The frustrations of divination

I told you all about the possible job that I've been discussing with a recruiter from my former employer (affectionately nicknamed BehemothCo for the purposes of this blog). At this point, I have spoken to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and (just this afternoon) to the two most senior employees in the department.

I have also—this should be no surprise—been consulting divination. The problem is that the message I get from divination is consistently different from the message that I get from my regular human interactions. But of course divination doesn't speak English, and there's always the possibility that it's not true. But I remember enough times in the past that it has described reality that I am reluctant to dismiss it. This means that I am stuck.

What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

A new job?

About a week ago, a recruiter contacted me out of the blue. Normally I ignore recruiters, because I think of myself as retired. But this one had a very unusual story.

• In the first place, she works for the same global Behemoth corporation that I used to work for up until our office closed in 2021. 
• In the second, place, she wasn't calling because "my background matched her needs" blah, blah, blah. She was trying to contact me personally, Hosea Tanatu, by name.
• In the third place, she represents a location which was just recently acquired by BehemothCo, and which is in the process of being integrated. This definitely sounded interesting. I have been through two corporate acquisitions in my career to date, and I'm starting to think that navigating that unusual terrain is something I'm good at.

So I took her phone call last week. Then she set up an interview with the hiring manager: that happened yesterday. Where do things stand now?

I'm still kind of interested. It involves work that is similar to what I used to do, but not quite the same. So I'd have to learn something new. It involves setting up a whole new program, which in turn means I'd have to navigate the BehemothCo bureaucracy to get things done. But I got good at that, back in the day. 

It also means I'd have to move. The new plant is something like three or four hundred miles from Beautiful City, and the job is necessarily on-site. Now of course I moved when Wife and I separated and we sold our house. But that was just, … like, … across town. (Well, strictly it was from the suburbs into town. In any event it wasn't far.) I have lived in the general area of Beautiful City since Wife and I moved here in 1990. That's thirty-four years, for the arithmetically-challenged. More than half my life. I own a lot less stuff than the two of us owned when we were moving out of our house, so it shouldn't be a big deal. But emotionally it's a big deal, because Beautiful City has become home to me in a deep way.

Also this move would put me farther away from Mother. I spoke with Brother last night and he thinks she is pretty stable. So from his perspective the main consequence of my moving farther away would be that it would be "sad" I wasn't around more. But I want to discuss it with her directly, as well.

Oh, … I asked the hiring manager where she had gotten my name? Turns out she was meeting a lot of people in BehemothCo who work in her area, and one of them was the guy I called "Bill" in this post here. He and I were never collocated; but over the years we worked together a fair bit. And apparently he told her, "This is a long shot, because I don't know if he's even working any more; but the guy you really want to hire is Hosea Tanatu, and here's how to find him …." So that was flattering.

The flattery is probably another reason that I'm interested.

Anyway, I don't know what the hiring manager is thinking right now, and I don't know for sure that I'll take it if offered. But I'm mulling it.  

               

Alone

There is no one I can discuss this election with.

I'm not sure when I first realized this. But my friends—I mean Marie, Schmidt, and Debbie (I don't have a lot of friends)—and my family are all 100% wrapped up in the Dominant Narrative: Joe Biden may be old but he is the Savior of Democracy, Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, and Robert Kennedy is a nutcase. 

Me, by contrast? A couple years ago I started following Bari Weiss and Scott Adams on Twitter because I thought they sounded intelligent. But you know how it is with gateway drugs. Pretty soon I had added Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Abigail Shrier, and Robert Kennedy. Sure, I tried to soften the impact by also following John Cleese, Bill Maher, and James Surowiecki, but it was never enough. It was only a matter of time before I was following CatGirl Kulak, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dave Portnoy, and the University of Austin. You know—the hard stuff.

This doesn't even mean that I have been completely red-pilled. Mostly it means that I have come to know—like Socrates—how little I really know about what is going on in the world. When I read accounts from the Right about What Really Happened on January 6, 2021, or about the cartons of documents in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, I realize that the political parties in this country are divided not by values but by basic facts. One side will assert that this-and-that happened, and it was bad. You would expect the other side to argue that it was good, but No! In fact, the other side agrees that IF this-and-that HAD happened, it would have been bad; but in fact what happened was something else totally different!

Not a normal election

This afternoon, Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and someone took a shot at him. The shot apparently nicked his ear, which means it narrowly avoided doing much worse damage. Trump stood up again to gesture to the crowd before the Secret Service dragged him to safety.

People are saying, "That's it—he's won the election." Maybe, but the election is nearly four months from now. That's a long time in politics.

Other people—mostly Trump's political opponents—are saying loudly that "Political violence has no place in America." Clearly these are people who don't understand America very well. I've discussed this point before: for example, here and here, and to a lesser extent here and even here. Sorry, but in some ways we are all about political violence, even as we repeat the motto that "Ballots are better than bullets."

