Unemployment: Day 1

You are not your job. Your are not your job. You are not your job. Lather. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

I have been through all of the stages of grief. Denial: I'm not laid off. I still have my job. In fact, I'd better go call C about the web logs she messed up while I was gone. Anger: Those bastards! It's always the technical people who get cut so that some fat, dishonest executive can keep on cashing his paycheck. Bargaining: If I give up computers forever, can I please have a job that will last longer than a Budweiser in a frat house? Grief: Pass the salt (sob). Yes, dinner is lovely (sob). Why oh why did this have to happen to me! Waaaaah!

Now I have reached Acceptance, the Zen-like state that allows me to shrug and sigh when people tell me how sorry they are. These things happen. Lots of people are being laid off. We all knew that the good times were over. Now, in a tight job market with a mountain of bills due, I get to find out if I'm really a rock star, one of those people who is so good at what they do that they will never lack for work. Of course, then I go right back to denial and start worrying about whether or not the development server has enough swap space.

I have resolved to make May a holiday. I'm not going right back to work. The last time I changed jobs, I left The Magazine Which Shall Not be Named on Friday and came to work for The Company That Shall Soon be Visited by a Plague of Locusts on Monday. Plague of Locusts took the vast majority of my waking hours between October and the middle of February, at which point I could chart and document everything I had done in the last four months, making it that much easier for me to be replaced by a younger, less experienced, cheaper UNIX systems administrator.

I will spend the month of May overseeing the enormous amount of work that still needs to be done to the loft. I will find furniture and paint things. I will drink coffee in the middle of the day with my unemployed friends. I will go to the gym. I will have dinner ready for J when he comes home.

When I do go back to work, I'm contracting. If I'm going to work a sixteen hour day, I'm going to work by the hour. I will take time off between contracts whenever I please and I will never again put my heart and soul into a company that would gladly screw me over just to save some middle aged marketing zombies. No one will ever have a chance to smile and say with the most sincere look on their face that, I, of all people, will always have a job at this company just so they can stab me in the back a month later.

At any technology company, there's always a level of animosity between the Suits and the Geeks. The Geeks are arrogant. They think that the company can't possibly function without them. After that, what's a technology company without a product? They think that that the suits are superfluous. When the Suits think about the Geeks, which is hardly at all, they think of them as cogs in a machine. The Geeks are plentiful and replacable. In fact, once they've built the technology, who needs Geeks at all?

No one has ever explained the concept of maintenance to the Suits, at least not until something breaks. Then that explanation costs $200 an hour, and I can take a vacation whenever I want.

Are you there, God? It's me, Never. If you're an omniscient and omnipotent God, then you know that I don't believe in you, but sometimes I need someone to talk to while I sort things out in my head, when I'm trying to turn Events into Stories, those little tidbits of conversation you can feed people who ask "How're you doing?" This is the Executive Summary of my life. Executives are very busy and they won't read anything that's more than a page long. Even then, they don't really care, so if you want an Executive to really notice something, you need to put it in a concise little list with bullets next to each item.

I went on vacation, my first real vacation that hasn't been sucked away by Burning Man in years. It's cold in Paris, colder than it ever gets in San Francisco, but that just meant I could wear my leather trenchcoat with the fur collar. I felt smug for being so well prepared. It's beautiful there. Every time we saw another cathedral or park or palace, J and I would laugh and say "Oh look, another diamond," in that bored tone of Uma Thurman's in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Since we've in Executive Summary mode, I'll make a list: the catacombs are closed until July; the RER is much more complicated than the Metro; the couscous in Paris is like nothing else on Earth; the French have five weeks of vacation mandated by law; they have also mandated a cafe every fifty feet and a carousel every ten blocks. At night, the Eiffel Tower lights up the same way it did on New Year's Eve 2000, twinkling with lights that rise ever upward, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, for five minutes, or until the Tower operator decides to put an end to it.

The whole Internet thing is just hitting France right now. I have a glorious fantasy in which I drop everything and move into a flat on the Rue Saint Germain and do consulting for some French computer company at a ridiculous rate. A Silicon Valley systems administrator is worth her weight in gold there. I would never need my five weeks of vacation there. I could just walk to the Musee D'Orsay.

