I suppose enough time has now passed for me to talk about it, while I can still do so and have all the details fresh in my mind. I got laid off of work last Friday. I still have no real idea why, which is the really annoying part. I could handle the situation better, I think, if I had some clear understanding of what I did to warrant being terminated from my position, but as of yet nothing really adds up to a logical answer. They said it was for generating low-quality work and not performing according to task, but something about that doesn't jive with the rest of the facts at hand:

They're giving me a severance package.

People who get fired for incompetence don't get severance packages, unless they're CxOs of some sort. They're giving me through the end of the last pay period, plus another paycheck after that, without me having to do any work for them in return, while they're in the middle of a financial crisis because they've just moved into a new office and can't really afford a lot right now. This is not the behavior I would expect of a company firing someone for negligence or the level of mistakes I'm being accused of making.

They're giving me unemployment.

This is the single-biggest factor belying their statement that I did poor work. Companies don't pay their screw-ups unemployment, normally. If you botch something bad enough to get fired, that's it, you're history. Unless, of course, my understanding of unemployment policies is wrong, which I concede is possible. However, they told me to list "LACK OF WORK" as my reason for being terminated, and that they would back that up when the Department of Labor and Industry came asking about my application. I want to say that this isn't how they treated the other people I know who got fired, but I can't say that for sure.

They never gave me a warning.

My previous manager insists that I had three months of warnings and suggestions that my work was unsatisfactory and needed to be corrected, but as far as I understand employee-manager communication—admittedly not as far as I'd like, or these things wouldn't keep happening—a warning consists of a one-on-one meeting between manager and employee, or perhaps a three-way with an HR representative, in which the manager says "your work is unsatisfactory," and then either the manager or the HR rep presents a form for the employee to sign that goes in the employee's file. I know Beth got that kind of warning before she got fired, but I never did. The first I directly got any sort indication that I wasn't doing good enough work was the morning I got let go from the company. My manager insisted four times that the quality meetings and statements about "we all have to do good work all the time" and "we have to implement these quality metrics" were my warnings. That, pardon my French, is bullshit.

The other responsible parties didn't get the axe as well

This is the one that really burns me. If there were mistakes made, and I won't lie here in bed and say there weren't, 'cause there were, I know for certain I wasn't the only one making them, but apparently I was the only one who got hit. The database from which my department worked was riddled with errors generated by both the group responsible for getting data and the group responsible for creating the database, many of which we had no way of catching unless we knew to look for them, and how to identify them when they happened. The people who created those sorts of errors still have their jobs, probably because they were under different managers.

I hate to sound tinfoily, but I suspect ultimately what happened is that I did a sample project for a company that got used in a head-to-head comparison of our products against other companies', and because of a recent reranking of our address space—something done by another department—our results came in dead-last in the comparison. This cost the company marketplace credibility and probably a fair bit of money, and somebody at the sufficiently-elevated-as-to-not-directly-have-all-the-information level made the decision that somebody's head had to roll, and mine was the most easily accessible. They did some digging, found enough reason to make the charge of "poor quality work" stick, and stuck it hard and fast so they could say to whomever needed to hear it, "the problem has been solved."

Of course, the problem hasn't been solved, but they've bought themselves some breathing room to solve it, maybe.

I don't really want to see them burn in flames, 'cause my friend Bennie is still working there, and the last thing I want to have happen is to see him get caught in the crossfire simply because I think someone in upper management made a poor decision, but I really would like to know who decided what and why. Not that knowing would do me any good, mind you. If anything, it would make things harder. When I got fired from CRS, knowing that one person was ultimately responsible for the decision made the desire to act against that person quite strong. Not really having a target here keeps the anger from boiling up and out of control. There's nobody to be angry at. Not even me.

I can at best be angry with the circumstances that have brought me to this point, and hope that they don't happen again.

On the upside, Saturday I sent out several copies of my résumé, and Monday morning I had a voice mail at the new place waiting for me telling me that someone had seen my application for a position with a financial services company and was interested in talking with me more in-depth. I've called and the recruiter sounds quite positive, but is currently waiting for a more detailed job-description from the hiring company. Apparently they've had trouble filling this particular job because the data people complain about too much programming and the programmers complain about too much data management, meaning it's almost exactly what I was doing at HMS.

It would be exceptionally boss if I got a new job before the severance package for the last one vanished.

