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.