Spirit of the Wind

I continue to fail at finding work! I've had interviews over the past month, yes. But it's been weeks and nothing's come of them. There's another one this week for a technician position (not going to go into the details on a public post), yet I've basically given up hope at this point. The final straw was a manual labor position saying they wanted to interview me, not sending me the Zoom link, rescheduling, not sending me the Zoom link again, and then after I tracked down their number and called them, promising me an interview and then not sending me one. At that point they're either malicious or wildly incompetent, but I'm still taking it as an omen.

The job market is shit. It's going to continue to be shit. The fact that it's shit is, I suspect, partially deliberate; HR departments are putting up fake jobs (those are estimated to be 30% of job postings, by the way) in part to intimidate employees and I'm sure some of them are thinking, "If we make getting a job as torturous as possible, our employees will never quit and any new hire will be pathetically grateful for scraps." There is a real possibility that by this time next year I still don't have a job.

And I've been applying for gas station attendant positions!

I don't want to hear optimism at this point. Pessimism feels better.

Winter holidays were at least pleasant. My brother was over for Hanukkah, along with his girlfriend (who I'd met before and whom I like). We did not have much in the way of latkes but did make some sweet potato ones. And we got to go hiking. There were ducks.

I wasn't able to give much in the way of gifts. I'm working on art projects that I'm going to give instead, and some of the gifts I got from other people will help me do that. I've started working with watercolors and will be working with glass again soon. And I was already creating kumihimos--no, not kumihos, I like my liver too much for that. I'm by no means that good at art, but I'm not terrible for a total novice. It'll at least be welcome on the wall for reasons other than them being family.

With the weather I'm not spending as much time outdoors as I normally do. The weather is frigid but it's not snowing, which is always the worst combination. I don't like snow or ice, but if it's frigid the world should look nice rather than just looking dead. And on that note I really do need to go through the camera trap at some point and see what wildlife we have in the woods pathetic strip of trees behind the house.

I've at least been able to spend more time with local groups. There's a local crafts group I'm going to join and the local game shop hosts some events. At this point I've long since stopped having anything to do with the local synagogue. I tried, but I can't go from reading about Israeli war crimes to hanging out in a building dripping with Israeli nationalist symbology* just because I share a religion with those people.

* This is not unusual for a synagogue. Yes I know that sounds stupid. It's still true. There's Israeli flags in the classrooms.

You've been told never to get COVID. You've been told never to get the flu. Let me tell you that they go even worse together. I somehow managed to get both at once when visiting family for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I got it from--probably not my parents, since they came down after I did, and it couldn't have been from a third party because I only went outside in isolated public parks. One of my other relatives seems the most likely possibility.

It was nasty. I've never had body aches from being sicky before. Injuries, yes; I've fallen down my share of slopes (and off a cliff, once); that hurt. But for two days I had trouble moving because I was aching, and at night even with four blankets I had chills. Then I had nausea, and the second worst case of congestion I've ever had. The symptoms lasted a week, though there was a gap of two days when I seemed to be fine.

Luckily, things have cleared up now.

As far as classes, I'm in the tail end of things. Finals have been going well--aside from my group presentations. Which, given that they're what I'm doing for two thirds of my classes, is a rather large wrinkle in things. It's not affecting my grades, but it's still been frustrating. For one class, my group-mate got injured and so I'm having to work by myself. Not their fault, but unfortunate for us both.

For the other? I put in a ton of effort, read like fifteen papers, but they ended up not using much of the research I put in to try and help them and their own work was, in my opinion, kind of sloppy. There were a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors. They didn't give really in-depth explanations of what they were talking about but gave superficial surface-level stuff you'd teach to a middle-schooler.

Given that we're graduate students, that's pretty frustrating.

Family is doing well. Unfortunately, I won't be with them for Hanukkah, because of finals. This is actually the first year in a while I haven't been able to visit them for it. Still, they visited today and I got to enjoy their company.

The job I've got pays well. It's pretty decent all things considered. But.

It's all inside; where I work there are almost no windows and it's under fluorescent lightning. I'm isolated from the weather; even in thunderstorms I'm lucky to hear them over the chirping and banging of the HVAC system--which booms many times a week, startling me out of my skin. I'm disconnected from the plant and animal life. There are many potted plants in the hallways, but it's simply not the same. And, well, it's kind of shitty as far as exercise goes.

And I liked working outside. When I was in the Northeast, I got caught in thunderstorms--but that gave me a thrill. Sure, it was occasionally annoying, but only mildly. It wasn't as if I was in real danger from getting soaked; the only time I minded was when there was a major squall and it was really cold so I was sprayed with cold seawater for the entire time.

Even if it hadn't given me a thrill, seeing the horseshoe crabs, and the hermit crabs, and the birds, and the sunsets over the bay, would have made it more than worth it. But there's not so much nature around here. Oh, there's some--monarch butterfly caterpillars, woodpeckers, the neighborhood owl, robins and rabbits and squirrels and blue jays. Flies and beetles and wasps swarming the boneset. But there's less of it, and I spend most of the day isolated from it. It doesn't ground me like it did when working in the field.

The notion that you can feel more like yourself is, I suppose, by nature a false one. However you feel, that is what you are. If you feel like an emotionally numb worker staring at your email inbox, that is what you are. But the parts of me that I like the most and made me feel like the self I identify as were most present when working in the field.

Makes sense, I suppose. My view of myself is wrapped up in wilderness and wildness; working inside for long periods was never going to be too good for me.