---

In the meantime, I'm working more on my novel and other short stories. I've got two more erotic pieces conceived that I need to write, and I need to work up the gumption to replace the chapter of Child of Man that I deleted by accident. Important note: the commands "vi" and "ci" are very close to each other on the keyboard. Further, "ci" doesn't make a copy when it puts it under revision control; it just sticks the file into revision control. Deleting the revision-controlled copy deletes the original file.

Further note: Recovering deleted files in linux should be attempted immediately after deleting, not half an hour later. This is especially true on a server system with multiple processes all running at once.

Thankfully it's nothing I can't recover by rewriting it, and doing so will let me clean the prose somewhat. I wasn't entirely happy with the segment, but I do know where I'm going and how I want to get there. I just have to put
all the ideas down onto actual hardcopy now.

I'll also have lots of time to handle moving into the house. We still have a lot of crap in the apartment that needs to be shunted over to the house, and we still haven't fleshed out the plan to do that. I'm still shuttling boxes over in the Volvo as I get time, then coming back after dumping stuff up in the attic.

It seems I have a lot of time, now, so at least the house should be easier to move.

I suppose the fact that this entry isn't actually a joke is, itself, the biggest joke of them all. I just don't know who the butt of this joke is.

I bought DDR MAX for the PS2 today. Some time ago, Jessie picked up a pad that EB had pennied out of inventory, so we had the controller sitting around the apartment, unused. I remember saying when I first saw it in an arcade that, if the music were good, I might be interested in trying to play it. However, in very short order it became überpopular, and anyone who knows me can probably guess what sort of result that had on my interest.
Still, I tried it a few times, but every time the game greeted me with such horrible screeching that I failed miserably, unable to focus on the actual gameplay.

I'd been looking at the copy at the EB where Jessie works for a while, but today I finally took the plunge. The back of the package said it had a bunch of songs in a vast array of styles, meaning I figured I had a good chance of finding at least a few songs to which I could listen without bleeding from my ears. To my surprise, the first song I found when I actually played it was a cover of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World," which I think is eminently listenable. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but most of the rest of the music was at least endurable, if not particularly memorable. Even the few tracks I outright didn't like, I could probably survive long enough to play. If not, it's not like I have to listen to them. Unless I want to unlock everything. Damn my OCD.

Actually, the biggest impediment to my doing any good at this game appears to be my staggering lack of rhythm and balance. The sensitivity of the pad is such that I have to lift my feet to put them back down; I can't just tap
my foot and have it count. This means that in any complex pattern with the same button being hit often, I have to sort of stagger-hop to make it work, which throws off my ability to do anything else. I'm going to have to learn
how to not look like I've had six beers and a shot of everclear laced with Kool-Aid before playing.

Now I just have to not feel like a fool while playing. I suppose in time if I keep working at it that I'll get decent enough to do myself some good, which is another reason I got it. Anything I can do to burn calories is a positive. Right now, I can use all the help I can get.

---

I had my first interview in three months on Monday. It was with a recruiter, not a real company, but it's better than nothing. Still, I came away from that meeting not really sure what to think. The agent with whom I spoke
really didn't seem to be technically minded himself, and that always bothers me. I can't help but feel that people who don't know at least a little about the technology for which they're recruiting people can't do the best job in
selling technical people to technical companies. No offense to the person with whom I spoke, but I felt a bit like I'd been passed through a living buzzword filter.

I suppose in a twisted fashion, it's my own fault. I don't have the sort of skillset or résumé that can easily be summed up in a few short words. I have three years of job history, just over a year of actual work at those jobs, and ten years of academic and personal training in the skills that I know. I list PERL and C as the languages that I know, but I've used over half a dozen languages since I started and I could write professionally in any of them; it's just a matter of learning the syntax and then practicing until I don't need a book to remember the function names. I don't have any formal object methodologies, but I understand object-oriented programming. I've got too much experience to be entry-level or intern, but not enough to be mid-level or higher. I'm not a junior, but I'm not a senior. 

Adding to this confusion is the fact that in the last three years, I've held five jobs. Kinetic reneged on my employment contract. FlashNet hired me by mistake, advertising for "system engineer" instead of "system
administrator" and then not making it clear what my job duties would be until I'd been working for them for nearly a month. Raytheon sold the division of the company into which I'd been hired to L-3, who then had no work for me to do. ISI dissolved my department out from under me while I was on medical leave, then refused to move me into a dpeartment that had anything for me to do because of a hiring freeze. CRS laid me off. At no point did I ever quit any job outright. Either the company had nothing for me to do, or what the company wanted me to do wasn't why I took the job in the first place.

