Peculiar Monster

Still Here

Is this thing on?

I sometimes wonder that about myself. It's been 8 months since I was laid off and I still don't have a job and my unemployment has run out. This, predictably, sucks and I hate it. In the last eight months I have gotten precisely one interview and one phone screen. I'm now widening my search to include part time work and contract work (preferably long term).

This is a terrible job market. I've never had such a difficult time finding a job, not even after I moved to Nebraska and went on 70+ interviews in about 4 months and ended up getting a job with a company where I cold-called HR and they told me to send in my resume.

I could moan about our utterly broken system for ages but I don't want to. But my mental health has been affected and not in a good way.

I do want to share these two pictures of two of my cats, Miles and Gregor:

Miles is a black cat with a small white splotch on his chest. He's sitting on the arm of the couch in a very upright and classic black cat way and he knows he's handsome. Gregor is a black cat whose left ear has been clipped to signify that he's been fixed (he was a feral kitten who decided he liked inside better) and he is sprawled on the back of the couch, causing some slight disarray to one of my non-fiction shelves. Careful examination of his face will show a tiny blep, for Gregor is a cat who bleps and we are delighted by this fact.

Both photos were taken on my Light Phone III (which I'd pre-ordered ages before losing my job) and just switching to a mostly dumb phone for phone stuff has been a great way for me to stop doomscrolling. And the camera takes pretty darn good pictures. I do fall into doomscrolling on occasion, but it's not as big a concern for as it was pre LPIII. I'd say I'm doing more productive things, but unless you consider falling back into Animal Crossing: New HOrizons like it's March 2020 to be productive, I'm not. I have been getting a good bit of reading done.

I spent December through early February reading a bunch of Guy Gavriel Kay books and I'm bereft that I'm out of them (there is one, I think, that I haven't read but I also want to reread the Fionavar series + Ysabel and I don't own them and I'm on a book-buying embargo). Then I re-read Kate Elliott's The Witch Roads so I could read The Nameless Land which I thought was the entirety of the series but apparently not! Which makes me happy! I've just started a re-read of Martha Wells's Witch King so I can read Queen Demon. And in between, I'm rotating through three non-fiction books: Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters which is an extraordinary book about plant intelligence; Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy, Bad Strategy which is a business book, but I'm finding it very insightful, mainly because I've seen a lot of the bad decisions he describes; and finally Richard C. Schwartz's No Bad Parts which is about the Internal Family Systems mode of therapy and there's a lot in there I flat out don't agree with and more than a whiff of illness/disability shaming which is not cool.

Note: I am using Bookshop.org affiliate links here in the hopes of maybe earning money towards a few of my wishlist items, which are all things I would prefer to read in hard copy--I don't absorb non-fiction very well electronically; I don't currently have a fiction wishlist. Purchases made from my wishlist support my local bookshop, Huxley & Hiro, which I really need to go to at some point. But in that photo of Gregor, that bookshelf is primarily books I haven't yet read. There are a lot of books with red, cream, and black on their covers. I can't imagine why that would be.

Finally, if you're interested in seeing my chorale perform, you can buy a livestream ticket. I'll be the short person in the front left with very short brown hair and glasses. I'm singing alto 1 this time around and it's been good. The program is extremely challenging but I think it'll be a lot of fun. If I can manage to pull my shit together and if we stop having heavy snowfalls on Sundays that affect our Monday evening rehearsals.

If you made it this far, yay! I appreciate you, anonymous reader (you are completely anonymous; I do not use analytics software to count pageviews or clicks). I hope you have a nice week. And I hope that you wish that for me, too.