The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

My routine goes on, daily I check the bookmarked sites, sometimes I even find jobs to apply to, weekly I report my news to unemployment. I haven't yet met my goal of daily reporting to my blog readers, but I try.

Today I'm listening to CNN report on the unrest/horrors that are going on in Egypt. I'm also aware that there is a war waging in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that terrorist bombs are going off in places, mostly far from here. The economy sucks, and many of my friends and family are out of work. Sometimes I feel like I want to scream, then cry, tuck my  head under my shirt, roll into a ball, lock the doors, turn out the lights and check out.

But I come to my senses. All that is different is the location, the date, the regime, the faces. We live in an ever-evolving world of chaos and the only truth you can count on is that truth always changes. These negatives are more significant only because I'm now unemployed and have to worry more than usual.

What do I do, how do I care? I'm only one of many billions. I have to care, but realistically I am physically powerless to solve the world's problems. But if you know me, you know I have strong feelings about political action, even if I don't  always live up to my own rhetoric. I have to live my life in a way that promotes my beliefs.

If each person lived in the way they believed, it would be a better world. For one thing, maybe we would have 95% voter turnout instead of allowing 30% of our citizens to decide who will run the country. For another, maybe we wouldn't allow people to beat their children in public, and if that happened enough times perhaps they would think twice about doing it in private. Who knows? I'm an optimist. Maybe we would step in when our children are being bullied instead of expecting them to 'stand up' for themselves.

Yes, I can hear you all snickering. But the lettuce and grape boycott  brought about unions. The advertiser boycott helped get Lou Dobbs off CNN. We have choices. We have power. We should use it.

Where do we go from here?

"Waste not fresh tears over old grief."    -Euripides

Part of the process of job-hunting is resolving the loss of old jobs. It doesn't matter whether you liked the job. Or the previous job, or the one before that. The fact is, you were laid off, or downsized, or organized out, or whatever nice words they want to put on it - it still says rejection. And rejection can make you angry if you let it.

The first time it happened to me it was from a job that I thought I would have until the day I retired. Talk about throwing a wrench in the works! I was completely unprepared and for that I say shame on me. So on top of looking for a new job I had to deal with a lot of anger, disappointment, surprise and even shame.

But I got a new job, found my place once again and made new plans. For nine months. And out of the blue it happened again. This time I dealt with not only the new anger, but it brought back the grief and anger from the previous loss.

We tend to think of grief as being associated with death, but it's true that we go through the same stages of grieving with any loss in our lives. If we recognize them and deal with them from that viewpoint, acknowledge the seriousness of all losses and their effect on our health, both physical and mental, we can move through these phases more smoothly and not let them mire us in self-pity and frustration.

This third job loss was not a surprise. I was prepared and recognized the signs. I'm not even angry, at least not at the employer. Perhaps at our government and Wall Street and those vague entities we like to call "them" that have pushed our middle class toward poverty.

But I'm prepared now. I know how to job-hunt, I know how to survive. And I'm finished with the grieving.

Knock three times....

"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit." -R.E. Shay

Through all my job-hunting forays, I've always looked for the ad that says, Vivian, we're looking for you! It hasn't shown up yet but I'm an optimist.

So I keep honing my resume, tweaking it for each job application. My skills are great, too good for most of the jobs I apply for, which can be a problem. How do you say to a potential employer, "I have everything you need and more, and I am really NOT interested in being your boss. I just want to be in your office and help it be a great, smooth-running operation."

They don't buy it.

I dislike the idea of "dumbing-down" my resume, but it's what I do. I take the fact that I'm an advanced user of Microsoft Access that can design and maintain complex databases and put it on my resume as "database maintenance." I play down these kinds of skills as things I just do, and don't reveal my training and the years of employment that have led me to advanced usage.

I don't buy it.

But I do it.

But I digress.....

"Every path is the correct path for the person walking on it." -Vivian Ashcraft

It's Sunday, once a day of rest for most of the country, so I'm not blogging today about work or goals or job-hunting. Today I am thinking about tolerance because of a conversation we had with a visitor a couple of days ago. Of course tolerance is one of my favorite subjects.

I believe there is only one higher power in the universe, and its name is Love. As imperfect, physical beings with egos we are not capable of practicing unconditional love, but I try. It's not easy when public vitriol is the order of the day, but I remind myself of what one of my heros, Dr. King, said (paraphrasing), that we can't teach love by showing hate. And that makes sense on paper, just not always in my heart when people are being hurt.

But Love loves everyone, no exceptions. Love doesn't think Rush Limbaugh is a jerk. Love doesn't pick sides in the fight, it just holds and comforts and tells all of us that we are loved and valuable and worthy. It knows much better than I do that it doesn't matter who is right or wrong, it matters only that we live in the way that we know is right, and we teach our children what is right, and that we love.

All major religions have the ultimate lesson of unconditional love*. I cannot exist within organized religion, even the non-major ones, because I believe that once you put rules on your beliefs you have already distorted them. The evidence, to me, is pretty clear on that. But on paper they are beautiful in their teachings, and if people could actually live the teachings instead of the buildings and organizations, perhaps we could have a more peaceful world.

