Asshole Bosses Should Be Fair Game

As someone who has been through the long, hard slog of job hunting, I consider myself something of an expert on job advice columns. You read them, you get advice solicited and unsolicited from others. Some of it is helpful. So much of it is bullshit.

One piece of advice is helpful, but bullshit at the same time. That is the advice to never talk poorly about your former places of work.

I understand that being negative about where you worked before makes you look like a complainy pants, and that the potential employer may not want to bring such negativity into their place. That makes perfect sense.

But let’s take, say, a really bad job for shits and giggles. Say your last job was shredding documents illegally for Enron, or digging mass graves in Bosnia. What the fuck are you supposed to be positive about? “It gave me a great appreciation for proper organization!”

I think part of me just has a bad gut reaction because if you do have a legitimately bad boss, you are supposed to lie about it. And that lie props up bad bosses everywhere. It gives bad bosses free reign to be dickholes to their employees, as long as they are being assholes to white male employees anyway. If you don’t read This Article  that sparked this blog entry, and you should, at least read this excerpt:

It is nearly impossible to successfully sue your boss for being a bully. While there are decades' worth of precedents on gender and race discrimination in the workplace, just being an all-around jerk is sanctioned boardroom behavior.

"The standard for outrageous conduct is so high that people lose those lawsuits," says Dr. Gary Namie, the director of the Workplace Bullying Institute. "Nothing is considered outrageous when committed by management."

So when it becomes OK to lie about your former places of work where you were let go because your asshole boss kept asking you to work 60 hours a week and one time you needed to attend a funeral and he waited an appropriate amount of time before firing you. When it becomes OK to lie about it, all bosses everywhere are protected species. This rule works out like gangbusters for former bosses, who have no reason to be reasonable. I've known people that think Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross is the model of a motivating boss. Not the personification of human pit stain.

I’ve lucked out in the boss department, I should say here. I’ve had good and not as good, but with the not as good ones I was in a position that I didn’t really have to interact with them more than a couple times a year. But luck should not give me an edge over others because I can be honest about what management styles work well with me.

And it rankles me that there’s a management class that can be assholes, not get called on it, and can still fuck your shit up when any employer calls for references.

It warms my heart that Minnesota courts are starting to reasonably explore the issue of office bullies, at least on the legal terms of keeping people safe from violent work environments. That’s something at least, and something that might get higher ups to care about more than just numbers, but how their middle managers get those numbers. 

Fargo Vs. Cities. Pros and Cons Comparison

Staying in Fargo	Moving to Twin Cities	Winner
Still get to see the RedHawks in a pleasant park with good food and good seats	Get to go to St. Paul Saints, but it sucks	Fargo
10 minute commute. Most places in city easy to reach in under 20 minutes, and parking doesn't suck anywhere.	Going anywhere takes forever. 20 minute commute, finding parking near big events sucks	Fargo
Would have lost house by now	Household income doubles what it was in Fargo	Cities
Job leading nowhere, wife unable to land one	wife and me both employed at same time for first time in our 4.5 year relationship	Cities
Broke	Ability to start savings account	Cities
Hateful bitch of a neighbor	Hateful kids as neighbors	Draw
Favorite places keep closing (Silver Moon, Lauermans, Red Bear, Ralph's)	Favorite places are still kicking, and there's always somewhere new to try	Cities
Cost of montly mortgage cheaper than rent	Still, getting double what we earned in Fargo	Cities
Shoveling, mowing, gardening, fixing appliances	Renting, don't got to fix shit	Cities
Dealing with bank about mortgage and selling house for no gain after five years	No mortgage headaches. Rent sucks, but we have a pool	Cities
Fargo Street Fair	Art-A-Whirl	Draw
Squirrels galore	Deer, wild turkeys, geese, cardinals, bluejays	Cities
Red River Zoo	Como Zoo	Cities
Working every day	Unemployed for 8 months, but now working every day	Fargo, sort of. Complicated, but after 7 months it will be as if I never stopped working, income-wise
	When twins are doing poorly, tickets cheaper than Saints tickets	No comparison with Fargo
Got to see Patton Oswalt	Got to see Paul F. Tompkins, Neil Gaiman, and Amiee Mann at one event	Cities (sorry Patton)
Writing for Area Woman is a scam	Tons of freelancing opportunities	Cities
New Library	Tons of libraries, free museum passes inside!	Cities
Politics of a Red State	Politics of a Democratic state	Cities