I came home to perfect California weather. It was seventy degrees and the sun was shining.

I came home to an email from F to an email address that I hardly ever use anymore. It was dated the day I left for Paris and it said that his father in North Carolina was very sick and he was going back to Asheville to look after his family. He's probably never coming back and I never got a chance to say to goodbye properly. I locked myself in the bathroom to cry.

I'm drinking now, even though I haven't been drunk in three or four months. I have a bottle of 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon and I'm not ever bothering to pour it into a glass. I came to work early this morning. It's one of the benefits of jet lag. I couldn't sleep past 6:30 am, so I came to work at 8:00, when the office was mostly empty and quiet. I read through a week's worth of work-related email, then I tried to log in to some of the servers to see what kind of shape they were in. All of the root passwords had been changed. I knew then. No one had to tell me. I wrote up the procedures for letting someone go from the IT department. Those were my documents.

They've laid off half of the people from Technology, including a couple of H1B's who will probably have to go back to India now. I've never been laid off before. They've been quietly getting rid of contractors and such for the last couple of months. My people were concerned enough that I even called a meeting with my boss and talked to him at length about our job security. "We're understaffed as it is," he said. "If we fire anyone here, we're screwed." My boss is looking for another job right now. He doesn't want to catch the blame for the Hell that's bound to follow.

In a way, this is the most backhanded compliment I've ever recieved. My department is the department that took the cuts because "we need the least attention." I've engineered our network so well that the Powers That Be are under the impression that it runs itself. In the all company meeting that was taking place while half a dozen of us were being laid off, when my name listed among the fallen, the lead developer looked out at the Powers That Be, the powers that sign her paycheck and said "Now we're fucked."

This company will probably be out of business within a year. Morale is at zero. Everyone is updating their resumes. But in the meantime, I have to pay my painters. I have to pay my rent. I have to pay for new floors for the bedroom. I have a million stupid, expensive errands to run before I move this weekend. Everyone has promised to help me. Everyone has sworn that this time off will be good for me. My boss has sworn that there are people tripping over themselves in their eagerness to hire me, but I'm scared, so scared, and I'm crying just like I've just been dumped by my first boyfriend.

Are you there, God? It's me, Never. I'm sad and I think I'm drunk and I don't believe in you anyway. Do you remember, God, when I was in college, and I had to decide if I was going to pay tuition with my body or with my brains? I should have become a stripper, God. Strippers don't get laid off.

The last time I was in Paris, it was with F. He'd never been to Europe before, so I took him. I already knew Paris' streets and museums and chocolate mousse from vacations with my parents. Besides, I'd read enough about Paris, from Alexander Dumas to Henry Miller, that the geography of the city was burned into my brain.

So one summer, I gave F Paris. I unwrapped it for him like a present. It was one hundred degrees and our feet were sore after walking all over London. The Pope was in town with a million Pope Groupies singing Jesus songs. Every sensible Parisian had abandoned the town in favor of milder climes.

F didn't speak a word of French. I translated street signs and poetry on plaques. I told him the names of churches and the history of the Place de Vosges, where we made a picnic out of a baguette and caviar and sour creme from the market. We dipped our feet in the fountain at the Luxemburg. We bought a bottle of wine and passed it back and forth while sitting on a bridge over the Seine the night I turned 18.

I know it's a cliche, right down to the charming Left Bank bistros and the carousel at the Place de Bastille. I was young and in love and in Paris. I was convinced that it (everything really, but especially F) was going to last forever. It didn't. I can't tell you how certain I was, how everything we said and felt and did seemed to be the center of the universe. It wasn't, of course, but it was dizzying to be so sure of something, even if it was wrong. It's an awful thing when you learn that love ends. You can flip through a calendar and mark off the days.

This is when it started

This is when it ended.

These are the years that have passed in between us. There have been lovers and jobs and jokes and vacations since then that you've known nothing about. Now, I can't see the beginning without thinking of the end. What a shame it is we fell apart. What a shame it is that all things fall apart eventually.