Unfortunately, most companies these days don't care about the reasons. They only care about the number of previous positions I've held. I look like a job-hopper, and I'm not. At least, I don't think of myself that way. I've been trying to find a single, stable company at which to put in my twenty years of service, like my father did at IBM. So far, every company I've thought would be like that has turned out not to be like that at all, which is highly upsetting. I want the comfort of knowing that the job I do today will be the job I do tomorrow, next month, next year. I don't want to stagnate, but I don't want every two years to be at a new company. I'm tired of starting
over at the bottom anew every time I turn around. 

Now if only this recruiter can find some place for me that understands that.

I wish I knew right now what I was feeling. My emotions are this tightly knotted mass of disjoint and tangled threads that all interleave into a Gordian Knot, matching the lump in my stomach that refuses to settle.

Shay moved out this morning. Like when Tanya left, I didn't get to say good-bye. I'm not sure I could have. I don't even know if I wished I could. I wish I'd had the option, but if I had could I have not done it? I feel at once like I failed her as a sister, like I failed myself as a protector and guardian, and like she failed me as a friend. Buried deeply beneath the mask she wears is the person I invited into my family, but that person is so deeply hidden that I sometimes question whether it existed at all, and I hate saying that because that can only lead me to question whether asking her to be a member of my extended family was worth the effort at all, which means so many months of wasted effort and so many resources poured into a black hole.

I feel a bit like a failure towards my mate, as well, in spite of the assurances to the contrary. It's not my place to discuss reasons or details, but the short form is that I got very pushy about something that I didn't need to push, then caught the brunt of an emotional blast caused by many more things than just the moment's excess. Things just slowly seemed to slide from there, until finally Jessie and I sort of crawled into bed and I fell apart.

Usually, a good night's sleep is all I need to recover from these kinds of divots, but today I find myself no better than last night. If anything, I feel worse because now I have the sense that I should have gotten better and didn't, and I don't know why. I've had Elton John's "The Panic In Me" off of the El Dorado soundtrack stuck in my head since I woke up, and it certainly hasn't helped.

I'm having a horrible time controlling my weight right now. My height is still upsetting to me, and I have trouble believing that it will ever be "acceptable" to me. At best, it will be "tolerable," but that's hardly the same thing. Unfortunately, at least partly because of this immutable and unwanted truth about my physical form, keeping the
rest of the things I can control in check has been much harder than I would like.

I haven't dilated in months now, again. That, like my weight, is one of those things that I wish would just happen but that I can't seem to make happen by myself, a fact that bothers me even more than before. Jessie used to complain about the effort involved in hair-removal, and I always said that if zie really wanted it badly enough zie would find the will to make it happen, but that's not true and recognizing that makes me feel even more out-of-sorts. I have so many things that, if I had the will, I would simply do, but that never get done for one reason or
another. It certainly isn't that I don't want them. It's that I can never make myself stick with them.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my surgery, not counting differences in timezones and other negligible details. I've only ever made love with Jessie once, and despite how desperately I want to be able to do it again, I can't seem to spend the effort it takes to stay on top of what I have to do to make myself ready for it. I should be happy that it's been a year since I did this. I should be ecstatic that my surgical scars have all healed according to every medical text. I'm only disappointed in my own inability to live up to my expectations.

I still don't have a job. My creative endeavors are all languishing in pieces. One of the players in my weekly Werewolf game won't make it this week and may have to drop out, which might end up killing the story. I
couldn't even look at the scale this morning. My unemployment checks haven't arrived yet this week, and I've got a pile of bills I need to pay. 

It's very hard for me not to feel like a failure right now.

---

It's now 19h00 by my desktop clock, and while I can't say I feel better than I did this morning, I'm not suffering from it in any immediate sense. More than anything, it feels "behind." It's no longer an immediate and crippling sensation but a painful memory. More than anything, right now I just feel sort of blah. I fell back into bed as soon as I stopped writing this morning, and I didn't get up until five minutes ago. I woke up several times during that period, but I never managed to overcome inertia enough to actually go do anything.

I really didn't feel like there was anything to do, I suppose. I had no reason to leave the bed. I'm sure I could've found semi-productive things on which to work, like the renown backlog for my Werewolf game or any one
of a hundred different stories that I have pending for one reason or another, but likely if I had gotten out of bed I would've spent the day spodding with Xenosaga, trying to get chaos to level fifty to see his last deathblow (I
know the game calls them Tech Attacks, but I agree with the people at GameFAQs that say that's a lame translation). 

