p.s. I like this WordPress theme (“Neat”) for its simple elegance but am annoyed that by default it formats all paragraphs to full justification.

No, truthfully, one of my goals in establishing this new blog is to keep myself motivated and on track in finding new employment and figuring out some large chunks of the rest of my life. As such, I intended to post in a disciplined manner and on a frequent basis; it lasted for all of three days. But that’s of course no reason to abandon the enterprise altogether (not that I was considering such an (in)action anyway); I’ve always been better at following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law and in this case there weren’t even any letters!

Another, perhaps better, quote for the post’s title might have been this one from Bruno Bettelheim:

The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one’s own eyes, according to one’s own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may “have a good conscience.”

–B. Bettelheim, A Good Enough Parent, 1987.

But, in this blog I organically established a pattern of using a literary quote for titles and (mostly) using fine artworks for initial illustrations, so… by choosing the Shakespeare quote (Richard III, V.iii.1) I’m actually being disciplined and setting a good example for myself.

New post to follow anon.

George Eliot‘s words may be true, but I’m keeping in mind that she specifies merely an image of death, not the real thing. From there one can extrapolate to whether it is in fact darkest just before the dawn, whether every cloud has a silver lining, and if a window does in fact always open whenever a door is closed. But I digress. (Note that the aphorisms don’t specify if the dawning day is going to be overcast, how shiny or pure that silver is, nor how wide said window opens. But I digress yet farther.)

To explain the diagram above, let me first inform you that I am a New York City born-and-bred gal. Not only that, but I had the best of both worlds, as my family moved from Manhattan to (the deceptively-still-in-NYC community of) Rockaway Beach when I was seven, thus allowing me the best of both worlds: a small-town experience with easy access to all that a world-class metropolis has to offer. I attended college in New Jersey but my big-town hometown, my stomping ground, was always a hop, skip, and/or a jump away. My previously mentioned work of the last 16 years was in the City, although I’ve for familial sake lived in the hinterboonies of northwestern New Jersey for the last 5 or 6 of them. To summarize a long story that should have been short, I’ve always maintained a direct connection to my alma mater (Latin, literally “fostering mother”).

Now I’m faced with a bit of separation anxiety. Among the factors precipitating my newfound unemployment was a drainingly long commute, one often exacerbated by accidents or any of the other inexplicable vicissitudinous delays of the highways and byways. But this idea of some sort of placental nourishment obtained from daily contact with the motherland, this too is an image, an illusion. (Perhaps a more apt analogy might have been to Gaia’s son Antaeus? It’s too late now, alas.)

Who put the “G” in “APGAR”?

The Apgar score was devised in 1952 by Dr. Virginia Apgar as a simple and repeatable method to quickly and summarily assess the health of newborn children immediately after childbirth. Apgar was an anesthesiologist who developed the score in order to ascertain the effects of obstetric anesthesia on neonates.

The Apgar score is determined by evaluating the newborn baby on five simple criteria on a scale from zero to two, then summing up the five values thus obtained. The resulting Apgar score ranges from zero to 10. – from Wikipedia

I suppose by now you’re asking, “how much farther is she going to stretch this tenuous analogy?” The answer is, sorry to say, just a little longer. The mnemonic G component of the test refers to “reflex irritability”: (0) no response to stimulation, (1) grimace/feeble cry when stimulated (2) sneeze/cough/pulls away when stimulated. So yes, I’m in the midst of getting over this unpleasant reflex. But that’s all it is, a reflex. A short-lived reaction, with the promise of unbounded possibilities.

And I didn’t even need to be spanked!

Nascent. Embryonic. Nebulous. These words describe the state of this blog and, not incoincidentally, the state of my search for new employment.

I was at my previous job for 16 years. It was in a niche field and at a place I was uniquely qualified for; I never seriously enough considered the idea of doing something else. Unfortunately, conditions had over many years inexorably deteriorated both in the nature of the work and with a very small number (2) of dysfunctional but crucially placed ‘colleagues.’ Much as one doesn’t realize, due to day-to-day interaction, how far one’s increasingly dilapidated auto is from the bare minima of drivability or how much one’s child has grown in size and spirit, I failed to see the extent of my discomfort and despondency, how I dreaded each new day. And so, with exquisite timing, I admitted to the absolute untenableness of the situation and found, perhaps surprisingly not regrettably, that I had no other choice but to resign. Yes, in the middle of the worst financial crisis in 70 years. Does that not speak to the enormity of it all?

Today my jobsearch agenda includes the following tasks:

• investigate what is entailed in filing for unemployment benefits.
• outline my résumé
• begin scanning on-line classifieds to get a sense of
  • what’s available locally
  • what’s available for immediate, short-term (from my point of view) employment
  • what long-term/career paths are appropriate for me, my strengths, and my skills.

As of today, I have officially joined the vast, teeming ranks of the Unemployed. This blog is to be a journal of and a means of maintaining my endeavors to once again become a functioning and contributing member of workplace society.

Wish me luck.