hunkering down

so i got a new temp gig. i am working in the tax department of a large bank. it's pretty exciting. i sort mail and faxes all day long. so i would rate my job satisfaction as: high. nevermind that i have the constant urge to weep all day long, that i have no human interaction, and my supervisor does not speak to me--it's a job.

no really, i am glad to have a gig again. hopefully, i will be able to save a lot in order to finally make my big move. i just try and focus on that. all of the above is true and i know you appreciate a dry sense of humor.

i applied for the last job i will apply for in iowa this evening. it is as a product marketing manager and involves a lot of domestic and international travel. i figure by the odd chance i do get it, this could be a decent home base for a couple of years. the cost of living is cheap, so i could pay off a decent chunk of el grad school loanos. we'll see--i'll probably just intimidate the hell out of those people anyway, per usual.

so yes, some serious hunkering down going on here.

rolla and i had our typical monday evening meeting at le continental, which was nice. the weather was good--we could have even sat outside. spring smells good, but rolla said all that she could smell was cigarette smoke. that is pretty much the extent of my social life. tonight, i hung out with my dad and watched law and order. suhhhweeet.

since it is no longer minus eighteen degrees celcius in the iowhat, i have started to go on walks again since i no longer have a gym membership and the eliptical at home gets old and running hurts my knees, yes, i powerwalk around suburban iowhat with techno playing on my ipod and yellow sneakers. really it is a classic amischwab moment. and really, i should laught about it more.

i talked to my friend kel-lay on sunday evening. i just think you should all know what an amazing person she is. really, i have thought about her a lot this past year, after being rejected from so many jobs and feeling like i am falling away from my dreams. see, kel-lay is an opera singer and lives in manhattan. she has a fancy corporate job by day in order to support her numerous auditions, lessons, etc. she gets rejected all of the time--it is almost like a lifestyle choice. but she knows what she is meant to do, so she persists, even though she might be happier somewhere else. so shout outs and smooches to her. she is just one of the people who i am thankful to have to help keep me going.

it's time...

...and i am a little nervous.

after many conversations with friends back in the PNW and my family here, i have realized that it is time for plan Z.

i have tried really hard to make things work in iowhat, but i find myself mistreated and undervalued. it is frankly a little ridiculous. so i've got to move on.

so i think i am moving to chicago. i do not know how this will happen or exactly when, but i have to do something. i can't wait around here much longer.

updates to follow.

so, i kind of lied

when i said last week that i expected nothing or very little from this trip, i lied. i expected to have a lot of time and i would use this time to sit in coffee shops with free wireless and work on the el job searcho, blog, catch up on e-mail, etc. alas, this did not happen at all. it does not mean that this was not a valuable experience, but i am exhausted and feel like i have a lot of catching up to do when i get back to the iowhat.
i hate this feeling of being behind. it is like oversleeping, except i have overslept by ten days, not ten minutes. so i will probably spend the next 24 hours self-loathing and then become highly productive tomorrow.

all dressed up and nowhere to go (or no one to take me)

It has been said that the core of human fear stems from abandonment. When one is in need or in danger and there appears to be no means of protection or no way of escaping a situation, one experiences fear that can be traced to an overwhelming sense of utter hopelessness. In these situations, we require someone else to rescue us and it often seems or is actually the case that there is no one to perform this role.

Abandonment is an emotion I have experienced frequently during the last several months. One could argue that avoiding this feeling is what drives our behavior. It is true that much of what I have tried to accomplish in order to take back my life relates to this. Recently, I have come to understand and accept that this is inherent in the human experience. I would like to think that it does not drive all that I do, but at the end of the day, I am sure that one could make a convincing argument that this was the case.

I find myself again experiencing this poisonous emotion. We experience it in a variety of situations, from medical crises to a relationship ending to a loved-one passing on. There are also the mundane cases, but abandonment feels the same. I am sitting on a front porch waiting for a taxi to take me to an interview and it has yet to come. I called an hour and a half ago to order the cab and I am now forty minutes late for the interview. This is, of course, not the impression I would like to make on the organization. Alas, I do not having another option. I am feeling abandoned.

My extreme tardiness to this meeting could affect the course of my life. I say this with caution, knowing that it might appear that I am blowing the situation out of proportion. It may also turn out that the recruiters will totally understand the situation and overlook my now forty-five minute lateness. One might say that this is an opportunity to demonstrate how I behave in crisis situations and will actually make me a more credible candidate. I can rationalize almost any outcome.

In the end, though, I have no control. I have called the taxi company a total of four times and I always receive the same answer, that I am next on the list, that they are busy. I have phoned other companies as well and the story is the same. There is no access to another form of public transportation where I am at and walking might have been an option three hours ago, but no longer.

In short, I am feeling abandoned. At first, I was enraged by the situation. My anger has yet to fully subside, but I now find myself saddened by potentially missing an opportunity at a chance to present myself and my abilities to a potential employer. And yes, the taxi has still not arrived, I am fifty minutes late now.

