Summer Jobs

Honestly, I thought I'd be blogging much more this week, seeing as how I fully expected to be unemployed.

My job, such as it is, has been tumultuous from day one, but in recent weeks it had crossed over into abuse.  Twenty-four hour abuse, with demands coming it at 4 in the morning or the dead of the night.  Things escalated over the weekend and it seemed only a matter of when, not if, things came to a head.  And who would pull the trigger.  I can't say what exactly my boss was thinking (and Lord knows, I've been trying for months) but I do know my resignation letter has been sitting on my desktop, ready to go, since Monday, just waiting for the red line to be crossed so I could hit "send".  When that didn't happen, although we came close, I simply changed the date on the letter to Tuesday and waited for it to happen the next day.  And the next.  And the next.  And then today.

And then, like a scene out of "The Hurt Locker", most of the major bombs appear to have been diffused during a lengthy conference call this morning.  Now, suddenly, we're all singing "Kumbaya".  I don't believe it for a minute, but I'm hoping the faux goodwill holds at least until the new year.  Looking for work during the holidays sucks, unless you're aiming for department store elf and I think we can all agree I'm too tall for that.  Although, at the rate I'm going, I don't think we could rule out a slot as "Santa" for next year.

Summer for us officially ended this past Sunday.  We won't be going to the mountains as we traditionally do for Labor Day because the boyfriend will be out of town attending to family business.  I'm especially disappointed because tomorrow marks our 10th anniversary and we'll be celebrating it apart.  We'll no doubt make it up when he returns, but somehow it just won't be quite the same.

Sunday was also, coincidentally, the day I finally finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs.  I actually bought it last December and took it to the mountains to be my winter reading.  Then came the unexpected job offer and subsequent house sale and move to OC and months went by without a trip to the cabin.  We missed most of the Spring and it wasn't until June we began visiting more regularly.  And that's when I finally started reading the book.  A few chapters a week whenever we were up, week by week, month by month, until, with perfect timing, I finished a few hours before we left for the season.

Look, I'm a Mac guy going back 20 years.  I'm not one of those freakish people who camp out overnight whenever a new gadget goes on sale, but I would definitely consider myself a "true believer" and a Steve Jobs admirer.  So I was really quite anxious to read the book, which I found absolutely fascinating, but also a little disheartened to discover that there was one overarching impression you came away with after reading it...

Steve Jobs was a dick.

Brilliant, but a dick.

Genius, yes, but... a dick.

I mean... page after page, chapter after chapter, an unending litany of bad behavior and people wronged.  There doesn't appear to be a single person in his entire life he didn't fuck over at some point.  And he made absolutely no apology for any of it.  I kept waiting for the chapter where there was some sort of redemption, maybe when he discovered he had cancer, maybe after he had a liver transplant, maybe, I don't know, on his fucking deathbed.  Nope.  His theory until the end seemed to be that if you're a visionary, if you're brilliant, if you're ahead of the curve, then you can afford to be a dick to everyone around you because despite your bad behavior, you're somehow advancing mankind.

I suppose that's fair enough, as far as it goes, in relationship to Steve Jobs.  I mean, for better or worse, he's certainly advanced the way we see and interact with the world over the past twenty years.  It's a much different world since the launch of the iPod, and there's no further proof of that than the fact that the biography I just read may be the last physical book I ever buy;  I've already downloaded my reading for the coming Winter on my iPad.

And here is where the tale of Steve Jobs bodes ill for the future:

Most people are not geniuses.

Most people are not brilliant.

Most people are not pushing the envelope and ahead of the curve.

Most people are, at best, middle management.

And their takeaway from the book will be that the key to success is being a dick.

And the way I know that this is true is the way the boss ended the conference call:

"I believe in running a company just like Steve Jobs and by pushing people to do their best..."

No, you don't.

You believe after reading the book that you have a license to treat people abhorrently with no consequences.  Thanks to Steve Jobs, being a dick is now the goal.  And after this week, I think we can safely say... SCORE!

Cabin Fever

Throughout the turmoil of the past four years, through the losses of jobs and homes and security and peace of mind, we did manage to cling to one little luxury... our cabin in the woods.

