Thursday, I had my first
job interview in almost 4 months. I thought that it went very,
very well. I met with more than a dozen people over the course
of an 8-hour interview and, by the end of the day, the people I
was talking to had stopped using the hypothetical voice when talking
about the projects that were coming up. It is usually a good sign
when the tenor of the conversation shifts from "this is the sort of
project that you would be working on" to "on our next project you'll
be focusing on low-level protocol issues".
Yesterday they called back and said that they decided that they weren't
going to hire me. Their process requires that every person you interview
with recommend hiring you but, in my case, there was a single holdout
who didn't think I was right for the job.
We put our house on the market today. My wife and I cried after the
real estate agent left. Like everyone, we worked our asses off to
get the house. We love this place. We love the backyard with its
beautiful 50-year old cherry tree that I hung a rope swing off of
for the kids. We love the kitchen that has hosted so many good meals,
that brought forth the first Christmas dinner our son ever had in the
first year that Santa Claus came down our chimney.
We love the neighborhood. This is home.
Our kids don't understand, they just know that we're moving back to
Colorado because Daddy can't find a job in Seattle. They don't
understand why Mommy and Daddy are always so grumpy, or why they can't
go to dance class or gymnastics anymore. But they still laugh
infectiously as we chase each other through the rapidly growing
pile of boxes. That's something, at least, kids are kids and will
find a way to be happy no matter what is going on around them.
We don't know what will happen next. We haven't found a place to live,
yet, back there. We're hoping that a friend's mom with a basement apartment
that she rents out will be willing to rent it to a family of four. If
that should not come through we're afraid that we may end up crashing in
my mother-in-law's basement until we get our feet back under us.
I know this isn't traumatic by overall global standards. There is
absolutely no possibility that we are going to end up homeless in
the sense that our kids are getting rained on or sleeping in snow
drifts. None of us have missed any meals, nor will we. From the
perspective of a single mother in Afghanistan we've still got it
fucking made. But from here, inside the American Dream, things are looking pretty grim.