Spod is a powerful thing. It's any activity that's a timewaster, that you know is a timewaster, that you can do with minimal effort or concentration. By "timewaster," I mean an activity whose goal is ultimately unimportant. Ship-in-a-bottle building or writing JAPHs are not spod; they have some sort of vaguely tangible outcome. Playing pick-up sticks with yourself is spod, unless you're deliberately trying to build your hand-eye coordination.

The typical example of spod is endlessly levelling characters in a console RPG long past the point of being able to beat the game, and I excel at it. Most of the games I've played, I have a save-state somewhere on a memory card or floppy disk that's designated my spod state, and I've likely hit the final boss but have backtracked to some area of the final dungeon or another and just sit and take on fight after fight to pick up stuff and gain experience. Usually, this is to see just how high I can push the experience point counter or the HP counter or some other numerical statistic. 

I've been spodding with Xenosaga a lot lately. I beat the game five days after I got it, but the ending was so phenomenally unrewarding that I keep playing it because I feel like I got no closure out of it. That and, frankly,
I'm tired of everything else I've got at the moment and nothing else new will be out for a while that interests me, and so Xenosaga has been my drug of choice during the long, empty stretches of day while Jessie's at work and I
don't feel like I can be productive at a jobsearch. 

I got Master of Orion 3 when it arrived, as well, but it was a huge disappointment. I like empire-building, but I hate political games, and MoO3 took all the empire-building factors in MoO2 and stuffed them behind a wall
of AI, and took all the political stuff that had been secondary to the previous game and made them the focus, which meant that everything I enjoyed I couldn't do, and everything I found tedious was now the point. It's the
first PC game I've ever returned out of disgust. Not the first game ever, to be sure; that was Legend of Mana. I think honestly I disliked this even more than that.

I keep saying I have things I should be doing. I could be dilating. I could be writing. I could be out walkies. I could be managing my free time in some sort of useful fashion, but I never have. When I've got sixty things I
must do, not only do I get them all done but I manage to squeeze in ten things I want to do in the same time because I turn into a blizzard of productivity, and I can keep that up indefinitely; I did for three years at the end of my stint in college. When I've got nothing I have to do, or only one or two things, they never get done because I turn into a perpetual procrastinator. "I've got all the time in the world to work on it" because my excuse for everything, and then nothing ever gets done. The stuff I should be doing gets delayed because I don't feel like doing it right now and I know I can do it later. The stuff I want to be doing I feel guilty doing because I have things I should be doing that hang over me, but never get finished.

I'm a horrible time-manager, and I recognize it, but I'm never sure how to fix it shy of just doing things, and that doesn't happen, even though it should. I'm such a joyful bundle of neuroses. It's a wonder I'm not in a Happy Coat somewhere singing to my socks.

I suppose technically that this should be March 5th, but I'm writing it on the extreme morning of the fifth after having gotten up some time on the afternoon of the fourth, so I'm calling it the 4th for technicality's sake. To be fair, some of my Thailand entries are properly labelled and I wrote them at all hours of the day, but the entries I wrote while in Thailand don't match up to anything normal, sane or reasonable. That whole trip is one big bucket of surreal in my head, a symbol that contains no inherent meaning and thus is reinterpreted every time I think about it.

I think what shocks me most about Thailand, even to this day, is the way it lingers in my mind. It wasn't a happy trip. It wasn't a frightening trip. It wasn't a surreal trip. I visited Chloe, XoYo and Mut. I had three major and
two minor surgical procedures. I endured two bouts of food poisoning. I learned to love pad thai. I discovered the 1950s-era-science-reel joy of dilation. I reinvented who I am. I discovered that I'm just like who I used to be, only moreso. It's not that Thailand could have been only yesterday; it's that Thailand could be tomorrow.