It's much harder now to start anything. Every year love gets a little bit heavier and it's harder to push it into motion, but I've managed. I love J and I want to show him Paris, even if it's a cold and rainy Paris that will require my warm coat. I'd like to show him the museums and the gardens, the book stores and the cafes, the places to buy wine for less than five bucks.

I hope he likes it there.

Work has been slow. I've been writing up documents, tying up loose ends, taking care of those boring little details that I'd pushed aside when my top priority was just to get everything up and running. It's a calm time. I can go home after eight hours if I want to. When I do, the sun is still shining. Sometimes the bookstores are still open. I haven't woken up to the sound of the phone ringing in weeks.

I can't help thinking that this is the calm before the storm, that I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and half of our servers will be down. There will be rioting in the streets. Heads will roll. Head. My head. Everyone tells me to relax, to take advantage of the lull and enjoy my vacation. I think I will. I haven't had a real vacation in a very long time. I've taken a few weekends to go to Vegas, sure, but Burning Man has swallowed up my serious vacation time. I haven't been out of the country in years.

I lost my passport a year and a half ago. I was in a terrible panic at the time. I had no idea where it might be. I turned my bag inside out. I turned my apartment upside down. I yelled at everyone. Replacing a lost passport is a royal pain, such a pain that I didn't bother. It wasn't as if I left the country very often. I'm not the international jet setter I used to be.

About a month ago, D. found it at his warehouse. Lost things from Cats and the Manhattan Lounge end up at his house. It had been sitting there for over a year before he realized it was mine. I wonder how drunk I was that night. I wonder if it fell out of my pocket or my bag. I felt stupid to think that it had been lost for so long and I'd been too lazy to replace it. I'm not normally so careless with my things.

The passport is expired now. I had to replace it anyway.

The blogger ate my entry! Oh well. In the meantime, I took the some pictures of the loft. You can see them here.

Joe (the painter) has started painting. There's no big hurry, so he'll probably take a week or two. Right now, he's finished the entire back wall, the studio, a bunch of door frames, the kitchen, and the base coat for both bathrooms. I tried to get a picture of the bathrooms, but the light is so bright in there that it washes out the color on the walls. Every time I visit the loft, the place looks a little bit more finished.

Once apon a time, I looked like this:

Where did my weekend go? I didn't go out. I had to do a code push in the middle of the night on Friday and J worked for most of Saturday and Sunday. I don't feel rested at all because I woke up at 8:30 (don't laugh!) to meet with my painters and make all of the final decisions about the walls. My father would say I'm "making a circus" out of this wall thing. Of course my father could live in a cave and not care so long as he had high speed internet access.

It's unusually important to me not to have white walls in my house. It's not enough to paint the walls. I have to live in a place where colored walls don't look ridiculous. I need high ceilings and maybe even crown moldings. I need romance in my living space. I never lived in a place like that when I was growing up. My family lived in dingy apartments, surrounded by old Soviet furniture of unsurpassable ugliness. Family legend has it that we arrived in America with two suitcases, one of which was filled with my toys. How we managed to fit all of those bookcases and the green striped chairs into the other suitcase I'll never know.

I remember our second apartment in San Francisco, right after the basement room we shared with my grandparents and their temperamental Pekinese. The carpet was nubby yellow-green stuff and it was covered with plastic. Plastic! Who covers their carpet with plastic? Was the landlord afraid that we would damage his cheap, ugly carpeting? What could we possibly do to make it worse?

I grew up in houses with textured walls, pine paneling, and decaying linoleum. We lived in the remnants of late 60's and 70's apartments because no one else wanted them. We moved the lime green striped chairs and the bookcases my parents got as a wedding present and the light-colored rugs my little brother puked all over and the waterbed (what year is this again?) from one apartment to the next. There was never anything on the walls. I was fifteen before I thought to hang up posters for Blade Runner and Lost Boys. I covered my room in dried roses and bits of black lace. Honestly, I think that made things even worse. My pointy-toed goth decor clashed so violently with the off-white carpeting, the fading pastel furniture, the plaid bedcover I'd had since I was three, that the room looked like a joke. Kids, don't try this at home. I mean it. And wipe all of that black eyeliner off of your face too.

