This unemployment is a vicious cycle. When I was in my first month, and it was December 2002, I figured that month would be a given that nothing new would open up. I mean, it’s Christmas. Nothing new starts until the first of the year. So I sent out the resumes, joined Monster.com and Career builder, and wrote emails to people and hit my weblog hard (when I wasn’t too bummed to blog; the “blogless funks” came fierce and often). I had a couple of interesting and encouraging bites. Then….

Then Janet had her breast biopsy, and so that couple of weeks from the time they had her do her second mammogram (mid-December) , and then from Dec. 18-20, when we awaited her biopsy, we were both a wreck. When we found out about an hour afterwards that the preliminary “frozen sample” was negative, we were feeling almost elated compared to the previous two or three days. That next Monday, on the 23rd of December, we found out the results were negative, and we had reason to celebrate life at Christmas, even though I was still facing unemployment.

The next month, the couple of bites I had that were promising faded. I had no interviews the month of January. I was still confident that I and the family would be better served by my spending fulltime hunting a “worthy” job. I continued sending resumes to answer newspaper ads and job board postings. I put up some items for sale on my website. I had an almost immediate bite and sale on my Original Interpreter’s Bible Set. Another inquiry about the Dictionaries, but the email was mistyped, and I couldn’t seem to estimate correctly what was meant. NO other inquiries came. As February rolled around, I had a couple calls for interviews. One “head hunter” person made suggestions about my resume, and had me send him a revised version for a client he had in mind to show my resume. I never heard from him again. The other call was an interview setup, and I drove about an hour to this place north of Nashville, almost into Kentucky at Portland, TN. I never heard back from them either.

The day after I got back from that interview, and really really down, I got an email from a friend in St. Louis saying his company was going to hire a Webmaster, and asked if I ws interested. The next two to three weeks, excited about the prospects of moving to St.Louis, and working in a high-energy, “cutting-edge” atmosphere, I was much less diligent with my job-hunting activities, but was often exploring in my head the thoughts of Church Web Development, talked with my friend at Sopjourners about their plans for the near future, and paid a visit to my old Youth Minister about 3 hours away in Mayfield (on the 13th of February). I went back and spent the night at his house the night before (the 24th) on my way to the interview at St. Louis on the 25th of February.

When I returned, I had to check into getting another prostate biospy set up at the reccommendation of my new Urologist (whom I went to see when I got us on TennCare health insurance). I had the procedure scheduled, but the doctor’s offcie called and told me that I wasn’t in the TennCare system. There followed almost a week of making calls to straighten all that out, and ended up getting the procedure re-scheduled to March 10th. It was done, and when I got home afterwards, still stinging from the needle sticks in that vicinity, I got a letter from the St. Louis possibility, informing me that someone else got the job.

The next day, I was back on the interview circuit, talking to a guy about a website for a syndicated talk radio show. They were built mostly on Cold Fusion. I didn’t get that job, either. The next day, I vistied a cardiologist to check my heart, to make sure nothing was amiss (I had gone ot the doctor the week before the St. Louis trip, concerned about the frequebt tightness below my heart region, worsening back problems — which had me worried about Prostate cancer– which was about to be checked for again— and got prescribed Paxil for my “depression”). Also that day, I was hoping to get the results of the biopsy from 2 days before. I did, and it was negative, AGAIN. Whew! Relief.

Every year since 1997 (and once in 1993) I had attended the SEC Men’s Basketabll tourney with my dad and two brothers. We had our reservations and plane tickets for 2003 back in October or so (before my loss of job). I had talked with Dad about whether I should still go, and he told me to do what I needed to do, and not worry about it, either way. With the cancer worries out of the way again, and the job that didn’t materialize for me, and all the stress of the past two months, I figured the mini-vacation would do me good. My back problems practically disappeared (and haven’t returned) from the first night, and the tightness subsided significantly (only to re-appear, though not quite as bad as before, just recently).

When I returned, I got in touch with a Church member who had a Art Framing Business, and had asked how much I would charge to help her build a website? So I investigated some technology framework issues like shopping carts and picture framing bots. I spent that week after the tourney (March 17-21) looking through articles and books at the bookstores on what I might use to build these components, and began to think about Church site building again as a compliment to this “e-commerce” free-lance work. It turned out that there wasn’t enough money to really get started soon, and so I was deflated again.