The last month has been incredibly stressful for me. Finding a job in this economy has been... well, to say difficult is an understatement and to say it's been hell is a hyperbole. The truth is that all of my work seems to vanish into a black hole of Human Resources drones and technical recruiters who themselves aren't technical people. I had a recruiter tell me "I don't see UNIX on your résumé" when I had listed Solaris, AIX, OSF1, HP-UX, and SCO instead. I've been accused of job-hopping in my efforts to stay ahead of the lay-off curve. I've been told that my years of experience in coding don't count for anything because I'm too specialized. I've been told they don't count because I'm not specialized enough. I don't know how to make my chances of success more, or even less, likely, short of yelling at a recruiter and accusing her of pigeonholing me because of my attempts to avoid being let go by one company or another that's suffered trouble, reinvented itself and discovered it didn't need me or otherwise
found out after hiring me that I wasn't the right candidate for the job. Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

In short, I've hit a sort of use-the-Force requirement. I can no longer plan for my own future, because I don't feel like I'm in control of it, at least not right now. It's horrifyingly liberating, and sadistically enlightening. I'm not reacting at all well to the feeling that I can't provide for those about whom I care, and every day I realize just how much of my personality is tied up in the belief that my value unto others is determined by my ability to provide for them, in some fashion or another. It's a very dangerous belief, one I'm trying to excise from my mind. In the absense of obviously positive cashflow, though, it's very hard to overcome.

Jessie and I finally had to ask Shay to leave. Her last day under our roof will be the fifteenth of this month. I don't want and don't need to go into all the reasons she's leaving, but it's been gnawing at me. I feel like I've failed, though how I couldn't say. Worse, there's a part of me that feels used, even though I know she never intended for that to happen. I gave her six months in Texas. I gave her six weeks when she came to Philly. I gave her a month this time. Every time, she's managed somehow to wear out her welcome by the end of it. Not that she's chosen to leave, but that we've had to ask her to vacate our premises. Part of me wonders why I keep sticking my head in the bandsaw. Part of me can't figure out why she doesn't turn the bandsaw off. Part of me relishes the pain as long as the bandsaw-operator is laughing while she calls 911.

I've been yelling at Jessie a lot lately. The stress is obviously getting to me, but never in ways that seem obvious. Little things that I can take in stride as long as the lights are on come back to gnaw at me when I close my eyes. Jessie locked a LiveJournal post to friends only recently, and I don't have a LiveJournal so I couldn't see it. I knew it was there 'cause I saw Jessie writing it, but it didn't show up in the listing, and I had a conniption because I wanted to know how many other posts I might have been missing along the way and never known I'd missed, just because I didn't have a LiveJournal account, to say nothing of all the other problems I've had with LiveJournal, et alia, in the past.

Those of you who would respond to this by saying, "why don't you just get a LiveJournal account" have not done
your homework. C-minuses for the lot of you. See me after class.

I wish I knew what was wrong with me. I wish I knew how to make it stop. I wish I at least knew when I would have the resources again to make these things go away. I was never like this when I had a job, or was I? Was I
always this petty, this antagonistic, this bitchy-without-just-cause, and I just had enough material comfort and security to patch over the jagged edges of my personality?

Most psych-types that I know have said to me that losing one's job is the second-largest possible cause of stress in one's life, just behind a death in the family. It's a loss of self-sufficiency, and more. It's a loss of self-esteem, of self-respect. I'm sucking on the government tit and hating it, and hating myself for having to do it.

Maybe I should go work at a coffee-bar or something, for the extra cash. I won't lose any benefits until I'm making forty percent of my unemployment check in earned income, and considering what I was making before I doubt I could make that much at a part-time job. Of course, by the same token, taking a job like that while I'm still receiving benefits feels like I'm giving up hope of finding a better job. I joke about becoming a truck driver if I can't find a tech job, but that, too, is giving up. It's just giving up in a different way.

I wish I had a job. I wish I felt like I had the ability to just go get one. Right now, I feel like it's all in the hands of Fate, and Fate is not a master I trust.

---

I feel the need to add this as a post-script, though I know I shouldn't have to say it. I said above that I've been yelling at Jessie. What I didn't say there is how much it tears me up inside when I do. I don't think I could put
into words just how much Jessie means to me. Every time I lose my temper, I feel sick to my stomach. My breath gets short. My paws go numb, even worse now that I've damaged the nerves in my right one. I lash out, and then I want to curl up in a ball and cry because I've hurt someone that means as much to me as my own life. I feel that much worse after having lost control of myself with Jessie, worse than I ever would if I had just blown up at a friend, or even a lover. It's the closest I can get to screaming at myself in a mirror without a reflective surface.

I know I've wished to undo the past before, to change steps I'd taken and do things differently. I know how foolish those wishes are, how they seek to uncreate the person I am today. Never do I wish for that ability so strongly as when I get angry with my mate, in spite of all that. I hope this makes sense.