Yesterday I became an accidental hero

Yesterday I was at an art exhibit to be inspired and write about it for a freelance opportunity. I looked at art for about 3 hours, and it was all wonderful. By the end, I had a strong thesis rolling around in my head and several pieces picked out to help exemplify and expound on that thesis while deepening it.

There's a lot of construction going on in Minneapolis right now, which made getting to the place something of an adventure as primary, secondary and tertiary streets were blocked off. In the end, I just had to keep the general direction of the gallery in my head while driving and just keep turning the car in that direction until construction turned me another way and I spiraled my way there.

The coolest thing, though, was while I was watching the last video installation, I could hear the weather sirens going off. I decided to head out, and by the time I got outside, the sirens were off. I walked up three flights of stairs in the parking garage (also under construction for each floor above floor three). I opened the door and about 30 feet away, a very large black bird, a raven or crow, saw me and started to take off with something in its mouth.

The raven dropped whatever it was carrying, I guess thinking I was too much of a threat to keep holding on to lunch.

The thing dropped two feet to the parking lot ground.

It got up. It was a tiny bird.

It also flew away, the other direction, while about a dozen of its friends and relatives went after the raven, shooing it away out of the parking lot.

I sort of felt like a hero. 

Open letter to the little shits upstairs

Yes, I hear you, tromping around your apartment on an urgent mission to calm down the wildebeasts that live with you. Sometimes I think your actions only urge the clomping beasts on.

You sometimes drop toys off the balcony, and trek outside to get them back. The time you went to get a ping pong ball and tried to hit it up to your balcony while I was sitting RIGHT THERE was awesome, The way the ball bounced off the window behind me.

I hate you, stupid 10 year old kid. I absolutely hate you.

Every time I go out on the balcony to have a smoke, you run to the door and yell “stupid smoke” and slam the door shut. Lean closer, I have a secret.

I only smoke for you now.

I don’t smoke unless I’m at home, on the balcony, and able to slowly give you cancer. I don’t smoke at work. I don’t smoke out and about. But first thing in the morning, and at home in the evening, I want to slowly kill you.

I could play loud music, but I’m not a fan of loud music myself, and it would hit the innocent neighbors next door. Smoke has a wonderful directional quality. I can take a deep breath and shoot it right up between the slats of your balcony.

I actually planned to quit this week now that I’m working full time and life sucks a lot less, I don’t need it to just get through the day without wanting to harm things. Funny, now instead of keeping me from hurting myself and others, I’m smoking to hurt you, you little shit.

Life was great for the three months before you moved in. With you menagerie of elephants, wildebeasts, and ponies.

Some day, I’ll come up with a machine that smokes the cigarettes for me. Just for your pleasure. Until then, please breathe deeply.

A night out at the ballpark becomes a deathtrap

We were spoiled by the RedHawks. There isn’t much more to it. But our evening trying to capture that summer joy of being at a ballgame with the St. Paul Saints quickly became a disaster, filled with danger.

Wife had bought tickets through Groupon, which meant we had to pick them up at the window on Thursday, the opening day for the Saints. This was our first game with them, the first of many we planned. The RedHawks had been a staple of our summers. We’d come to enjoy each player’s quirks, and mourned when they moved on or were traded away.

First thing is parking. For literally two miles along the road the field is on, people are parking along the street. Luckily, there are a few lots close by, and we coughed up 6 bucks to park there, in a field of grass.

