Farting through my Fingertips

An unlooked-for loan.

This could be described as an interesting point in my life.

Despite two post-graduate and one and a half graduate degrees, major international finance and IT experience, and a list of skills that gets embarrassing to recount, I am within a handful of weeks of bankruptcy because I can't get a job.

The perils of a non-standard CV.

I'll expand on this in a later post. It's too hot and too late in a long effortful day to rack out even a sample of the job-hunt fatuities. Let alone the various other blog posts backburnered these last few days.

I sit here at my desk, the brightling sky out-window framing the roof 1 alley away, the buildingless precarious Georgian facade 1 corner away, the stilled stark cranes spidering high above Spitalfields 1 block away. A chalk-smear cloud stands startled and alone in London's so-rare clear sky. A handful of happy drunks have taken over the wine bar 20 feet under me, door flung wide and music spilling out and up and into the 400 year old passageway. The lace curtains belly and skirl in the brothel's open window opposite and above them. A Chinese waiter clambers over the roof with a knife in his hand, face impassively flushed. The drunks are taking turns to stand outside the doorway and cheerfully accost passersby with big grins, unsteady stances, and: "Come in for a dance? Fancy a beer? Oh, come on." Some drop their heads and scowl rigidly forward and they press on with their irritation or upset strident in every stiff step. Others stop and laugh, swap teasing for cajoling.
"Oi, ladies, are you, arhhh, dancing tonight?"
"Oi! I've just seen Jack the Ripper! He's in there!" to some tourists wandering round with a Hidden London guide.
Amiable.
Affable.
Happy.

I will miss this place.

It's what's given me the energy to keep going this long.

The current rent payment takes the last of my reserves. All these documents, books, memorabilia, souvenirs, crystal, furniture, files, clothes, electronics --worthless if sold, but things I've worked for or gathered or kept, to make life better, more comfortable, more enjoyable-- all have to be disposed of. Binned, burned, or bruited. Too much to keep at friends', or even to shift. My life set to zero again.

Unable to get a job in the fields I've been coaching and helping people in and hammering myself in for 10 years. Unable to get past the filters because my CV is not standard. It's not standard as a direct result of how much I've done. My career set to zero again.

And in a twist worthy of the worst soap opera, during the week wherein I'd discovered I'd miscalculated, that I had a full month less time than I'd thought I had, and was struggling to come to terms with it even as I was still cajoling my way past and around more agents and HR staff, during that week some of the effortful groundwork I'd been laying for months suddenly kicked in all at once. Akin to an exhausted swimmer finally getting swept over the waterfall he's been struggling against for o so long and, just as his flailing leaden arms are losing contact with the stream, hearing bellowed belatedly from the shore above: "Lifebelt! Swim for it!"

Suddenly I'm tabled at half a dozen places. Painstaking custom CVs breaking the way, interview yesterday, interview today. Not great jobs but working again, with the possibility of upside after yet another stint of paying-my-dues. The alarmed embarrassed silence from my friend who can do perhaps a third of what I can do professionally, when I mention what level these opportunities are. I don't care. I haven't cared for the last year. I need to work again. I need not to have idiots in unearned positions of power play jobsworthy irresponsible games that leave me withering slowly, my life's effort fading to pointless history. I need not to have to start my whole life over again from scratch. I need not to have flushed down the toilet the last 10 years of 60 and 80 hour weeks knocking myself out for other people.

I don't know how to finish this post. It's hot, I'm fading further, I've so much to do tomorrow to have even a shot at making this post irrelevant. I want it to be irrelevant. A laughable maudlin aberration, in the darkest dark before the dawn, the invisible but ex-post inevitable dawn.

I wanted to finish this post gracefully.

I wanted to write this post today, while tomorrow is still only possibilities.

I wanted not to be here.

Apologies: not a lot of surplus brain energy for blogging at the moment. A lot of frenzied extended ground work finally started to pay off, requiring tricky custom CVs/job-applications to follow through on, at the same time as the week's mini-heatwave meant the temperature at my desk oscillated between 30 and 36 degrees.

I hope to be back towards proper blogging form later this week.

Note to self: stop drinking dogs

Now this looks interesting: a combined USB drive + processor

Last week's Evening Standard's (40p, available weekdays in all your local Londons) free Friday colour magazine advised me that my star sign's guidance for the week was:

Once you understand that whatever you do you're at a distinct disadvantage, you'll stop worrying about minor issues.

Cheering, I thought. Upbeat. Sets a positive go-getting tone.

Looking back on the week, I can only tip my hat in awe of the astrologer. Spot on. Rather understated, in fact.

Only, it wasn't so much a reduction of minor worries, as a vast explosion of the major ones reducing the minors' proportion to... well, a relatively minor one.

Am about to go out and seek advice about the upcoming week. Am hoping it says something about lotteries.

Ever wanted to go online and chat but just didn't have the time? Mope and whine no longer, oh time-poor person. Here for your edification is the distilled essence of over 22 terabytes of AIM, ICQ, and BLX. Simply re-read whenever required for that essence of true chatty goodness.

<Donut[AFK]> HEY EURAKARTE

<Donut[AFK]> INSULT

<Eurakarte> RETORT

<Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-RETORT

<Eurakarte> QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE

<Donut[AFK]> SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE FUCK UP

<Eurakarte> NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM

<Donut[AFK]> RIPOSTE

<Donut[AFK]> ADDON RIPOSTE

<Eurakarte> COUNTER-RIPOSTE

<Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE

<Eurakarte> NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON

<Miles_Prower> RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES

<Eurakarte> WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD

<Miles_Prower> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

from bash

Stricly no amateurs, it's VERY complex

via glassdog

Does anyone else find it ironic that the only way you can find non-PC stuff nowadays is by using one to get on the internet?

Familiar metaphor used to explain reality to Americans


Beautifully clever satire, bone dry behind fervid game-kiddy text. Except for the last couple of paras.

Perception is all about attitude, you see. Today, I'm... about 12 degrees off vertical.

Well, it was another poor quality bank-holiday weekend on the weather front, with the sky and clouds getting progressively duller and more depressing in perfect time with the mood of the population. And now it's raining. Not your pleasant refreshing air purge, oh no. Just wet air and wet ground, an intermittent fine misting haze that irritates and discomfits without ever becoming interesting.

But it occurred to me just now how much more pleasant days like today would be if we treated weather like a woman. They have so many other characteristics in common that this seems entirely reasonable.

And then on days like today, my little heart would burst with joy. I'd leap outside and howl with true pleasure: "Ohhh yes! It's WET!"