Actually, "cling to" might not be the right phrase; we couldn't unload it even if we wanted to (which we don't).  Bought at the height of the real estate bubble in 2007, it's so far underwater it might as well be next door to the Lost City of Atlantis.  Selling it wasn't an option and at the depths of our despair we considered just giving it back to the bank, although I'm not so sure what they would have thought about the matter.  Having already lost one house in a short sale, I can't imagine they'd be too pleased with me losing two.  I imagined they would want to make an example of me and I pictured being hauled off in the dead of the night to some Citibank Gitmo.  So we hung onto it, through thick and thin.  Mostly thin.

How we came to own it was somewhat circuitous.  Long before I met the boyfriend back in 2002, I'd pretty much lost any sense of wanderlust.  Too many unfortunate trips with regrettable friends, too many bumped, cancelled or diverted flights and missed connections, too many lost bags.  And then there was the weather;  the best predictor of freakish weather was just to check my travel plans.  Heat waves, hurricanes, swamp like humidity in places they normally don't occur.  The one constant, no matter where in the world I traveled, was some local explaining that "the weather is NEVER like this."  And finally, there was my knack for always being seated next to the sickest person on the return flight, guaranteeing the one souvenir I brought back from every trip I took was a week long bout with the flu.

That's not to say the boyfriend and I didn't travel, we did.  But it was always short weekend trips to Vegas or the desert, somewhere we could DRIVE.  When the dogs came around they introduced a new wrinkle... boarding.  In theory we could have had someone house sit them, but the friends we had at the time were horrible, the type of people who would rifle through your drawers and closets, hack into your computer and inevitably throw some little get together that would spiral out of control and involve the authorities.  And the odds were great that at least one of the dogs would go missing, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose.

Everything pretty much came to a head during the "Alaska Cruise To Hell" of 2005, a nightmarish experience combining the worst of both air and sea travel.  As if every conceivable disaster hadn't already befallen us, once we entered cell range somewhere outside Ketchikan, my phone rang with news from the boarder.  Turns out our dogs don't play well with others and had been "quarantined".  "Actually" said the frightened sounding girl on the phone, "is there any way you could come and take them away?"  It took the dogs weeks to recover.  And us too.

That was pretty much the end of our travels.

But still, you want to get away from time to time, so what to do?  The boyfriend hit on a novel idea... camping.  No one would ever peg us as "campers".  And they'd be right.  But the idea of camping appealed to us because it would allow us to get out of town with the dogs in tow.

The boyfriend found a 1984 VW campervan on eBay.

It had obviously been used a lot, but it was well taken care of and maintained.  It was bright metallic copper.  It if was a person we pictured a 50something redhead, seated at a bar, hard and worn.  We imagined her name was "Karen", so that's what we named the van.  It only took two trips in Karen to realize we had miscalculated.  Less than a year after we bought her, the boyfriend put her back up on eBay and we sold her to a brutish looking lesbian from Vancouver. 

So now it was 2007 and we found ourselves with a little money to invest.  I'd watched my 401k languish and always considered the stock market a casino where the odds were always stacked against you.  We decided we would invest in real estate.  You could NEVER go wrong investing in real estate, right?  It would be a twofer - it would be an investment property AND a weekend getaway.

A place at the beach was way out of our league, but perhaps something in Palm Springs or Big Bear?  At the time, places there had already skyrocketed out of our price range.  And the prospect of a four or five hour drive in rush hour traffic dampened the enthusiasm.  So the dream was put on hold.

Since the boyfriend couldn't have a weekend getaway, he decided he would get the next best thing... a tanning bed.  This was just days before tanning beds were revealed to be nothing more than cancer causing death machines.  He found one on eBay and won the bidding and then the question became how to ship it.  It's not exactly the type of thing UPS delivers.  "Why don't you just come up and get it?" said the seller.  Turns out, he lived in a small mountain community north of LA we had never heard of.  "Bring a 4 wheel drive" he said, "there's snow on the ground".

We borrowed a truck and schlepped up the 5 and then off into the Los Padres Forest.  By the time we reached the village we were already smitten.  We found the seller's house, but he wasn't home.  He had thoughtfully left the tanning bed in pieces in the snow.  We loaded up the truck and headed back out of town and as we passed a real estate office, the boyfriend made a sharp turn into the lot.  He didn't even have to ask since I was thinking the same thing.  We ended up looking at just one home and instantly fell in love.  Not wanting to be rash, we thought we should sleep on it.  And we did.  We drove back up the next day and put an offer on it.

And here we are.  Literally, here we are... we drove up yesterday to spend the holiday weekend.

And glorious it is, our little refuge.  I'm so glad we didn't lose it.  I think it's the only thing that's kept us sane these past four years.