Closing up shop, part 3

 In earlier posts here and here, I explained that my office is closing at the end of next March, and my job is moving to Sticksville (with or without me).

Today I accepted the offer to go with it. Next spring I pack up my apartment and leave Beautiful City for Sticksville. I'm not exactly excited about it.

To be fair, I did look around -- both inside my company and locally through Google and LinkedIn -- for alternatives. And I did apply for a job with my company in International City; maybe not Timbuktu, but close enough. I didn't get it. In fact, I didn't even make it as far as the first interview. (To salvage my pride, I tell myself that they figured in an age of COVID-19 it would be too hard to relocate an American internationally as an expat. Sure, that must have been it.)

This afternoon I decided to characterize it to myself by saying that my fear of being unemployed turned out to be bigger than my fear of the terrible, man-eating weather. But another way to look at it is that I just accepted the easiest and most inevitable outcome.

I do this. When something becomes inevitable, or seemingly so, I simply accept it. The clearest example is my marriage to Wife. (And see how that turned out!) First we were just sleeping together, then I moved into her apartment, then we applied to graduate school together, and when we learned that the only way we could share an apartment in (university-owned, rent-subsidized) graduate student housing was to be married, we decided to marry. Even as I began to get one sign after another that this was the wrong thing to do, I went ahead and did it.

Of course one reason (out of many) that I went ahead with the marriage was that I was reacting to a time a year before when I had applied to a different graduate school (in a totally different field), ... gotten accepted, ... moved there and moved into the dorms, ... and then dropped out before classes started. It was a strange time; I was frightened and very confused. But the experience left me afraid that I couldn't commit to something, that at the last minute I would bolt. So at the next big decision (marriage) I resolved not to.

Coming back to my job situation today, I think probably the best advice I've gotten from anyone was from Schmidt, back when I first learned about the shutdown. He told me, "Some time ago, I saw a funny tattoo (in of all things a candy bar ad) that read "No regerts!" [sic] I think that really sums it up. You make a decision and then you make it the right one. That's life."

As I say, good advice. Anyway, I'll be moving in a few months. It won't matter to the blog, of course, which will stay right here.

This will put me a lot closer to Debbie: I'll be able to drive there to visit on a weekend. But I'm going to miss Beautiful City.