To extrapolate this though process even further, perhaps to its end, much of this has to do with time. Time has bound me to arriving late. It is also time, however, that will free me. At the end of this day, I will enjoy time with old friends and I am sure the events of the day will not be significant. If, in fact, I never make it to the interview or any for that matter, time will inevitably produce other opportunities. So life continues and time will also bring our inevitable death when time will no longer matter to us and all of these situations will be forgotten.

This is verging on coming across as morbid, but the same is true in the present. We know that each day will end and that the sun will rise. In the meantime, it is our charge to take advantage of the time we are given. We will fail and succeed over and over again. We will grow tired, yet we will rest and attempt once again to fulfill the charges of the day. Morning will come and in the end, we will come to find to comfort and solace that each and every one of us craves and needs. Of this I am convinced.

(p.s. taxi never showed, no other companies could help me. i missed the interview and could just say sorry.)

automobiles, then planes, then trains, then busses

so here's the deal:

- ol' blue and i braved the recently opened interstate and drove to omaha and spent the night before getting up at 3:00 am to catch flight.

- flew into portland from omaha (wanna save $500 when travelling from dsm? go to omaha!)

- took train into city to drop stuff off at a-squared's apartment.

- borrowed a-squared's car and went over the river, through the woods to grandpa and grandma's house (literally, itwas quite a drive).

- spent 3 FULL days with grandparents, which was nice, but intense. lots of tears. trips to doctor, grocery store, doctor again, and my personal favorite, the department of motor vehicles.

- lots of good talk time with a-squared throughout. i honestly would not have made it through the time in P-Town without them. they are just fantastic.

- other sites visited in P-Town: Nordstrom Rack (wow!), The Boiler Room, some other random place on Burnside.

- took train to T-Town. Picked up by foxer. Dinner at the Spar. Foreign film with subtitle afterwards and beer. Typical evening for the foxer and I.

- hitched a ride with foxer to work, saw old boss/friend for coffee and kashi (that's why I was so gassy yesterday!), lunch with mentor. good times.

- dinner at Silk Thai (har har!) with MJ and jillywog. So good (when did I last have Thai food?) and then beers at E9 in the North End of T-Town.

- finally, a morning to myself. interview this afternoon. not looking forward to ironing my garments.

- tonight: pub crawl with Kaka and Frick et al.

so yeah, it's been busy, but fun, actually. quite unexpected.

sometimes, you don’t want any more helpful advice, you just need a glass of water

i am visiting my undergraduate campus today. If you have ever done this, you know that it is strange, pretty much on the same level as visiting your old high school or primary school for that matter. A person’s years at university were supposedly very formative. Thus visiting campus, even if it is only to see a few select individuals, is like stepping back into a pressure cooker. Here I am, it is if I am saying, did I turn out like you had hoped? Did you receive the return on investment you had hoped for? Some people had placed high bets on me and I on myself, perhaps even higher.

I have not achieved what I thought I would have by this time. Four years ago when I thought about my future, I did not expect anything that has occurred, particularly over the last year. In avoiding those people from my past, I am also avoiding those antiquated expectations. I am also avoiding helpful advice that would put me back on that track. See, that advice is just another form of placing expectations on someone. Really, I do not need any more. I know what options are available, I know that should these not materialize or work out, I have the flexibility to seek out others, and I know that this all takes time. I also know that I am the worst about expecting a great deal from myself and I do not believe that this is unreasonable. I understand what I am capable of and what I need to do in order to support my capabilities.

One learns the difference between expecting what another person will do and expecting what they will become as a person. By no means am I doing what I or others expected. Many goals and dreams seem stagnant now or have died altogether. At the same time, the self is still very much alive, though it has formed itself and been formed in different ways than what was projected.

The people we want to connect with are those that care about the life inside the form and not the form itself. They are those who provide the rich soil and water and fertilizer in which we grow, not those with pruning shears and saws. The shears and saws are the helpful advice. Just as a tree will not fully thrive if the gardener continues to chop away any new growth in order to keep it in a particular form, the self too will eventually stagnate when continuously chopped at with helpful advice.

In German, the word for a nursery is “Baumschule,” which literally translates as “tree school.” I believe this is a wonderful metaphor for formal education. Schools, universities, and other places where we have teachers and mentors, so nurseries are full of gardeners that tend to plants and trees in a variety of ways. Some are concerned with giving helpful advice, others enrich the soil and let the plants grow as they are meant to.

It is not difficult to find gardeners who will prune trees. Finding ones who will water the trees is rare. It is a far less glamorous task, but it is vital for the survival of the tree.

wide open spaces

To be totally honest I expect nothing from this trip. I do not even think it will be that enjoyable. Yes, it will be nice to see family and friends. It will be nice to get away from the snow. Otherwise, I have no hope or belief that it will bring something more.

I am sitting at the Denver airport. The horizon is defined not by fields as it is in Iowa, but by the Rocky Mountains. When I lived here, I never found them that remarkable. It is true that they are mighty, springing up from the plains out of nowhere. At the same time, to me they do not compare to the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest that tower above mighty rivers that flow into the expanse of the Pacific. This morning, however, they are magnificent. Again, I never sat and looked at them before. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in other things while I was here. I did not pay attention to a lot of things when I was in Denver. I never thought it would be a significant place in my journey, but given the events of the past year, it turned out to have been stage of some major scenes.