Blast from the past: Gossip

This evening in Sangha we talked about gossip and I suddenly remembered a habit from early in my marriage with Wife.

It didn't start out that way. But for our Dharma study, we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. Then as we began to discuss them, someone (maybe I can call her Annie, in case she needs a name) commented that she had a problem with the Ninth Training.* Specifically, it's not that she thinks there is anything wrong with the behavior that it recommends—"We will … [refrain] from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence …. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure"—but that she has a lot of trouble living up to it. Fundamentally, she enjoys gossip! She added that she doesn't really know why she likes it so much, but there it is. It's just a fact of life that she has to deal with.

Of course I had (and have) no idea why in particular she enjoys gossip, and I didn't pretend otherwise. But the whole conversation put me in mind of the early years of my marriage to Wife. So when it came around to my turn, here's the story I told the Sangha.

What was Flora like, anyway?

This is not a picture of Flora! This is a royalty-free
picture of a dark-haired woman from the Internet.

While I was writing the previous post, I scrolled back through my old emails looking for a couple of data points. In the process, I stumbled across an email from Marie back in 2020 that included the following description:

It suddenly occurred to me … that there are in fact certain obvious points of similarity between my mom and the woman who occupied most of my erotic imagination for years, long ago.

(Put differently, between the two very different women who occupied most of my erotic imagination during my youth.)  

Beautiful, check.  To men, check.  Dark-haired and a bit exotic-looking, check.  A bit of the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" glamour, check.  Brighter than most of her contemporaries, check.  Unwilling to settle for provincial dullness...

Ulp.  Hosea, love, this is sort of unsettling.

So maybe this helps you picture her.

I also found that way back when Marie briefly re-contacted Flora—when Flora's reply confirmed that she had a new boyfriend (now that her husband had died) but hinted tactfully (at least to my ears) that they weren't monogamous yet—I did indeed call that implication to Marie's attention. Marie, for her part, thought that I was overthinking things.

               

Flora and Marie

I talked with Marie this morning, and we discussed Flora a little bit. I told her that I had looked online for an obituary, but all I found was a date of death. (Last December.) Marie said, "There was a time when I would have known when it happened, but that was years ago."

"Do you mean you would have known without reading anything or being told in any way?" (Compare, e.g., this post.)

"Yes."

"When I was searching, I did find an obituary for her husband a few years ago. [He was a good bit older than Flora.] It said he left three children. Were they hers, or was she a second wife?"

"She was a second wife. Actually she wanted children of her own, but I think they were adults by the time she married their father so she never got a chance to raise them as children."

"And her husband didn't want any more at that point?"

"Or they decided not to have any, yes."

So I guess I can add Flora to the sad list from this post here: marrying a significantly older spouse, and no children. But wait!—as the ads say—there's more!

Another classmate died

I got the latest issue today of my college alumni magazine. Another classmate is dead.

That makes five, now, that I know of: not all the same year, but close enough. Many of us hung out together, at least from time to time.

Today's news is about a woman I've mentioned a few times before. When I first wrote about her I called her "L" (not to be confused with the sex-blogger formerly known as L!), but at this point I think I have gone back and changed all those references to call her "Flora" instead. So "Flora" it is. And I've written about her in a number of posts: for example, she shows up in some of Marie's recollections (here, here, here, and here) and also in one of mine (much tamer, here). 

Flora was a science major, back when we were all undergraduates. Somehow (maybe because we were all young) many of the stories I remember about her have to do with sex. 

• When I got to know her (through R–, one of my circle of friends), she had already had an affair with one of the science professors. 
• During the time we were in school, she settled into regularly fucking both R– and Mac (q.v.)—though to be fair, I learned not long before graduation that R– and Mac were both fucking each other as well. (Yes, they are both guys. It's amazing the things people will say casually when everyone's on MDA.) 
• She wanted to fuck Schmidt, who really wasn't interested. He had determined that "Everyone who fucks Flora goes crazy," and he didn't want to go crazy. He later said that at one point he had to make a point to fall asleep at a strategic moment, while she was trying to seduce him.
• Marie remained friends with Flora after that time, and fell in love with her for a while. Marie tried to go to bed with Flora, but it never worked out—as she describes (with some anxiety) in the selections linked above. 

Not long after Marie and I got back together, she [Marie] contacted Flora to ask her some questions about relationship-management, and to catch up. It turns out that in the intervening decades, Flora had married and her husband had later died. At that point she was seeing someone new. The way she described it to Marie was delicate, but to my ears it translated as "We are fucking but we're not monogamous yet—or at least I'm not." (I don't remember if I ever discussed this with Marie.) I never heard Marie mention her again. I thought of getting in touch with her independently, but it felt like Marie discouraged that.

Anyway, now she's dead.