the end is the beginning

I spent the end of last week in Wisconsin, visiting my best friend and her husband and their beautiful new(ish) baby. {Sigh} If money were no object, I’d really fly away to new places every weekend—or most, at least. I’d see Baby more than once before his first birthday. I’d go to Prague. I’d know just how horrible my old roommates’s job in NOLA has been.

In reality, I suppose, I have everything I need. My friend’s baby is stunningly, amazingly wonderful, and I got to spend two whole days getting to know him. All for the cost of gas for 600 miles round-trip (I love you, my affordable diesel VW Jetta—you, with your only-one-tank-needed road trips) ($40). And I paid for one lunch ($11) and two admissions to a park ($3). All in all, not such a bad deal: $54 to see people I love.

A fringe benefit of the trip, I found, was the wonderful distraction from job-searching. My friends live in the country-country, as in—you pass ten farms and three packs of cows before reaching their street. They have dial-up Internet, no cable, unreliable cell phone signals. I hate it and love it, if you know what I mean. There’s the initial withdrawal and nervous cell phone checking, the itch to know if any job offers have been missed. Then there’s the relief, the peace of letting go of a few responsibilities in favor of marvelously satisfying ones like sitting on the porch and watching Baby giggle.

All good things must end, and I’m back in Chicagoland now. I have two more interviews scheduled tomorrow, and I’m hopeful, hopeful, hopeful about a job I have yet to be called regarding. Someone at the company visited my online portfolio three times, so I’m telling myself it’s a good sign and trying very hard not to count my chickens.

Filed under job-hunting, the everyday |