Living in different places as well as travel for me has little to do with location, though I have enjoyed what cities ranging from Washington, DC to Berlin and Windhoek to Prague have had to offer in terms of culture and climate. How I long for a hot afternoon in February in Namibia! Picture sitting by the pool in the desert with a gin and tonic. After the blizzard, that sounds about as close to paradise as I can imagine. That aside, it is who I have met that has made the difference. These people who have enabled me to see myself and see beyond myself have made all the difference. In Iowa, I must admit that there has been more of the former, which has been excruciating at times. There is no truly other word to describe it. I have been accompanied to new depths by those at that stopping point and I have gone deeper all by myself. At times, I have felt weighed down by people who seemed more like psychotherapy patients than friends. I realized that as I consoled them, I was counseling myself. As I explained what I had learned from years of what can be best described as hard living, I was teaching it to myself all over again. There was so much I had not noticed and so much I had forgotten.

For one, I have ceased to believe in signs in Iowa. So-called signs seemed to point me in a variety of directions during my time there. These ways turned out to be dead ends at the end of very rough roads. Kraeutle says there are still signs, but it depends on how we interpret them. Perhaps he is correct and I was just too compulsive or even frivolous in identifying signs.

On my flight from Omaha to Denver, I slept for most of the way, but as we were landing the man next to me asked where I was going. I told him I was going to Portland. As a friendly gesture, I returned the question. He was going to Seattle. Yes, I would be going there on Wednesday as well. The conversation continued and it turned out he actually lived in a suburb of Tacoma and his mother had worked for 25 years at the company where I have an informational interview on Friday. Six months ago, I believe that the silly me would have thought that perhaps this connection meant something, in other words, it was a sign that something might come out of this. Now I just think the world is small and full of coincidences. It was a teachable moment in that sense.

You might recall from writings and photos what a fantastic social life I had in Denver. For a short time, my paths crossed with those of some brilliant, fun, and caring people. At same time, our lives remained parallel in many respects. In graduate school, one is so focused on one’s career and there is a great deal of internal and external pressure. We had our time here filled with late nights in the library, later nights at one of the hundreds of great bars and lounges Denver has to offer, and yet again, even later nights that turned into mornings at the library. Now we are all scattered throughout the world—from West Africa to California to Manhattan. We chat, we comment on each other’s blogs and myspace pages, and there is the occasional phone call. The lines of our lives that intersected for a brief moment have now taken other tangents. Perhaps they will cross again, but certainly not in the way they did here. We will meet for a martini at the Bar Rouge in DC or spend a weekend in Seattle together, we will laugh and reminisce, and our lines will then swerve in another direction once again, just as they swerved into each other here in Denver.

Today this city is just a stopping point and I will not even leave the terminal. The expanse of the plains and the towering Rockies have reminded me of Wide Open Spaces—that song that so simply says so much about growth, growing up, and moving on. In front of these mountains this land is so flat I truly feel like I can stretch my arms again and take off with wings that have been frozen during a chilling winter. Though they were broken and stiff for so long, they still have strength. Are airports, fellow passengers, and airplanes signs of things to come? I do not believe so. They are simply a coincidental backdrop to my own takeoff.

As I step onto the airplane for my next flight, I will.

another day

it is an overcast, dark morning here in the iowhat. Right now, it is drizzling, but blizzard conditions are expected later. Sweet!

I believe that most of my colleagues are scouring the supply cabinet to find blunt objects with which to end their own lives as they find this weather totally depressing. I, on the other hand, am surprisingly chipper. Perhaps this is due to growing up in a place where it was like this all the time. I told a coworker about my freshman year of college when we had 100 days straight without sun. Now that was a little much, but otherwise, you just drink a lot of coffee and light candles. These are the tools of survival in the Pacific Northwest. It is true, they are not as sexy as those with more extreme weather: snow blowers, plows, rock salt, gravel. Whoah, I am feeling a little woozy thinking about how amazing it must be to operate a snow blower. A snow blower is definitely better than a candle.

I just turned around and looked out the window. The Seattle weather is gone. It is now snowing. Someone told me they are closing the interstate at noon. The Apocalypse of winter, let us hope. It seems like no one is working but rather staring at sattelite images. Seriously, I just walked through the cubes and everyone was looking at the dopplar.

(Note to self: Pills, The Perishers—good song—how did it end up on my iPod? Anyone?)

In many respects, this is like living in a foreign country. The hardest part of living abroad are not the things you notice, but the things you do not notice, or perhaps more accurately, you do not notice and people do not notice that you do not notice. So here I am, a west side kid who has no f-ing clue what the deal with the weather is. like, do people go home early? will they tell me to go home? or will i pop my head out of the cube at noon and find myself totally alone in this huge building because they assumed i would know what to do?

people are starting to leave. the slush is beginning to turn into ice. wtf? i guess i gotta wait.

doppler picture

i see a lot of things in this doppler picture. there's a snake. there is what looks like a primitive map of the united states. there is an arm flexing with a fist. what else? gimme your best shot.