Forty Hours

Date: 2002-09-24 17:38:36

After Festing on Sunday, I got a whole two hours of sleep before eating breakfast and then having a fun-filled and action-packed meeting with my parents. They were concerned about my lack of progress in my job search and declared that "as long as I was living in this house" (yep, they used those exact words) I would have to spend forty hours a week doing either paying work or job searching. Since Scott only can pay me for 30 hours a week, this leaves ten hours a week to sacrifice to the gods of jobsearch. (These gods, I believe, are currently on an extended vacation to somewhere on the other side of the galaxy. No matter how loud I shout at them, or how much I sacrifice to them, they're not going to hear me.)

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot I'm supposed to keep up a positive attitude. (Hi, Dad!) Actually, that's one of the things that I'm going to count that I did today, since I replaced "futile" with "attitude-improving" on my jobsearch scorecard. That, and trying to figure out what on earth to say to a Chief Operating Office whom I forgot to call two weeks ago who isn't even in this country at this exact moment in time. The best I can come up with is, "I'm sorry I forgot to call you... two weeks ago... and only now got around to remembering it. When I'm working for your company, I promise I won't be nearly as stupid as I was this month." Somehow, I can't imagine that would be a good idea.

I managed to install PostgreSQL, from source, on the friendly Buildmeasite Cobalt today, which means that I actually get the full features of 7.2 without having to upgrade the existing copy of Postgres, which everything else (like the Cobalt's stupid little built-in management gibberish) happens to depend on. I also managed to do about a week's worth of work for Scott's girlfriend Jenny in ninety minutes (most of which was spent trying to grok the problem) through the magic of Perl.

Oh yeah, I did laundry, and even managed to flip my new mattress.

Nope, I'm not demoralized. Because I'm not supposed to be. But if I actually bothered to open my eyes and look at the evidence around me (like, say, the NASDAQ closing even lower than yesterday's six-year low), then I suppose I could be rather bearish about my real-life possibilities for getting a job. (Am I taking after Kiesa when I say that I'm not being pessimistic; I'm just being realistic?)

The obnoxious part was that I was actually looking forward to having one of these things called a "disposable income" so I could feed the economy. Come on, someone pay me, and I promise I'll feed it back into the economy!

The one bright spot is Google News. Now I can see all of the stories telling me the markets are dying, all in one place! What a deal.