So. First, I've lost my job. Second, I've lost my car. Third... well, there isn't really a third to that, but the first two are enough. I suppose getting the flu could be the third, but it only makes me feel like diving head-first off of an overpass above the Schuylkill, or however the hell that river's name is spelled. Spelt. Whatever. It really isn't a life-changing event. That's okay, though, because between my means of getting from point A to point B vanishing and my means of acquiring a new means of getting from point A to point B vanishing, I've had it pretty rough.

Actually, there are a few other points, call them 3A, 3B and so on. They're not really "life-changing" but they're pretty nasty. I think I've come down with cubital tunnel syndrome. The ring and pinky fingers on my right paw have been tingling non-stop for the last five days now, and they refuse to relax. About a week ago, I picked up Arcanum, which is this older game for which I finally got a fast enough computer to run, and I treated myself to a few marathon sessions of this new addiction. Only, I hadn't really accounted for the fact that my trackball had died, and I had just gone back to a mouse, and I have this really old wooden-armed chair that my father
made that cuts off the circulation in my hands when I rest my elbows against it for too long. Well, sure enough, after three days of non-stop steampunk action à la Castle Falkenstein, two of my fingers went numb,
and every time I pick up the mouse in that paw, they start to tingle more fiercely, like a dowsing rod for bad ideas. I've tried to keep my arm locked straight as all of the self-help guides have suggested, but that doesn't
seem to do much more than cut off the blood-flow to the other  fingers on that paw, so I've kind of given up caring.

There is a medical solution, of course. Cortisone shots, and outpatient surgery if those don't work. However, point 3B is that my medical insurance is gone. You see, this goes back to the fact that my last company is the
entrepreneurial equivalent of an old man dottering about in his garage. The president is a woman to take advantage of the tax break. The owner is the Vice President of Emerging Business, which is a fancy title that seems to mean "is a personal friend to two-thirds of the customer base." The kicker, of course, is that the company never has more than fifteen people in it, because then they'd have to follow all the rules that apply
to small businesses but aren't aimed at two-guys-in-a-garage. So, no COBRA. My manager was magnanimous enough to offer to let me cover the premiums out of pocket and just not list me as no longer employed for health purposes, but I can't afford USD676 for two months of health insurance when my total monthly income comes to USD1700 right now, ten percent of which is taxed because it qualifies as income. Thank whatever deities may exist that I already budgeted for the full cost of hormones, because if I hadn't someone would've needed an ambulance when my drugs ran out. I just hope that person would've been insured, or we'd all be in trouble.

Finally, 3C, I have two new boarders living under my roof. Now, in a perverse sort of fashion, this is a good thing, because Kelly and Shay are paying a portion of the rent, which means my unemployment checks are going further than they would otherwise. However, living in a two-bedroom apartment was cozy with two people, and with three it was crowded. Now there're four of us, and it's packed. If I had a job, I could offer to co-sign on a place, but I don't. If Shay didn't have an eviction on her record, she could co-sign, but she can't. If Kelly were working two jobs, she'd make enough by herself to pay for a place in the eyes of the complexes around here, but she's already getting stretched at the seams working the one she's got. Right now, none of us really
know how to get out of this mess, but in the meantime, hey, cheap livin'.

It's this amazing clusterfuck of a situation. I'm looking for work, but right now the tech market is TEH FU><0R, and half of my friends are either unable to get tech jobs or are massively underpaid and overworked. I'm trying to avoid the mindset of "I'll ride out my unemployment, then go be a truck driver," but it's a pretty tempting proposition. I've always hated the tech sector; I got into it because I knew I was good at it, not because I liked it. I can't afford to go back to school unless I want to plan on a bankruptcy in my future, which one of my other long-term friends is doing. I've got too much experience and education to be a fresh-out-of-college entry level trainee, but not enough to be the God Of Computing that every place now seems to want because they all know the tech market is TEH FU><0R and they can demand godhood and get it if they wait long enough.

On the other note, the car that Tanya brought me to replace the one I exploded failed its state safety inspection, which is going to make life really fun for a lot of people. I don't have the money to make the repairs it needs. If I'd had the money to repair it, I'd have gone to a dealer and bought a real used car that was already inspected. Instead, I cashed out Tanya's debt on the promise that she'd bring me a car to replace the one I destroyed. The car she brought me isn't street-legal, so now I'm even more screwed than I was before. If push really comes down to shove, I can put the repairs for the car on one of my credit cards and just plan on adding four or five months to the time it takes me to pay off my bills, but that's really not how I wanted to have to handle the situation; see above for why.

I hate living in a holding pattern.