So you see, I can't live in a big white box. A big white box is the ugliest, most soul-crushing thing of all. It's being poor and living on Ramen and never inviting anyone over because all of my classmates live in mansions in Pacific Heights. It's having no friends and spending my weekends reading science fiction/fantasy novels and eating Eggo waffles. My house must have colored walls and pictures in frames. It has to have velvet curtains and candelabras. It has to be crowded to point of bursting with things, found objects, flowers, scraps of fabric, stacks of books. If Tim Burton designed a Victorian bordello, I would live there.

In fact, I wouldn't settle for anything less.

So J and I fight. We never fought before, but we do now. He's spending all of his money on silly technological gadgets for the house. He's thinking about rewiring everything in the back room. He's unhappy with the way the lights are arranged. He wants to buy a three thousand dollar projection television. I'm worried about where we're going to find extra bookshelves and a couch. I spend all of my time worrying about what colors I'm going to paint everything. He thinks I should relax. He thinks it's not the end of the world. But someone has to make the decisions and they can't be unmade unless you want to repaint two thousand square feet of wall.

I can't help it. I can't relax, take it easy, go with the flow. I have to flip through books and mutter about colors and spend my nights plagued by self-doubt. I have nightmares about my teeth falling out. Then I wake up and J and I snap at each other some more. I tell him to take this seriously. He tells me to relax. This can't be over soon enough.

Oh God, I'm dreaming of color swatches. I can now close my eyes and envision every wall in the loft, where they connect, and what furniture will probably be nearby. I can't help thinking that valuable neurons are being used to store this trivia. I could be solving world hunger or meditating on the key to peace in the Middle East. Instead, I'm deciding whether to use three shades or two for the color wash on the west wall.

I snuck out of work in the middle of the day and went to The Builder's Booksource to pour over glossy interior decorating bibles, pictures of other people's beautiful houses that look as if no one has ever lived in them. When did it become fashionable to paint everything white? When did everyone become obsessed with "opening up space"? Much coverage was given to making a small room seem larger. Everyone wants to make a small room seem larger. No one is interested in taking a huge, cavernous space and making it intimate.

The photos in loft books (and there are entire shelves of Books About How the Trendy Loft People Live) look like the sets for late 70's science fiction shows. I do not want interior decorating tips from The Prisoner or Buck Rodgers. I don't want giant floor-to-ceiling windows with no apparent window coverings. Why would I want to live in a place where I couldn't even leave a pair of socks on the floor?

At last, I gave up on color swatches, went to a normal bookstore and picked up Vertigo Visions: Artwork from the Cutting Edge of Comics, which is filled with paintings by Greg Spalenka, Dave McKean, and Glenn Fabry. The whole thing is now thouroughly annotated and bookmarked with Post-It notes that read "This! This is exactly what I want!" On Monday, I'm bringing a copy of Dave McKean's Mr. Punch for my painters to see.

I think it's all going to be okay. I have the inspiration I need for my walls; I have yards and yards of fabric to drape over everything and I've had good luck in finding good, cheap furniture. I've found 7' steel bookshelves for $70 each and a steel and glass display case from a store that's going out of business that I will use for storing my dishes. I have one small wall that I'm leaving blank because I want to wallpaper it with tea-stained pages from children's books.

I think I've finally stopped worrying so much and just plunged head first into this project. It feels good.

Ned Kirby comes from the same part of Germany as Al Jorgensen. I wish I'd been the one to come up with that astute observation. Even though I wasn't, I'm stealing it. It's mine now. Stromkern is easily the best German band to ever come out of Wisconsin.

I can only imagine the members of Icon of Coil sitting around, drinking beer and eating some Norwegian fish-thing, saying "I know, let's tour America! There will be free drinks and Industrial groupie girls with dozens of facial piercings. We'll put our whole show on a minidisc and we'll hardly have to do any work at all. We'll have some band from Wisconsin open for us. They've only got one hit, so when we hit the stage in all of our bleached-blond glory, the crowd will go crazy. Yeah! I'm going to go buy a new pair of leather pants now."

