Is it a sign?

Well my plans for tonight just completely fell through rather unceremoniously. I'm taking it as a sign that I need to update this thing. To be fair, it has been waaaay too long so I apologize for that. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing going on in my life. So I wait until enough things have piled up to make it worth posting about.

So let's see, what have we got in the pile? In December I went home for Christmas and my birthday. The last two years were 3 week long trips but, for reasons that will be explained later, this year was a 2 week trip. Let me just say, you really feel the extra week. Everything felt so tight the entire trip. I was always trying to cram more family/friend/Minnesota time into my day, which frustratingly wouldn't stretch to accommodate the extra demands on my time.

The trip was great though and I got some important family/recharge time in. I don't think it could ever be "long enough" really but it was adequate. I had to get back by the 31st of December anyways because my brother Jordan and my dad were coming out to visit me. That's right, about 24 hours after I made my return to sunny California, I was followed by 1/3 of my family.

And what a great trip that turned out to be. More or less an extended vacation for me, I turned into tour guide for about 5 days as I chauffeured my family members around the treacherous California roads. I drove my new car (oh yea, I got a new car in December, 97 Accord) around town and showed them all the sights. We hit the Rose Bowl parade, took a tour on the Warner Bros lot (including lunch at the commissary) and saw dolphins jumping as the sun set on a beach in Malibu. We even got to have dinner with our good friend Remus from Haiti, who has lived in the Los Angeles area for many years.

It was a wonderful trip filled with eighty degree days and wonderful memories, but it had to end eventually. I sent them off back to Minnesota and it was back to "real" life for me. And that's about it really.

"Real" life, for me consists mostly of two things; working on my writing and working on finding a job. The first one is easy, though it requires a bit of discipline at times. But no one is paying me for that. Not yet. The "finding a job" part is by far the harder of the two. Setting aside the fact that unemployment in my age bracket nationally is upwards of 13% (higher in Los Angeles by all counts, though I have no numbers on that), I just don't know how to get a job. It's not something that comes naturally to me at all and I don't have much practice at it.

The real issue though is that these two problems compound and essentially make the sum worse than the individual parts. Normally, if I were doing something wrong in my job hunt, I would be able to figure it out eventually and make adjustments. But because the job market is so competitive, and there are so few jobs that I can be considered for, I don't know if my failings in this pursuit are a result of a flawed resume, a bad interview or just general misfortune. Did I never hear back from that job because my resume was wrong or because I'm not what they're looking for? Did I just not measure up to the competition well enough? Did I do something wrong in my interview? Trial and error is a really slow process to learn from normally, but especially when the opportunities are so few and far between. Then there are issues of "fate" and "God's will", but I could spend an entire post on that stuff alone.

But basically that's about it. I'm going to be writing on here more moving forward so you shouldn't have to wait 3 months for my next update. Until next time...

p.s. If anyone reading this has some contacts or friends in the Los Angeles area that might be able to help me in my pursuit of work out here, I would really appreciate being put in contact with them. Anything from advice to a job offer will do. Because the other missing ingredient in my job hunt is connections (sadly, the most important one these days). I'm working on that, but it's a slow process. Any help would be greatly appreciated.