Category: Moving

  • DMV And Mass Weed

    So, if it has DMV in the title, I bet you can see a cliché story coming about waiting in line for hours.

    And you would be partially correct.

    I now live in California, and I needed to go and get myself a California drivers license. To speed up the process, California allows you to fill out forms online, and have them waiting for you at the DMV. They also let you sign up for an appointment, this way you don’t have to spend hours waiting in line. I took advantage of this and filled out the form and requested an appointment. The earliest I could get into my local DMV was January 24th, at 10am. I love the irony of how they created a system to cut down on the waiting time, which has a two and a half month waiting time.

    I went to the DMV this morning and waited two and a half hours just to be seen by someone. It turned out well, I have acquired a California drivers license, am registered to vote, and am an organ donor.

    While I was waiting for two and half hours, I scanned the news and tried to catch up on my reading. A story that caught my eye was about how Massachusetts legalized the sale of weed today. They are now the first east coast state to legalize, which is cool, and I think also shows that it is only a matter of time before it is legal everywhere.

    The aspect that I found interesting was the timing of all of this. Massachusetts allowed sales to start two days before Thanksgiving; a holiday that revolves around food and family. I mean, being high does make you wanna eat, and most people I know need to be high to deal with their families.

  • Job Hunting

    I have now been in California for two and a half weeks now, and the job-hunting fear has set in. I have been sending out resumes and applications, and I haven’t got one interview yet. The first week was no big deal, the second week was a little annoying. Now, that we are on week three, and it is a short week with Thanksgiving, which means my search will continue into a fourth week. The fear is setting in. It is possible now that I will go a month with nothing.

    That’s a problem.

    As we planned this move to California, me finding a job wasn’t that big of a concern. I had worked my way up in arts management, and from that, I thought I had many marketable skills.

    I am beginning to have second thoughts about that.

    Also, it has been almost 15 years since I was last out of a job, and the instability and insecurity that this situation creates has caused more than a few self-doubts. There are a few anxiety triggers that are firing up now which also makes me spiral/fall into thinking that everything will blow up in my face. That I won’t be able to provide…

    And then I have to remind myself that I need to relax.

    Take a breath.

    I’m not at the panic point yet, though I can see it on the horizon.

  • Adjusting

    Today was my first day of a little depression. With the huge Camp Fire burning to the north of us, we have been covered in smoke, so we can’t go outside as the air is unbreathable. The wife goes to work, the kid goes to school, and I am at home looking for a job, and trying to write.

    It was fun for the first few days.

    Today, clearly, I hit a wall.

    I felt unmotivated, and couldn’t get going on anything. I mean, I got groceries for the family, but then I couldn’t do anything else.

    I watched the news, and just spent the day thinking about everything that could be happening to me in New York. Social media doesn’t help, because I can see what all of my friends are doing in NYC. And that kicks in the “fear of missing out.”

    But they are in there, and I am here, and 3,000 miles separates us.

    Another part of this is that I was talking to an old college friend last night, and he was asking me about how I was doing, and why I moved to California. It wasn’t in an accusatory way, more along the lines of “help me understand your decision so I can support you.”

    Why did I move?

    Well… I wanted a better life for my kid. I wanted to go on an adventure and try something new. I wanted to focus on writing. But as I was talking to my friend, I found myself saying something that I hadn’t expressed before, which was I was becoming the type of person who couldn’t celebrate other’s successes without trying to pull them down. The theatre world isn’t very nice, and I was beginning to take part in the bitter middle-aged actor stereotype. And to be that person made me a crappy father and a shitty husband. Maybe that was New York’s fault, but it was really my fault.

    I needed to change things.

    I needed to reinvent myself.

    Today was a day that I started to doubt that decision.

    Not that I am changing my mind.

  • Traveling Observations

    It took us seven days to drive from New York to California. We pretty much stayed on the interstates, except for a pace in Texas and Arizona. Most of the travel writing I have read has always attested to the glory of seeing America on the two-lane highways.

    I guess that could be true.

    I did spend a time in my early twenties travelling the back roads of East Texas, to visit friends at the small universities they were attending. I would call that quaint travelling, and small towns are nice, but some of them were happy to see you leave.

    Being on the big interstates of the country, you do get to see how these highways were cut into the land. In a few cases, mountains that were cut in two, and valleys that were filled in. It was like looking at the result that civil engineering can have on the land.

    The other observation that I made was the number of abandoned barns there are in the country. From western New Jersey to the Big Valley in California; there was always a rain and sun grayed wooden barn that wasn’t too far from the side of the highway that had its roof coming in, or barn doors off. I guess these barns were the last monument of the family farm, or that’s what I liked to tell myself.

  • Where Did the Day Go

    I do get distracted a little too easily. I have been working on writing today, I think out of six hours, I have only written for about one of those.

    One hour was for lunch.

    I did read a review on a book of Sylvia Plath’s letters, that took an hour.

    So… I can account for three hours.

    That would mean I have procrastinated for three hours.

    I can admit that I got sucked down a rabbit hole of looking up stuff on the Dragonlance and D&D stuff earlier. But in my defense, I hadn’t thought about all of that for a very longtime. In junior high and early high school, I read all of those novels and was really into all of it.

    I have been reading the news all day about awful stuff that I know everyone is aware of.

    Since moving to California, I have been looking for a job, and it hasn’t gone the way I thought it would, as I still don’t have one. My thought was that I would be splitting my days job hunting and writing. The writing past hasn’t taken off as fast as I thought it would.

    What I want to believe is that I need time to relax after the month I have had, but that makes me feel guilty. Two people are depending on me to find a job, and that is what has taken over my thinking. “MUST FIND A JOB!”