the president of a multi-billion dollar operation as other than “Bob,” (Duh, that’s not really his name, because I’m quite educable on the matters of weblogs and employers, even of the potential variety.) It even took a thorough Google search to determine whether “Dr.” was the proper honorific for the woman with whom I spent the bulk of my interview time for a quick “thank you” email. At my former place of employ, believe me honorifics were a clear and present force majeur and don’t you fucking forget it. (Although, in that wonderful way in which people like to see themselves as relaxed and cool, they would insist otherwise.)

Uncomfortably, I will wait and see on Friday the 13th how it all plays out.
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Interesting job interview yesterday. The good side was it seems like a nice place with nice people, and I felt pretty comfortable. The bad part is it’s in line with the junk on my resume I had on which I had thought I might turn my back.

Having felt pretty backstabbed when I left Boston (hidden pun definitely intended), I can’t shake my wariness. Everything still lingers like the worst of bad breakups. I just have to remember that like with shitty guys, shitty jobs need not be my fate. Maybe giving up a 15-year track record (successful I might add) in one field is as logical as swearing celibacy after dating yet another asshole.

One indication that it’s not black and white — the recruiter I’m working with sent me email, while I was at the interview he scheduled, about “National Slap a Co-Worker Day.”

Meanwhile, my sister is here visiting from the wilds of Wyoming. I think she might have been in the sticks too long since things like non-white people seem surprising to her, but coyotes don’t (we saw one in the Santa Cruz Mountains). She’s mentioned a couple of times that there are a lot of Asians. (I guess that would include the population of the house where she’s staying.)

The most interesting thing about spending time with my sister is how remarkably different we are. For example, I own NO pinkish, floral pants and, not one, but I think two or three pairs of coordinating pink, coral and/or green sandals. I would bet a tidy sum that I never, ever, fucking ever will.

Well, I might. Like if terrorists took over the world and demanded a national costume of pinkish, coral, giantly flowered capri pants. I would wear them if the only other option was death.

Last night, as is the custom when M. has finished dinner and cozies up to the TV, we were watching Fox or MSNBC or CNN or something newsy, and the story is about GW visiting Tbilisi, Georgia. (I swear that man looked at his approval ratings and asked around on what would be “historic” for him to do as president.)

So, the Georgians getting their democratic freak on are put on a whole big show, including dancing. After the dancing is concluded and GW is about to say a couple of words, I swear to fucking god he did an embarassing butt wiggle, hip shimmy thang, while applauding the actual dancers. It was goddamn painful to watch and think of this guy as the leader of the free, fucking world.

It was the kind of dance M. does in the privacy of our own home to embarrass us both and elicit laughter. Only, good old George wasn’t at home and was being broadcast worldwide. I look at that stuff, and I am fascinated, almost mesmerized, by how this clown could have gotten so many votes. I mention mesmerizing, because the only explanation I can come up with is some kind of mass hypnosis or psychosis last November.

I couldn’t find any pictures or videos to link here (probably because the press secretary had any such images destroyed as a blight on American relations with the world). I guess this substitution will have to do.

I think the chief benefit to living with someone is the prospect of pancakes. Iif you are living alone, and there isn’t much to eat in the house that’s breakfast worthy, you might just have your cuppa tea or coffee and let your stomach growl.

When you are living with someone else, though, you have a good excuse to make pancakes. I mean, you can’t let your partner go hungry, can you?

They were pretty killer pancakes, too. And the black currant cassis I happened to have lying around (because no plain strawberry jam or grape jelly suits this chick) seemed almost as though I wasn’t just wolfing down the puffy joy of a fresh ‘cake.

If everything else should fall apart, as Ilsa and Rick always had Paris, we will have had Sunday morning pancakes.

We saw Kingdom of Heaven tonight, and I think it’s only a matter of time before Sir Ridley Scott is branded un-American. Of course, being British, he won’t likely give a shit.

Nonetheless, Sir Ridley is a sitting duck for the pious, Christ lovers and their peculiar brand of hate.

I mean, really, how can he suggest something like there were factions of greed and corruption among the mighty Christian crusaders? That Jerusalem is a city of walls and mud and, perhaps, as a geographical location and architectural structure, not worthy of bloodshed in the name of any god? And, worse yet, that the merciful and reasonable leader was of all people, Saladin, a Koran-reading infidel?

I almost could forget that the star was Orlando Bloom, so it wasn’t a bad flick.

Also, in my fine, personal history of racism, M. tells me he never heard the epithet “towel head,” until he met me. However, in my own defense, we met in March/April 2003, when the war was new and the phrase de rigueur.

So, a while back, I visited with a recruiter, who seemed mighty excited by the sad little document that is my vitae, my resume. One does suppose, afterall, that I’ve gained a bit of skill toward sundry tasks in my history of toil.

Today, he gave me the time and date of my first recruiter-fetched assignation. Sadly, there is a big ol’ slice of grant management within the particular pie.

Of course, I have mixed feelings.

But, here’s the twist — it’s on the grant-doling side, not the grant begging.

One of my voiced fantasies at the past employer’s, and I might throw out as well, unmistakably non-violent, was this: That I would be on the grant-giving side of my tormentors and devise wicked hoops for their leaping and my amusement.

