Wanna buy a kidney?

First off, my apologies to anyone out there who still might be checking in with me. I know I haven't had much to say for the last month. Looking for work is rough, and I'm not very pleasant company right now, so really I was doing you a favor.

I've been in Austin about four weeks now. I'm in an apartment, so Leander and I are not homeless, and I'm looking for work. Yes, that's right, I've been looking for four straight weeks. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "That's really not that long."

And you would be wrong about that.

It is, really, that long. When you think that you'll come in, sign up with a couple of temp agencies and be a phone-answerer-for-hire whilst you look for something permanent, and between the FIVE agencies you sign up with, you get two one-day assignments in four weeks, you realize that four weeks is, in fact, a very long time.

So basically, I'm being humbled, but I'm not yet humble. Translation: my moods are constantly fluctuating from ecstatic to be living in this wonderful town again to so despondent about never again working that I start surfing the net to see how much my kidneys are worth. Both kidneys.

In the hours that I'm not pounding the pavement for a cushy HR job, I've been rereading Anne Lammott's stuff. In one of her books (I think it might have been Operating Instructions) she talks about how during WWII, children in orphanages in Europe who had been abandoned or misplaced during all of the chaos would often have trouble sleeping. They'd been starving and lost, and now that they were some place warm, with food, they still couldn't sleep. So someone figured out a way to comfort them. They gave the children pieces of bread to hold onto while they slept. Not to eat, because they had plenty of food, but just tangible evidence that they were being cared for, fed and kept safe.

First of all, obviously, things could be so much worse. I can't find a job, but there are almost no Nazis in my neighborhood, and it's plenty warm in Texas in August. But I can identify with having trouble sleeping, anxiety and insecurity.

After reading this, the one permanent job that I have been able to find is working five hours a week on Saturday mornings baking bread at a local bakery. I knead dough, carry pans, man the counter. I love to bake, so this was a lovely opportunity in and of itself, but the divine appointment of this was not missed by yours truly. Anyway, it's fun, challenging, and most importantly, it's my tangible evidence that I'm being cared for, fed and kept safe.