Nightmares

I've been bombarded for nights now with unsavory and startling dreams. When I awake, my eyes are crusty with sleep as if I've been crying quietly and then overtaken by fatigue.

Nightmares focus on my lack of professional work and the hopelessness I feel in my job search. I strive, every day, hitting the beat, asking for waitressing or hostessing work at businesses I frequent. Filling out applications in customer service jobs---jobs that I don't even want but look to as a way to get employed and bring money to my struggling circumstances. Time and time again, I feel like God or Fate or Providence has been fucking with me; employment agencies see my resume and interview me for an open position, only for that position to be filled from within the company days later. Recruiters, calling me about job prospects, only to find that my asking rate is too high. How can my rate be too high, if by calculations, my rate at 40 hours a week wouldn't even allow me to live independently of my family?

I'm so sick and tired of people telling me I just gotta keep trying. I've been out of full time work for 18 months now. While I'm lucky to have a part time position, it's just that---a position that probably won't lead me anywhere, and it's part time; usually less than 20 hours a week.

I know beggars can't be choosers in this economy, and I'm lucky to have food on the table and a roof over my head. But I feel swindled of everything. My parents are paying off my college loan for a degree that's not getting me anywhere. For everyone who says that there are plenty of entry-level jobs available in the PR and marketing world, I ask, where? I'm not seeing any of them.

My nightmares take me to places where I'm still searching for apartments, trapped with two college friends who betrayed my friendship. I'm voiceless and powerless with these two, who make all the decisions and do nothing but scorn me. In these dreams, I'm constantly running up against scary what-ifs and deadlines and emptiness. Sometimes, I'm in a new city, bereft of the friendships that mean so much to me, and starting my life all over again, as I did in Portland. That story didn't end well and the fear of having another miserable 10 months, filled with crying and lonliness and depression, keep me from moving elsewhere, even though I've heard there are more entry level job opportunities in San Francisco.

And the thing I hate the most is, right now, I'm feeling that old wanderlust I inherited from my father. The kind that kept him moving from New Jersey, to Florida, to Texas and to California. The kind that keeps him wanting to leave LA as soon as he can.

Right now, I think about beautiful fall trees in the Northwest, while ours are still green in balmy weather, and how I'm sitting in an hour of traffic to go 18 miles, when I could be in Portland on the MAX or in San Francisco on the BART.

I told Amelia, I feel like a mess, and I don't fucking know what to do anymore. And that's where I am. I'm crying in my sleep and I'm waking only to worry and wait about job prospects the next day. I just don't know if or when this will all be over.

Chilean Miners

We all watched, tuned in, turned up, engaged in--- the news about the 33 Chilean miners that were rescued this last week after spending more than two full months in nothing but damp, pitch black conditions.

In any time, this would be great news; especially since not every mining accident ends so happily (note earlier this year several miners in Pennsylvania lost their lives just doing a daily job.)

But this story is REALLY heartening right now. Amidst such bad news, a sluggish global economy that just keeps limping along, the wealthy that caused this whole recession continue to get wealthier, the statistics that 1 out of every 7 Americans is living in poverty (note that this statistic does not gauge those living at-near poverty levels, nor does this statistic acknowledge that the federal poverty line is unrealistically set at an-already-too-low-to-live at standard), the news that a third world country could safely get 33 miners to the surface is fantastic.

If only we could all get over our biases and issues, our separations, cultures, religions, political affiliations and get together on something that is universally important; oh what kind of world would that be?