I returned the books I had picked up that were going to be a resource to use during the “free-lancing”, and I looked at the “Cold Fusion” book on the shelves as I looked longingly at all the Web technologies being written about in books. I had also received the “thanks for talking with us” email from the talk-radio show’s Web supervisor, stating that they really needed someonme with Cold Fusion experience. Last time I looked, they’re still running that ad for a web developer. I could have learned Cold Fusion by now. I have Cold Fusion Server installed on my PC, and the scripting is SO similar to ASP VBScript. I bought the $60 book “Cold Fusion MX Development Kit” that day when I was dejectedly returning books I thought/hoped I’d be using to do some work that would earn some money. That was March 25th.

The next encouragement came when I met with a person from Atlanta about doing some work for them on some ways to do e-zines. I began looking at some DotNet based “Portal” frameworks such as the “Community Starter Kit” at ASP.net, and “IBuySpy” , both Microsoft “Open Source” projects. Someone also suggested “DotNetNuke”, which was an extension or Build-out from IBuySpy. I went and “borrowed” some more books from the bookstores (the previous batches were when I was “cramming” for my Webmaster possibility in St.Louis, to do a quick review of Webmaster -stuff like Site Usage Tools, Flash uses, and “Usability” studies, as well as documentation tools. Also , there were the books on e-commerce when I was preparing a set of possibilities and costs for the Art Framing business.) This time, it was a book on settting up a portal with IBuySpy ( I was thrilled to find a whole book on the topic) and a book on SQLServer 2000. I signed up with a Webhosting outfit that offered ASP.Net support and SQL Server as well as MySQL and Perl (which would enable me to finally set up an installation of Movable Type.

I was able to get all three sample portal frameworks set up, but it seems the guy I was talking to about setting a system up for his group has become otherwise preoccupied, and so another avenue to some visibility along with perhpas some small amounts of income have become sidetracked, and for all practical purposes, a no-go for now.

So the “Cycle” continues, in which I seem close to “throwing in the towel” and signing myself up for some kind of work where I will be most often fairly miserable and very much un-attached and “out of body”. Then another “hop” comes along, and a stage a full-scale retreat (all too gladly), and pour myself into pursuing what could be “a way to stay afloat, at least for a while). Several times now, as I describe above, I have stretched out this period from January all the way through the middle of May. I look back over the past what will be 6 months next Wednesday, May 21st, and think to myself that I could have been doing some VERY helpful training on things like Cold Fusion (it’s now been 3 months since I talked to the TalkRadio show Web guy and was told they needed someone with Cold Fusion experience. I could have built several “sample” applications by now. I could have learned some PHP, some MySQL, some more .Net stuff, Flash, COULD COULD COULD. How was I to know when something would finally break for me?

So I tell myself, something’s GOT to be happening with al these resumes I’ve sent out; something’s go to come up soon. I’ve held out for the “appropriate” job, which has been disturbingly not forthcoming. I’ve sent numerous resumes to various companies or “career boards” , and have been called in by Robert Half Technologies to put me in their “pool” of avaliable talent. The last I heard, the fellow I spoke with who seemed confident that he’d find me some work to do soon, was still getting all my references info.

I heard frm an old seminary acquaintance a couple of weeks ago, who is working with a coalition in another state, and that group needs a logo for their Website, so I said I’d do it, which promised about $500, and I figured that would take a week or less (at my slow “graphics-generating” pace. I thought then (two weeks ago) that I’d be getting done with that by the 15th (which is tomorrow), but I’m still awaiting a set of requirements for it (like, what is it you want to the logo to be, or what kind of a logo?). In the meantime, I’ve been “brushing up” on my Fireworks MX skills and learning some heretofore unused features that I can employ to help me produce some good looking stuff.

I’m afraid; VERY afraid, of “signing up” in a worthless job that takes up enormous amounts of time, keeping me from finding the energy to “pull myself out” and find the right job fit. I know people are hurting for jobs, and I can’t be picky. Then others tell me that you can find your dream job, and part of me believes it, but part of me is ashamed. I could have made $10,000 by now, doing something like online phone support for Dell. But then, what “feeers” that I have put out there would NOT be circulating now as a result? I have spent so much time searching, applying, emailing, blogging, trying to land a “new place” for me and for us.

Every “light” , be it but a flicker, gets my juices going and I see possibilities for starting something that can help us “get there”; to make enough at doing something that will also help “build skills” toward something bigger, or create enough “prescence” and visibility for some of my “Church-Webs Vision” to begin to “make a living” at it. But so far, it seems each of these flashes of hope have turned out relatively fruitless.