So if I could impart a lesson to the world, it would be this: Love one another. Make no exception.

*I confess I know little of the Islamic religion, but I have been told that the Koran includes lessons on methods of beating your wife, so they may be excluded from this statement.

The Job Dearth, I mean Search....

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. -Thomas Edison

Here I am, one week and one day unemployed. I was so excited on Monday, having applied for four jobs already. But that was it, nothing since. I checked 14 job sites today and didn't find anything to apply for.

But I am not disheartened. Yet. The last time I was between jobs it took a year, and the time before that it took six months, so 8 days is nothing. I continue to analyze my talents and resume, review my goals, and start each day with a renewed sense of what is important in my life.

My Goals? No, I didn't walk today and probably won't for a few days. The snow lies deep outside and rather than clear it the county just puts out advisories and cancels school. They tell us don't go out there or we'll arrest you unless it's an emergency. Okay. I build a fire in the woodburner, make a pot of soup and settle in with the Encore Westerns channel.

I worked on one of my projects. We are papering a small corner of our home with old magazine pictures from the sixties and I spent time today selecting and cutting out pictures for that project.

So the soup is ready, the living room is warm and I feel like a nap. Ah, the joys of unemployment and snow emergencies. Life is good.

Goals? What Goals??

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. -Sydney Smith

As is often true when we approach goals, I disappeared from here when I approached the subject. Yeah. Don't wanna do it. But I'm back. Also note: I haven't done a darn thing you could call constructive. Not surprisingly, I haven't gotten around to writing down the goals I have in mind for this idle period. So here they are.

1. I will walk, outside, in the village, six days a week, unless the weather is just incredibly awful.
2. I will take on a household project, over and above the usual house cleaning, six days a week. These projects will improve the house, and no project will necessarily takemore than one hour from my day.
3. I will write something in this blog every day.

So. Are these goals reachable? Absolutely. In fact, they're pretty puny, to be honest. But I've been pretty idle for a few years, so I have to start small.

Are they measurable? Yes. I think I'm able to tell if I walk, work, or write every day.

Are they relevant? Absolutely. Walking is essential to my health, physically and mentally. Household improvements are needed, and I've been putting them off for longer than I care to admit. Writing is needed for many reasons: I've been writing a book and suffering from writer's block, so I hope this blog will help to break it. Also it is suggested that I can refer a potential employer to a blog, showing that I haven't been idle during my time of unemployment.

So now that I've put them in writing, I guess I have to own up to myself and get busy.

See ya later....

Got Goals?

"If you don't know where you're going, you might wind up someplace else." -Yogi Berra

It's important to set goals, if you expect to get anywhere. But even more imporant is the nature and construction of your goals.

First, your goal must be realistic. If you are just starting a walking program, your first day should not be 5 miles. If the goal is unattainable or overreaching, you will feel defeated or be defeated at the beginning and this will lead to feelings of personal failure.

Goals should be measurable. You need to be able to say, "I started here and now I am hee." If you have made progress you will feel good about yourself - a sense of accomplishment. If you haven't made progress, you can analyze your goal and rework the steps needed to meet it.

Goals need to be relevant to you. If you are on an exercise program to lost weight, don't choose an activity you hate. Don't set completing a marathon as your goal if you despise running. You will not only stop running, you will stop exercising.

There have been numerous studies that have proven those who write their goals, revisit them and track them, using the above ideas and others, are far more successful than those who merely wing it through life.

Stay tuned and maybe you can help me set some goals....

And the hunt begins....

I'm surprised to realize that I've already applied for 4 jobs. Then I realized that in the past 3-1/2 years I've been unemployed for 1-1/2 years. So I guess you could say I have a lot of practice.

I've already set up a folder in my Favorites list called Jobs and begun to fill it with web-sites to check regularly - two newspapers, two sites that combine ads from a lot of sources, two temp agencies, the federal and state government hiring sites, and companies for whom I would like to work.

I updated my resume, both the one I print out and the online versions on the various sites. I have contacted people that have agreed to be my references.

I started a spreadsheet to track the jobs I've applied for.

I'm practicing questions with Frank so when an interviewer asks me something unexpected, hopefully it won't be unexpected.

This is my new job.

Arrival in the Old Country

On January 12, I once again arrived in the Land of the Unemployed. It's not my favorite place, but it is familiar. I'm three days in now, and the routine is taking shape. I've already applied for three jobs.

It's not all bad. If I could find someone to pay me for not working, life would be great. I'm not one of those people who can't find anything to do when I'm stuck at home. It's not easy to be bored, unless you're a boring person.

But there is a downside. All the time I was working I put off household projects. "I worked all day, all week, I don't want to clean that, fix that, do that." Oops. Now I have no excuse. So I've decided to take one item a day, get it done and only then am I allowed to have fun. It's a good plan.

Stay tuned and find out how to look for a job. I have lots of experience in this area.