We made our way to Midway Stadium, at 5:50. They don’t open the gates until an hour before first pitch, so we had some time to stand there and look around. There’s a sign that says that stadium waves are not allowed at Midway. “Do they hate fun?” I said. “Maybe” Wife said.

Finally we get through the turnstyles built for 10 year old beanpole kids, and start heading to our seats. We end up in the next to last row on the far right field side of the main bleachers. Bleachers? Yes, these seats are silver colored metal steel bleachers (with back rails at least). We’d grown used to nice, cool, plastic fold down chairs with cup holders, like adults use. I can’t imagine these seats are any sort of comfortable in the heat of mid-summer.

At this point, I was daunted a bit. I can’t say I was undaunted anymore. I'm plussed. We puffed our way to the seats. I tried to make the best of it by taking our remaining 32 bucks and get some food. I got a brat and a pulled pork sandwich and two beers for 18.50. The food was good, even better than similar fare at the RedHawks, even if the price was more. I also can’t get over the $12 per seat at this stadium for bleachers in the hot sun high above the stadium. RedHawks were $8 and you could sit right by the on-deck batter as he warmed up.

So now it’s still early. The announcer is testing his mic, and it isn’t going well for him. His station is a fold out table on top of the hometeam dugout. This mic is picking up parts of words here and there, which could be a problem when it comes time to announce a player named Hiscock. After 10 minutes of “mic check” and trying to get through his script and failing miserably, someone goes out to the stage behind the pitchers mound to grab the mic from there. This mic is the only working one in the stadium.

I decide to go get some more food with our remaining money. There are no hot peanuts, my wife’s favorite game food. But they have regular. I get myself a big pretzel, which is my favorite game food. I also try to get some soda, but can’t figure out why they don’t have anything. It’s three bucks a bottle, and all I can see is RC cola and 7up. I leave without soda.

The teams are announced, then the Governor is there, and the Mayor, and all these military people. They wait for the mic to be delivered back to the stage on the field. It’s military night at the ballpark, and they play a video that reduces wife to tears because her best friend is in Afghanistan, and she resents the team for playing so heavily on emotions. The mic is run out to the podium, where the speeches begin.

The pretzel is the worst. The absolute worst I’ve ever had. It was stale as hell, as if it had been waiting since last season. Oh my lord was it aweful. It’s hard to describe how bad it was. My unborn children’s children will carry the stain of this pretzel on their souls. And yet I ate nearly all of it because we had almost no money left and it was going to be a long game. We agreed for me to take the last 6 bucks and get to bottles of soda.

I’m done listening to speeches. It’s now 7:15 and the game isn’t even close to starting.

Turns out that RC and 7up are the major brands of pop at Midway. I get two bottles of Hawaiian Punch and head back up to the seats.

Before I get there, Wife is coming down the stairs. “Let’s go” she says, as if she can hear my battered psyche breaking its nails on the stone walls of this prison well of an experience. I love her. She’s never left a game early except for once, at the RedHawks one July 4 when it was so hot I was turning pale and vomity. Even then it took 5 innings.

This time, we weren’t even going to make it to first pitch, which was now 20 minutes behind schedule.

We walk to the car and start to drive home. “You know, when I got up to leave, the people next to me wouldn’t let me through,” wife says. “What?” “I asked to get through, and they said no.” “Seriously?” “No shitting.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Yeah. Fuck the Saints and their fans.”

Then about the time we get into Minneapolis on 94, the car sounds like something fell off the back end. What the fuck?

We pull over as soon as possible, with each bump making this horrible death rattle. I find a parking lot and get out to look under the car. Nothing is hanging on the ground, everything seems OK. I try to wiggle the muffler, but it’s steady. Now we have a car that runs, but feels like a death trap, and we are in downtown Minneapolis, ten miles from home. We get back on the road, and start driving. The gas is on the last eighth of a tank. So at least when we blow up, there won’t be a lot of fire.

