Meanwhile, Back at My Life

Yes, I admit it. These days I'm having trouble motivating myself to do anything productive beyond shopping, dishes and laundry, unless you count the daily visits to the dog park.

I have buttons to make for the Democratic Party office and for a collector, and button designs to do for the Inauguration. I haven't done any work on any of that.

I should be sorting through boxes, and getting the old Chrysler New Yorker hauled away, and working on the novels. There are so many things I theoretically have time for. Instead I watch Countdown with Keith Olberman, The Rachel Maddow Show and Doctor Who, my email and my Twitter feed. It's no longer a question of trying to keep up with election news. It's an attempt to distract myself from my personal situation.

My biopsy is scheduled for December 10th. The office visit and procedure will cost $163. The lab cost will be $140 "per specimen." My doctor's assistant says there should be only one specimen.

It will go on a credit card.

Even when I had health insurance, it once took me the better part of a year to pay off one stress test at Tucson Medical Center that fell under the threshold of my deductible. This new procedure costs considerably less than that. If it rules out cancer it will be well worth it.

And no, I never heard back on the latest job opening my main recruiter called about last week. There were supposedly four staff accountant positions available on a temp-to-hire basis. What, did they decide I wasn't worth an interview for any of them? There was something hinky about the industry they were in. My recruiter kept hinting about a regulatory reason why the pay scale changed for the worse between his first phone call to me and his second. The only thing he would confirm is that it's not the health industry, which seems to be behind most of the listings I see these days. The health industry jobs all want health industry experience. What other industry is highly regulated? Airline? Banking?

Maybe the four openings disappeared like vaporware as the company got caught up in the economic downturn. I used to see listings all the time that Citicorp was hiring, for about the same money I was making at Worldwide Travel in the early 1990s. But on Monday the news was that Citicorp was laying off 53,000 people (or 52,000; reports vary). John just received a notice that American Express, which just received government help in the form of deregulation, was raising John's interest rate. We haven't owed a penny to American Express in three years. So yeah, if that regulated industry K. was hinting about was banking, the jobs may not be filled at all.

And I'm getting fewer and fewer search results emails from CareerBuilder and other job sites. The ones I do get often have only one to three listings for jobs I'm underqualified or overqualified for - and they're all in Phoenix or Tempe, a hundred miles away. Latest local news here is that unemployment numbers are expected to be up in the imminent statistics for October, and fewer winter visitors are expected here to keep the local tourist and other industries afloat.

Troubling times. Is it any wonder I'm distracted?

Karen