(It’s actually a perfect bit of revenge for academic types. It has been my experience that they are not rule followers or manual readers, when, and inevitably it’s “when” not “if,” they think they have a better idea. So, it would be fish in a barrel to wait for their own hubris to create failure.)

Perhaps, I will get my chance at one of the world’s larger private philanthropic offices. Or, perhaps only, as my recruiter promises, it’s a chance to make some cake but not in an overly taxing environment. He promised me a little “life balance” afterall .

Worst case, is I will slip down a new and dank rabbit hole. He suggested I not go psycho. Perhaps I’ll listen.

My fallback is my new brilliant vision or awkward self-sabotage strategy. In every job interview I am experimenting with honesty and forthrightness. I figure that way no one can complain once they get what I already said I was.

Yesterday was dominated by my installation of Tiger — Apple’s latest Mac OS. So far, so good. The special surprise for yesterday was the sudden realization that we had leftover pecan pie in the ‘fridge from our cookout on Sunday.

I’m typing this post from a “widget” on Tiger’s new dashboard. I’ll be typing another post in the regular way in a bit, because among the things Tiger has fixed for me is total syncing of my cell phone with my computer. So I dumped some photos from my camera phone onto my desktop and plan to upload a couple.

Meanwhile, I now have my comedy performance schedule on the web, Palm PDA, my Mac laptop and my cell phone all in sync for both the address books and calendars. The Windows laptop has the same shit, but it’s all in the Palm Desktop and ain’t half as purty.

My OCD, computer geek tendencies tell me that now that all of this shit is synced up, I can schedule with wild abandon. I’m hoping that might be something like a job and something like some comedy dates.

So you’re tired from life in the real world on a Sunday, but you go to a comedy show late on Monday night, because they said they’d give you five minutes.

You swallow your shyness and act normal, introduce yourself to the guy that runs the show and buy a glass of wine. Wine not beer, ’cause it’s fucking California and you’ve become a lightweight anyway. It’s always easier for you to nurse a glass of vino over a beer that you’d just end up drinking like water.

The chick hosting is young and new and has all that young, new hip chick brashness that you find grating and unfunny. Yay. Whatever.

Stupidly, you assume the guy who runs the show will give her a nod to who you are, since, um, that’s why you introduced yourself and pointed yourself out and like acted kind of sort of professional. You’ve actually been sitting directly in the host chick’s line of vision, since mostly she’s facing away from the stage the whole show.

Anyway, dumb assumption on her figuring out, being told, knowing who you are. Whatever.

She introduces you — “Um, since I couldn’t find Denise, um, if your name is Denise…” (You’re actually standing at the edge of the stage directly in front of her and have been since she got up there, since she hasn’t been saying anything between acts other than who’s next. You make eye contact and say your name.)

“Oh, OK, yeah, here’s a good introduction, um the next performer is great and funny. Denise.”

Awkward hand-shake transition.

Fucking yay.

Mostly the show was in my unhumble opinion full of hacks and show offs. Almost everyone seemed abnormally loud. Two guys were honestly good. One chick was pretty OK. You were wholly adequate. Some laughs, some nerves, some trying to edit on the fly as a personal lesson for the day.

On the ride home, all you can think is “Why the fuck do I do shit like this?”

“Why did I leave my boyfriend, who has to get up early, and a relaxing evening to be with strangers who annoy the piss out of me?”

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and comedy is just another word for fucking masochism writ pretty damn large.

I forgot to mention a thing about rockin’ the Cali barbeque. No matter how fucking old I get, I’m still living in a high school mindset.

So, when the neighbor looks to share some bud, I’m OK.

When a couple of folks I know from Boston, one a comic, show up, I’m (a) happy, because, like I know someone, like and (b) embarrassed when I don’t have three or four cases of beer to offer up.

And, when the neighbor leaves and one of the other guests says something like, “Man, she was offering grass, can you believe that?” I though, “Fucking dork.” And, then, I made fun of him for saying “grass.” Like it’s 1980 and you’re doing a PSA, “Why do you think they call it dope?”

How fucked up and sad is it that I’m 41 years old, and I’m still evaluating cool party shit and lame nerds? I hope all the guests think I’m cool.

Almost maybe kind of sort of, I’m starting to settle in…or it’s the wine.

We had the first ever BBQ, and it’s almost over. I’m cracking up at the mix of young and not so young, and the wacky kids M. knows from his old apartment. The older folks and my friends (I invited four and had a 50% success rate of invitees showing up) drank and all. The young folks not so much. Weird.

The introduction of some Humboldt bud, a substance of which I no longer can take part, was my California moment. Somehow, it’s wine and reefer and surf songs to me.

The difference between planning a party on my own and with M. is the ratio of meat to booze, budgetwise. My party, the meat budget was low (and I was all set for any vegans or vegetarians wondering by), but I had booze, wine and beer in abundance. In M.’s world, it was the opposite. Our neighbor came by with some red wine, and other people brought a couple beverages, so all was fine.

Unemployed and with a buzz on, I guess is my new West Coast lifestyle.