Every bump on the road becomes a new reason for my heart to stop beating. The car clangs away in staccato triplets. Chung chung chung. Chung chung chung.

We make it through half way of downtown when we get to a stop light on Nicollete, and there’s a fucking race going on. A bunch of runners take off and we have to wait for the cops to let us through. Mental math on the state of the car tells me that it wouldn’t handle the cobblestone streets I would have to go on to get to 55, so I get on interstate 394. Going 40. Cars honking, piiiiiissed off, wanting us dead. I go north on 100 to get onto 55. Again, every single bump is another nail in our coffin. Wife is crying at this point. My first paycheck arrives tomorrow, and we may already lose it to the car. “Things will never be good for us.” She says. Part of me wonders if it is true.

We get home an hour after leaving the game. I’m exhausted. The sun is going down. Wife uses the last of her credit card to order pizza. She ends up spending the night throwing up in the bathroom.

Our groupon gives us two more tickets. We will give them another shot, only because the game is with the RedHawks, and they’ll need support to get through playing at this devil field. 

Tonight I met Paul F. Tompkins

Tonight I met Paul F. Tompkins, after listening to his podcast, and many other podcasts where he guest appears, for about two years.

Two years ago, I had no idea who he was. I was just starting to listen to podcasts as a way of getting through the grinding days. You know. Life. I was working on one of the few impressions I had in my toolkit at the time, making wife laugh by going into cake boss mode and complaining that there was no way I could get everything done she asked me to do.

Then I heard Paul F Tompkins' Cake Boss on a podcast, and it was brilliant, much more than I could have ever dreamed of. Here was a gem of a person.

The more I heard him on various podcasts: Doug Loves Movies, Comedy Bang Bang (then Comedy Death Ray), WTF, and many others, the more I came to appreciate this genuine, pleasant person with a cadre of characters and an arsenal of awesome. He started his own podcast as well, the Pod F Tomkast, which is consistently wonderful. All this was a thing to look forward to when trying to stay sane throughout our crappy year. If there's anyone who can understand a crappy year, it's a stand-up comedian, I think. A lot of them have been through some tough times, and hopeless desperation.

Last year, he came to the cities to be in WITS, a show hosted by MPR's John Moe. By then, wife and I were deep in the job hunt, and I would have given anything to be there by then. However, things didn't work out. This year, when I heard that WITS would once again have him, I was excited, but also very poor, unemployed, and couldn't justify it.

My wonderful wife took matters into her own hands. "We're going." She said. She got the tickets for WITS, and then it happened to be the thing to celebrate my first week in my new writing job. It was a wonderful night, and when Paul announced his show on Saturday, wife turned to me and said, "Did you know about it?"

Me: Yes, but I didn't think we could.

Her: You got a job. We're doing this if it means nothing for the next week.

Me: OK.

So tonight, I saw Paul F Tompkins for the first time doing stand-up. It was delightful. Lots of focus on his relationship with his wife, which as a newlywed, I loved. Then he announced that he would be selling DVDs and such after the show.

For a third time, like Peter with Jesus, except in a good way instead of a deny-ey way, in fact the only commonality is the three so it's not really that good a comparison, Wife turned to me and said "Go." 

Here's what went through my head while waiting in the line down the aisle to meet Paul F Tompkins.

"OK, what are you going to say? Is there anything charming in your bucket? Will I need to go to the bathroom before I get to the front of this line? What if I fart? OK, keep it cool. I can be like 'j'accuse! You made my cake boss impression obsolete!" No that's way too creepy. 'I know why you dress up so nice, it's so you are always the best looking dude in a picture.' No, jerky. 'Hey, I'm the one guy who listens to your podcast as you addressed me in the latest addition.' No, it's all so stupid. You know what, why don't you just be yourself?"

So here's what did happen.

Me: Hello

Paul: Hello!

Me: It’s a pleasure to meet you. I'd like to buy your DVD.

Paul: Thank you. Sure.

Me: My wife also wants to take a picture.

Paul: Absolutely.