Maybe I'm not being entirely fair to Icon of Coil here. By pre-recording most of their set, they are following in a long synthpop tradition. I've been to shows where none of the instruments were even plugged in. I can't pretend to be shocked when there's some band on stage at the Justice League doing Industrial karaoke, with nothing live but the vocals and slightly out of time drums. Then again, none of those bands ever kicked over their minidisc player in the middle of the first song, bringing their show to a halt while Andy LaPlegua sputtered to the audience, trying to fill the next three minutes.

He doesn't know any jokes, folks. He won't sing "Night Riders" either.

Maybe he's bitter. I'd feel bitter too if I'd just been completely upstaged by my opening act. Stromkern has learned the cardinal rule of playing to unknown crowds: if your audience only knows one song, play it early in your set. Ned Kirby got "In Traumm" and a new version of "Night Riders" out of the way early on and went on to prove that the rest of his material is just as strong. I went for an entire hour without once hearing the Cookie Monster vocoder patch, the confused growling sound that most vocalists use to mask their voices because they're deathly afraid that sounding like a kid who writes music in their bedroom with a keyboard and a Macintosh just isn't rock star enough.

On the other hand, Icon of Coil failed to heed the cardinal rule of playing Industrial shows: never cover "Headhunter." Don't try to sneak it into the middle of your set and never, ever, under any circumstances use it as your encore. Front 242 is a great band. "Headhunter" is a classic song, but no one will ever have a chance to miss it unless the covers stop. I mean you, Apoptygma Berzerk! Stop it! My ears are bleeding.

Have I not bought all of your albums? Haven't I danced to your songs and paid admission to countless nightclubs? Haven't I dutifully attended your concerts and bought your tour tee-shirts, provided you had them in a small enough size? Why, EBM bands of the world, do you continue to torture me with "Headhunter"?

Why?!

The more I think about this year, a quarter over already, the more it seems like it's been all about wanting things. I wanted a new apartment. I wanted a vacation. I wanted some new dress or a corset or better hair or a fancy dinner. I wanted to be thin, to have people love me, to earn respect at work. The more you have, the more you seem to need. It's not enough to be a Manager, now you have to be a Director. Now you need custom-made clothes and a house filled with art and a flat-screen television. That mad burning will not cease until every moment of your life is spent feeling fabulous and special.

Life can't be that way all of the time. What a stupid reason to suffer.

I'm going to enjoy the things that I have. Sometime this weekend I was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of things I felt I needed to buy for my new place that I curled up into a little ball on top of my bed and bit my hand so that I wouldn't scream. I don't really need these things. The world will not come to an end if I don't find a perfect dining table by the end of the month. I need to order a new phone line, a new DSL line, and move PG&E. I need to paint the walls because if I don't paint before I move, I am destined to live in a big white box. Everything else is optional.

Living spaces need time to grow. They need to develop. A decorating scheme does not emerge fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, anywhere outside of interior decorating magazines. There's no way J and I could fill all of that space up immediately. Why should we even try?

Saturday was so beautiful that I decided to go for a walk. I was going to go to Washington Square Park to lie in the sun and watch the old Chinese people do Tai Chi. Sometimes you'll see half a dozen of them, all moving in time like a flock of birds. Instead, the park was full of people. There was a stage on one end and the rest of encircled by booths. J and I nearly turned around there and then, but the banner read Oyster and Beer Festival, so we went in and ate a mountain of barbequed oysters with champage from plastic cups.

When I told my friends that J and I were moving in together, most of them said it was about time. These are the same people who ask why we're not married yet. A lease is stronger than a wedding vow. You can divorce at any time. J and I will live together for the next year come hell or high water. I'd by lying if I said I wasn't a little bit scared to lose my last shred of personal space, a place which is mine and only mine, where no one can come that I haven't invited. I was scared when I started my new job. I said right here that if it all went wrong, this is the moment that I would regret.

Please don't let me regret this.