I'M EMPLOYED!

Hooray! My six months in the economic wilderness are over! I'll be working at a local commercial TV station starting August 9. (Well, pending the passing of a drug test. And let's face it. I'm not exactly Keith Richards in that regard, so that will be no problem.)
The pay isn't nearly what I was once making, but combined with my wife's salary we should be able to pay the bills... and that was my biggest concern.
So new adventures await. This should be interesting!

Please Stand By...

Maybe things weren't as grim as I had thought yesterday. That commercial station called back today. They have upped the salary offer to what I was asking. They asked if I was still interested. When I replied that I was, they said they would call back tomorrow. We'll see what happens...

Back to Reality

Thanks to the generosity of one of my wife's co-workers, the family and I were able to spend a long weekend at a cottage in Lexington, MI. The cottage itself was wonderful and its location - a mere block away from the sandy beaches of Lake Huron - was even more so.
The kids and I spent hours in the Lake. I even spent one afternoon splashing around in the whitecaps as though my 48 years didn't matter. I may as well have been 10 for all the fun I was having.
And then, yesterday, we returned home.
There was a phone message for me from a local commercial television station at which I had applied. I set up an appointment for an interview.
And so today, I had the interview. The station manager seemed very impressed with my qualifications. When asked what salary I was looking for, I gave them a figure that was less than half my previous salary. It was too much for them. By several thousand dollars. They wouldn't budge in the least. In fact, for the salary they were offering, I could flip burgers at McDonald's. It appears they value cheap labor more than actual experience. Then, when I returned home, there was a letter in the mail informing me that I didn't get a job I had interviewed for a few weeks ago. There's something soul-crushing about giving your all in an interview and it - and the glowing recommendations you provided - not being good enough.
I am depressed, discouraged and frustrated. I don't mean to be self-pitying, but at times like these it's difficult to put on a brave face and keep going. But keep going I will. Not because I have any optimism left, but because I simply have no alternative. Maybe someday a decent job opportunity will present itself. Maybe not.
I hope one day I will be able to look back upon this posting and smile with relief that I made it through these hard times. But then again, I fear I may look back at these times as the "good old days" when I still had unemployment insurance and subsidized health coverage.
I'm torn between wanting to simply give up and wanting to grit my teeth and persevere. I know this recession is affecting millions of people. I know I'm not alone. But I keep thinking of the words attributed to Josef Stalin. Something like "If one person is affected, it's a tragedy. When millions are affected, it's a statistic."
Maybe that's my real problem. I'm tired of being a statistic. I am a person with a life story, intelligence, talents, hopes, quirks and dreams. I'm tired of being a percentage or a mere potential source of desperate cheap labor. I'm tired of daily fruitless job searches. I'm tired of endless applications and resumes that fly off unanswered into the vastness of cyberspace. I'm tired of wondering when my unemployment insurance will end. I'm tired of wondering when I'll lose the healthcare subsidies that are the only thing enabling coverage for my family and me. I'm tired of being labelled "lazy" or a "drug user" by some simply because I lost my job through no fault of my own. (Are you listening, Sen. Hatch?)
But most of all... I'm just... tired.

My Blog: Now Featuring Optional Noise

Hi all!
Just for the halibut I've added a little gizmo to the right side of this blog where those of you so inclined may listen to some sonic dandelion fluff by Ice Halo, the band for which I vocalize and occasionally scribble some songs fer.
You don't have to click on it, of course, but it's there if you want to. There are only a few songs there as I type this, but I plan to add more in the coming days.
Don't expect much, though!

The Kind of Stuff I Think About

I was watching a commercial for a skin cream which promised to make you look five years younger. Which made me wonder... what would happen if you put it on a three-year-old?
Yep. This is one of those days where I will do ANYTHING to keep from having to mow the lawn. Even post dumb stuff on blogger.

48 By the Numbers

Today is my 48th birthday. Unlike some people who would spend such an occasion waxing philosophical about the grand journey of life, I’m more of a “facts & figures” sort of guy. I will, therefore, put this kilometerstone into perspective by use of the following statistics, courtesy of the Social Security Actuarial Tables:

As a male living in the United States turning 48, my chances of dying before my next birthday are 0.4% (or, to make it sound more positive, I have a 99.6% chance of living until age 49).

In a randomly chosen group of 100,000 people born at or near the same time I was, roughly 92,958 of them are still alive. In other words, I’ve outlived about 7.1% of my peers so far.

Statistically, I can expect to live another 30.49 years.

I’ve been around for 17,532 days. That’s equivalent to 2,504 weeks, 420,768 hours, 25,246,080 minutes or 1,514,764,800 seconds.

No wonder I feel old!

Divisible

In the midst of the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 1980’s, certain Christian preachers wanted us to believe there was a Satanic Cult in every Podunk burg in the nation just waiting for you to turn your back on your toddler long enough for them to snatch him or her up and butcher them as a sacrifice to their Dark Lord. I was always suspicious of these claims for many reasons, not least of which if these Satanic cults were murdering kiddies at the rate these fundamentalists claimed it would have been impossible to walk through a park without stepping over the dismembered remains of the entire student body of the nearest elementary school.
Not to be so easily deterred, these folks vainly offered “evidence” that these cults were real. And sadly, these holy harlequins were actually taken seriously enough by some local law enforcement folks to have these hacks make presentations detailing “how to tell if your town is overrun by Devil-worshippers”. Among the telltale signs: graffiti. Yep. It seemed that, according to these “experts” graffiti and the devil went together like secularism and casual abortions. Seems if there was graffiti on your town’s dumpsters with pentagrams, "666" and the names of MTV hair bands, your town was infested with demon-lovin’ child killers.
It is, for that reason, I found it especially and delightfully ironic that decades later it’s now the Christians who are breaking out the spray paint in order to advance their particular supernatural viewpoint.
The story is this: the North Carolina Secular Association put up a billboard quoting from the original Pledge of Allegiance: “One Nation Indivisible”. Almost predictably, within a week, Christian vandals – taking their cue from the 1954 act of Congress that altered this original version of the Pledge– broke out their navy blue Krylon cans and inserted “Under God” on the billboard indicating it was to be placed between “nation” and “indivisible”.
There’s so much irony here I don’t know where to begin. First, there’s the incongruity between the Christians’ self-professed law-abiding nature and the use of vandalism and defacing of others’ property to promote their agenda. Next, there’s strangeness in their using a medium that mere decades before they themselves had condemned as being associated with them damned devil worshippers. Third, this act of vandalism has given the North Carolina Secular Association far more publicity than they otherwise would have had. But finally, and perhaps most significantly, the morons who defaced the billboard MADE THE SECULARISTS' POINT!!! The secularists were arguing that the insertion of religion into patriotism was – in itself – divisive. So much so that the mere expression of an admirable sentiment from the original pledge can no longer be safely stated in public without some religio-drones vandalizing it!
This is typical of how the religious right works:
1. Hijack a perfectly good secular national motto / pledge / whatever and alter it into a religious one.
2. Pretend the religious one was the one that had always been there.
3. When someone who knows history points out that it was the Christians who subverted the original intent of these statements, accuse them of not being true patriots, despite the fact that it is the secularists who are the ones who are promoting the original intent of the founders.
Those who vandalized the billboard in North Carolina proved yet again that religion is a divisive force in our nation. If you want to be religious: fine. But when you try to entangle your beliefs with government to make your point, you’re doing nothing more than causing unnecessary division within the land you claim to love so much.