Me: (sitting down). I love your podcast.

Paul: Thank you.

Me: You know, your podcast follows me on Twitter, and I don't know why.

Paul: Well, the podcast loves those who love it.

Me: Well, thank you so much. And have a wonderful night.

Paul: You too. Thank you.

And that's about it. He was lovely and polite and I hope I was the same. I was shaking as we left the theater. Wife made me thank her 10 times on the way home. She loves her some credit. Unlike Peter. Peter couldn't get the credit of knowing the J-man fast enough away from him. 

To end it, a picture with my head cropped out. This blog is anonymous after all. But it does have an unintentional side effect of making Paul look surprised and pleased to be sitting next to a creepy headless ghost. Ghostcatcher?

Week one of the corpratization of Fargo Jones

Transitioning from near-joblessness to full time work is a wonderful kind of crazy. I don’t know how to organize this hodgepodge of a post with any sort of throughline other than that. This is going to be random.

So this week I started the new job, picked out a 401k, insurances, other things. I got to carpool with wife since she works not too far from me. We even had lunch together for two days. That sort of thing has been very helpful in the transition. It’s hard to go from being available for her 24/7 and able to drop what I’m working on to help her, to having to limit our contact to a text or two, a brief phone call, maybe a short email, during the day. Maybe we were co-dependent, but it was a good kind of co-dependent. We work well together.

The new job is my first time writing for the corporate world. I’ve worked retail before, but my writing background is steeped in newspapers and academia. I’m learning new aspects of marketing, like eblasts, and writing press releases like a fiend. I’m watching training videos and learning all the different products the company makes, starting to pick up the business-speak shorthand like EOD. I filled out a personality survey that everyone is doing to figure out how to work with each other as a team. I got perfectionist, which is better than finding out you’re an asshole I guess. Maybe they’re the same thing.

The people I work with are great. The office is a supportive environment. Everyone gets along. My last job I found out on day one that there were definitely lines of tension to avoid between certain people. I haven’t gotten that this time. That’s why they said they were very careful during the hiring process. They were looking for even-tempered, no-drama people. Depite what is posted here, that’s me in work life. And everyone seems to be glad to have me on board, which is just awesome. Validation is a nice thing.

The eco-friendly office is also very nicely settled in between some major roads, yet also buffered by a forresty area. Every day we see turkeys, deer and other wildlife out the windows. One day there was a coyote rambling around out there to remind me that working late and alone at night will not be an option.

This week, for the first time in my life, I’ve been waking up between 6 and 6:30 without an alarm and feeling fully rested and ready for the day. I’ve become an annoying morning person, which is like Captain America suddenly deciding that communists aren’t so bad. I crash at 9 at night. I’m hoping this changes and I go back to being human soon.

And in the middle of all this, wife decided to take control of the family situation and email my parents a detailed account of why we haven’t spoken to them since Christmas, and what needs to be done to figure out a way to coexist in the future, a path to healing the wounds. Apparently we can't exist for a week without five life stressors on the burner. That was two days ago, and nothing back yet.

Last night, we went to WITS, with Paul F. Tompkins and Aimee Mann and hosted by the charming John Moe. We bought the tickets months ago, and it turned out to be my new job celebration event. It would have been a different evening altogether if I was still looking. Wife was not up so much on either entertainer, but I’m hugely into Tompkins, and Aimee Mann as a kicker on that just blew my fucking mind. Once we settled in and the show started, wife began to enjoy things as well, and she could see why I was psyched to go. Then out of nowhere, Neil fucking Gaiman walks out and reads some lines for several skits. What the hell! Wife asked what my favorite part was during the drive home. I said, “Every part. Every single thing was awesome.”  And Aimee Mann is surprisingly very funny!

We're driving out of the parking garage next to the Fitzgerald theater and waiting to turn onto the road, when Neil Fucking Gaiman drives up next to us on the right, also waiting to turn onto the road. Wife freaks out, for some reason surprised that he drives rather than takes some sort of portal he makes with his mind. He turns and drives off into the night. We do the same.

