Blue Fog

Feeling blah for the last couple days. Nothing particular - I am feeling a little run down vis-a-vis sickness, but not the sort of thing that would make my soul feel blue.

I would define it as a sort of chilling malaise, a sort of fog that seems to spread out and attack everything one does - a sort of deadening that makes any sort of activity seem boring and useless.

I had a pleasant lunch with Songbird and The Elder today. It was good to see their faces again - although the stress of their work is showing on both of them. It's odd that with the future in flux, I had never had any hope of re-enlisting there, but the reality of that sank in today as we talked.

I did have an interview on Monday with a real live hiring manager. The good news is that it sounds like it will lead to an interview; the less good news is that it will take two weeks to happen - and so one spends two weeks hoping positions don't get canceled and company priorities don't change.

Some of the malaise comes, I think, from the very act of job hunting. One goes to websites daily, some weekly. At this point, I occasionally find something, but nothing like the 5 CVs a day I was hoping to send out. You send out what you send out, and then....you do the same thing again tomorrow. Unfortunately, due to the very power of the internet, which allows you to do all this searching and CV delivering, you also have virtually no ability to follow up: you send it, it goes into a hole, and possibly you may hear something. Maybe. If you're lucky.

And maybe that's part of it - the sense that beyond a very narrow range, I can't really impact my job search at all. I am in so many ways dependent on so many things beyond my control.

But in point of fact, how is that different from my life anyway? I did everything right at my job, and I lost it because of factors I cannot influence. Friends and colleagues throughout the industry face layoffs or job changes through items not in their control.

Perhaps one of the benefits of this experience is to see, very clearly, exactly how little we are in control of everything - and how much God is.