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how not to feel like William H. Macy
Monday, April 4 2016
Another three or four inches of snow fell today, continuing the seasonably-inappropriate winter wonderland vista outdoors. I took the three dogs on a walk down the Gullies Trail, across the Valley of the Beasts, and then around the flat plateau at the north end (41.925083N, 74.099557W) of the Canary Overlook ridge, a place I could call the Ghostly Dog Plateau after a quasi-supernatural vision I had there once. Neville was showing an impressive ability to keep up with the walk, though his propensity to follow Ramona was cause for concern. She moves quickly, and if Neville bounds down a slope after her and then can't follow her back up, there's a chance he'll get lost. So, when I didn't see either dog for a couple minutes, I started hollering for them as I walked out to the edge of the Ghostly Dog Plateau, looking out over the expanse of forested lowlands to the north and seeing nothing. Ramona suddenly appeared from behind me, almost knocking me down, and happily Neville wasn't far behind. Later, when we were within a third of a mile of home, I gathered a modest 54.3 pounds of firewood with my small chainsaw and backpack. The return of winter had depleted my in-house firewood supply.
Back at the house, I was in a holding pattern for much of the day, not having much in the way of work as I fretted about the two job applications I had in the pipeline. One of the good things about watching Fargo is that it makes one feel better about the little incompetencies and failures in one's own life as one sees them reinforce one another in a positive feedback loop in the lives of Fargo's characters. Perhaps my inability to perform as a web developer in a job interview isn't as bad if I'm also not having to field phone calls from GMAC about cars I've fraudulently created out of thin air. I love how William H. Macy plays a guy who is in over his head, and today I was rewatching another movie in which he starred: the Cooler, though it's nowhere near as good as Fargo. (And what's with that unsexy unitard underwear his soon-to-be-girlfriend is wearing in their first sex scene?).
I also watched some teevee from the DVR, particularly the final half hour of a Frontline special about the new heroin epidemic and another Frontline taking us inside Saudi Arabia (yup, there's a public beheading). By this point I'd drunk a fair amount of alcohol and had also begun smoking pot.
A little after 8:00pm, the head of HR of the animal rights organization left a cheerful message on my machine, which I immediately understood to mean that I was being offered the job. So I drank a couple cups of tea to sober up before returning the call. Sure enough, the job was mine if I wanted it, complete with health benefits and a five figure salary closer to six figures than to zero. That's a completely respectable salary for a 48 year old man, particularly a college dropout. (Gretchen, by contrast, has a master's degree but has never had such a high salary in her life.) Whatever in me had been feeling like William H. Macy before was no longer feeling that way now.
Later I had a late-night internet-facilitated scrum with my colleagues at the theater chain website we work on. (This was mostly to address a successful hack into our website using a still-unknown avenue of attack; the hack had been caught by a script I'd written.) Normally we use Skype with the video turned off, but this time we tried bluejeans.com, which did feature video. This was the first time I'd ever seen one of my colleagues, and it turned out he's an African American (which I sort of knew, but only vaguely). Indeed, it turns out that I'm the only Caucasian non-Jew on the four-person team. The job offer I'd received earlier had me feeling confident and punchy, and when the two other developers started hitting their vaporizers (which could have plausibly contained tobacco), I brought out my little homemade brass redneck pipe and started smoking pot (there was nothing else it could have been). At that point the one non-smoking project manager on the team felt compelled to drink directly from a bottle of tequila that happened to be within arm's reach. Peer pressure was making people do stuff they didn't necessarily want to do.
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