So now we’re going to see Paul F Tompkins tonight for his standup act, something I wouldn’t have done without a job. We’ve been waiting in the wings of the Twin Cities for so long, going to the occassional free thing, but passing up on opportunities to see great entertainers because of the whole broke thing. Now we’ll get to catch our heroes when they come through town on tour. We’ll get to see plays, and check out the best places to get (fill in food item here). I’m looking forward to it. 

Enjoy some Aimee Mann!

and go here for a wonderful video clip of Tompkins talking about being broke, which seems appropriate for this blog. 

http://comedians.jokes.com/paul-f--tompkins/videos/paul-f--tompkins---creme-of-bitterness

Transition to a non-shitty state

Still on the road to recovery from joblessness. Monday will be the first time in our 4.5 year relationship that both wife and I are fully employed at the same time.

Last night, wife spent time sitting on the kitchen floor working on a budget.  I was browning ground turkey for manwiches, trying not to be, well, negative me. I failed.

Wife: So the way I want to do it is that after all the bills, we’ll have 60 a day to spend on gas, groceries, hair, whatever. We just have to keep track of the one number each day. If we know we have groceries or something coming up, we cut down on spending for a few days before. 

Me: I like that it’s one number rather than trying to keep track of gas budget, food budget, entertainment budget, and so on.

Wife: What’s wrong? (She has a sense)

Me: Well, This is your fourth budget now in three days.

Wife: Yeah. So?

Me: We’ve never been good at sticking to budgets.

Wife: So why don’t we try this one?

Me: Because I know us. Diets, working out, that time you wanted to do a load of laundry every day, each time it lasts for about four days.

Wife: Why do you have to be so negative?

Me: I’m sorry. We’ll try this.

Wife: I mean, shit, I’m just trying to set up a system here.

Me: I know.

Wife: God.

Me: I’m sorry. I just…

Wife: What?

Me: Well, I think a big difference between now and all those other times where making a budget didn’t work is, well, we were fucking poor.

Wife: Yeah.

Me: You can set all the goals you want, but if you don’t have enough to cover basic needs like rent, food, gas, and whatnot, it just won’t work.

Wife: I know.

Me: But you know what?

Wife: What?

Me: We’re going to be OK now. We’ve both got jobs. We’ll have enough coming in for necessities, debts, and can even save money for emergencies. For the first time in our lives together, we don’t have to be in survival mode.

Wife: …

Me: I know.

Wife: I’ve never had that. I’ve been in suvival mode since high school.

Me: And you don’t know any other way of life.

Wife: No.

Me: It’s scary.

Wife: Yes. (Starts to cry)

Me: I’ve been waiting for that to happen. It finally hit you. It hit me yesterday.

Wife: Yes. But the thing is, we aren’t there yet. We’ve got to get to June. And can you just let me be in survival mode a little bit?

Me: Transition survival mode?

Wife: Yeah.

Me: Absolutely.

Wife: It’s hard to let it go.

Me: I know.

Wife: I’m also scared about us. We’ve never been together when things are going well.

Me: I know. It’s scary for me too.

Wife: I’m having to make up things to worry about with you. Like you getting into a car accident, getting cancer, finding another woman – pretty much anything that ends with me losing you.

Me: Okaaay…

Wife: I now it’s nuts, but I can’t stop it.

Me: Well, It’s hard to stop worrying, and now that we don’t have to worry about where rent is coming from, you have to put that worry somewhere.

Wife: It sucks.

Me: We’ve been through so much shit. We don't know how we'll be with each other during the good times.

Wife: I know.

Me: We’ll figure it out. I promise I won’t go anywhere. You’re stuck with me, buckko.

Wife: OK. 

Cleaning up the jobless aftermath

I know I'm posting a shit load more than usual, and I know that leads to a downturn in readership, but shit, I got a job! And I have a lot to process.

The breakdown came yesterday. It’s quite a different feeling to have all these stresses and weights on your shoulders for months and months.

First, an interesting tidbit about credit cards. When you decide to stop paying them, you get a lot of phone calls. Luckily, we live in an age where our phones tell us what area code a call is coming from, and you can just ignore them. But it was getting to be about 12 calls a day to ignore.

I wish I could have picked up, to say, yes, I’ll send you a payment straght away. However, I learned early on that when they say “We want to work with you,” that means, “Pay us the full amount you owe us now.”  Don’t have a job, or money? Too bad, pay us.

(warning, video has strong language)

The crazy thing is after a few months, you start getting really ridiculous offers. At one point, they said I could pay off the whole 20,000 on the card with just 11,000 in four easy payments. You got to wonder, what the hell do they think I’m not paying for? Because I’m secretly stashing 11,000?  But it occurs to me that if you don’t give a shit about your credit score and you want to simply cut out a lot of debt, stop paying for a while and see what happens.

I have a bankers box full of recent bills, paystubs, late payments, tax returns, house information. It’s about 10 pounds worth of documents I used to fill out the lawyers form for bankruptcy. It’s been sitting there, waiting for me to have enough money to move ahead with it. Then I sold the house and got hired. So all that was left was about 30k in credit card debt.

And with the new job, I have the ability to make things right. I was more than willing to do bankruptcy and take a dump on my credit rating. I don’t want to buy a house again for a long time, and used cars are the only option I’ve ever thought would be available to me. Renting if we ever decided to move would be difficult, but we are settled with no plans to move for another four years anyway. Moving sucks balls.

On Wednesday, I called ACCC, a nonprofit debt relief company to see if I could get on a debt management program. They set me up to start at 770 a month for nearly five years to get out of it, which was less than I imagined. If I were to continue paying the minimum payment on these cards, it would cost me 1000 a month and take 25 years and about 17000 more in interest. They asked me to call each of the five cards to close the accounts.

OnThursday, I called each card. The big one, the 20000 one, gave me an offer to pay off directly to them, 270 a month for 60 months. They would forgive the interest, so the total cost would be 16000, with 0 percent interest locked in for those 60 months. I called ACCC back and they were like, shit, yeah, take that deal. So now between the two, it will be 550 a month to fully pay off my debts. Half of that for 4 years, the other half for 5. And I’ll be out.

Not to mention we can start paying back the family debts that accrued just so we could eat PB and J sandwiches and fill the car.

And after all that, I started putting the papers I’d pulled out of the box back in. All the credit bills, all the paperwork, the 10 pounds of paper that has felt like 2,000. And my body began to shake, and my face clenched in tearless sobs. And I can breathe. 

Sports deconstructed

I’ve never been big on sports, but my wife is. She looks forward to each year’s Twins game with the Red Sox like a good kid looks forward to Christmas (a lazy simile, but I'm tired). She wears a Red Sox jersey, hoodie, hat and scarf. She forces me into a Red Sox sweater and I wander around the game with anxiety that some drunk fan will start accosting me about a team I support vicariously through my wife. But I enjoy the games in my own way.

It was in support that I accompanied the wife to the Sports Show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We walked around the icons, past sports legends and gods. In some distant room, we could hear a crowd chanting, to the point that it was getting obnoxious.

We neared Paul Pfeiffer’s installation, “The Saints.” The noise was coming from speakers hanging high around the perimeter of a large, nearly empty room. “The Saints Go Marching In” was chanted by what I assumed was a soccer crowd. The sound was overwhelming. Near the middle of the back wall, there was a tiny screen, the size of a couple postage stamps. On it, a lone soccer player ran around a field. The other players and the ball had been erased from the video. So it was just one guy, and every few seconds, the screen would change to another part of the field, but the guy stayed in the same position on the screen as he ran, as if the field behind him were a giant green screen.

(note: first section of the video of the stadium was not at this exhibit)

Through some sliding doors was a dark room with two videos playing silent footage. One in color of a modern soccer crowd of Filipinos. The other was footage from the 1966 soccer final between England and West Germany. More than 400 million people watched this game.

This game, England’s equivalent of our Miracle on Ice game with the Soviet Union, has been divided into its constituent parts. A deconstructed match that mixes in audio from an entirely new crowd of fans from another country altogether.

The effect was disconcerting for my wife, who enjoys immersion into the sports she loves. She gets lost in a game in a way I never can. And because of that, I found this piece fascinating. Sports are so often deconstructed down to numbers – at bats, runs, games won, bases stolen, time left in the game. Here the visual and aural experience has been separated out so that all that’s left is a lone guy running aimlessly around a field. When I’m at a game, I, too, start deconstructing things. I separate out the morning DJ quality of the announcer’s voice, the next food purchase, the sounds of the people around me, the guy standing out in right field who comes into play only a few times a game. I wonder how he doesn’t get bored out there.

It’s this installation that sticks with me days later as we decide which Twins game to go to later in the season. 

I got a job!!!!!!!

It’s hard to know where to begin. How about the numbers?

9 months

500 applications (at least)

50 interviews

1 job.

A JOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Plus a side job editing stuff that I can continue to do to bring in some extra money each week.

Plus some freelancing.

And I sold the house.

On top of that, this new job pays nearly 30 percent more than the old one in Fargo (which is about right for the difference between here and there according to some sites). After 9 months of trying to pay for a wedding, going DEEP into credit debt, trying to figure out how to make $50 last the week when one gas fill up takes most of that, trying to remain sane, I have a new job that starts on Monday. Yesterday, we were wondering how the hell we were going to pay rent in June. Today, we are planning a budget that more than doubles what we were “living” on.

I can soon get an oil change for my car that has muscled through 5000 miles since the last mechanic set eyes on her.

I can soon own more than one pair of kacki pants.

I can get new shoes after 2.5 years on the last pair, daily.

I can have more than a carl budding lunch meat sandwich and ramen for lunch every day.

24 hours ago, we were trying to figure out how to come up with 1500 for a bankruptcy lawyer. Today, we can decide to go through a credit counseling service instead. They couldn’t help me before without a steady income.

Tomorrow, I have a therapy appointment. I’m still going, cause you’re probably wondering why I haven’t been already for criminy sake.

Job hunting has never been this hard in my life. It has been brutal. Painful. Confusing. Madening. Frustrating. Full of moments that seem like, "This is it, this is the one!" and then having that job pulled from your open hands, and then crushed in front of you. And every time you see Romney saying he's jobless, or see some politician on tv talking about how jobless people need to just get back to work you want to punch their grandchildren while they watch. Better yet, make them apply to jobs they are more than qualified for for 9 months without landing anything.

Every job advice column grates on you. You follow the advice, you blame yourself, you want to scream at HR computers who disqualify you without explanation.

Its experiences like this that people with jobs just don’t understand. It’s so easy to get comfortable, to think that you are a highly qualified, great worker with impecable references and qualifications. But the moment you take that leap into the unknown and find out how none of that means squat in a new hiring computer system that rejects you without a chance after you spent 2 hours filling out their stupid forms that repeat every goddamn thing that is already on your resume. Yet, don't accept that where you are is where you will have to be forever. Fear of leaving a job you hate can be just as soul-killing as trying to land a job you'll love.

Yeah, today is a day full of relief, fear, confusion, a new ability to breathe. I’m still trying to process it. It’s going to take a long time to recover.

Cee Lo, I need to go enjoy this breathing thing, please take it from here:

(addition): Long talk with the wife last night on how to be smart about this. How not to do the dumb thing and go money crazy the first month. We can live with our laptop that's missing a P button and has a cord held together by duct tape. We can live with the couch that got messed up in the move so now it feels like sitting on the floor. Slowly, carefully, we will crawl our way back to normalcy.