So how did my interview go? You never expect the Spanish Inquisition!

Okay, not quite like that. It went okay. It's so hard to gauge; I mean, these guys give interviews all day, right? So how am I supposed to know what they think?

I left here pretty late that day - I didn't think I'd make it, to be perfectly honest. It was easy to find, at least - it's in the Coastal Banc building on Westheimer and Bering. What isn't so easy to find is the entrance to the parking garage - by the time you realize it's there, you've passed it.

No biggie, I figured, I can just make the block and come back to it.

Of course, I wasn't thrilled to find out that Bering is lined on both sides with endless apartment complexes, condo developments and townhouse communities. It had to be a mile and a half to the next street if it was five feet.

Once I got back around, got into the parking garage and found a space I didn't think I would make it on time, but fortunately, I stepped into their office doors at 3:00 PM. I have a talent for being just on time.

I signed in and stood in the closet-sized lobby. I try to not sit, because invariably lobbies have seats who are bottomed-out and you have to struggle to pull yourself out of the gravity well like a beached sea lion. No thanks.

It wasn't three or four minutes until the recruiter I was here to see came out to greet me. He didn't shake my hand because it was wrapped in some sort of gauze. It smelled funny, too, like some sort of ointment, so I was just as happy not becoming a carrier for whatever he was trying his best to kill.

The surprise in this interview (I firmly believe that every interview comes with a surprise, and not always a pleasant one) was that I was being double-teamed. One of the account execs for the firm decided he was going to sit in, too. Heavy sigh.

We stepped into a side office and sat down, and the inquisition began. They began asking me questions, and not ones that put me in my best light. I felt pigeonholed into this one position, and I guess part of that is my fault for not taking the reins and moving the interview to a larger stage than this one position. They got a feel that I would really like to do web development, at least. It's just one place, anyway.

So... I don't know if I should be expecting a whole lot from this or not, but I might pick up some work for a while, who knows. At least they did ask me to touch up my resum� so that they could market it to their client more effectively, which sounds good, even if I don't feel so positive about this place.

Overall, though, I'm feeling pretty low with respect to the whole job search thing. I keep having those internal recriminations of who'd want to hire you, anyway? and you don't know what you're doing with this stuff, anyhow, even though people tell me otherwise.

I just feel like nobody wants to give me a foot in the door - all I need is a foot in the door. Nobody's ever hired me anywhere and said it was a bad decision. But... things just seem so hopeless.

I don't know why I'm feeling so particularly helpless right now, though. I had the interview Thursday, and I made another one for Friday (but had to reschedule to Monday because of allergies). I have sent out more resum�s. I even called about a couple interim gigs, and if I don't get something by Wednesday I'm going to hit temp agencies. I'm going to get some income Real Soon Now�, one way or another, and things are generally okay.

One thing I've noticed? Generally, on sites like computerjobs.com there are probably at least five web-related jobs every day that I could do if I were just given the chance. My new theory is to pester people with resum�s on them until they interview and hire me, or get a restraining order.

I know what's bothering me, though - it's Moogie and this whole moving thing.

To tell the honest truth, I need the impetus to get out of here again. What I resent is the "I-don't-care-what-you-do-that's-your-problem" aspect of the whole thing.

Let's be serious - I just went to get some cash from the ATM this morning (gotta love 24-hour banking). My bank account is in the low (and I mean low) three-figures. If I can't spare $100 for a web hosting account, then you can imagine what the deal is there. And she expects me to pay first and last month's rent, getting utilities turned on and all that? Um, yeah.

What's worse is that she harps on me about it all the time. Take Easter Sunday. What'd I do all day? I played 1200 frags in Quake (it doesn't take as long as you think it would) for mental fortitude, scanned a whole binder full of pictures for Kirk's website (let's put it this way - when I was done I filled a CD-R with the scans) for nine hours or so, and looked around online for jobs to send resum�s to for about three hours. The rest was doing laundry, piddling around with this and that, allergy relief, etc. I was legitimately busy all day.

She acts like I wasn't doing anything but sitting on the computer doing nothing.

This is the problem in a nutshell. She has no conception of what I do, and never has (when I was a student, she would see me doing sketches on paper, considering some physics or mathematics problem set and playing with approaches, because that's truly how you learn physics or math. She thought I was just fucking off, and no matter what you'd tell or try to explain to her, she still thought that. She's never wrong (in her own mind)). Even if she did, or if I could explain it to her, I doubt that she'd accept it because she's got some mental block about me. She's just like Marta (boss where I last worked a regular job) - she thinks this stuff takes five minutes to do, and it's done. NOT.

Anyway - I can't play her little games anymore, and I think she's getting the idea that I'm not playing. This decision of hers to move is reminiscent of the time we moved after my parents got divorced.

See, Moogie got the house. This was good - I had friends. I knew the neighbors. I was one of the two kids picked from my elementary school to enter a special district program for GT students. Things were set up fairly nicely.

She started acting strangely, though. My father has always been a neat freak (I swear he's obsessive-compulsive), and I have never been a neat freak. (Okay, I'm a slob, I admit it.) Moogie began to become a bit of a neat freak, though, and trying to push it off on me. For years she complained about my father; now she complained about me. She began pointing out things I did as being "just like your father," with the proper amount of venom emphasized in father.

She was making a surrogate out of me.

Finally, one day she told me she was putting the house up for sale, because she just had to get out of this neighborhood. Yes, mid-summer, and she'd made the decision to rip us and our lives up by the roots and move.

Why? "The neighbors are spying on me," she told me. Uh... yeah. The neighbors have nothing better to do than spy on you. They report every move you make to my father. A-yup.

Of course, when we got to Pearland I was the odd one out in everything. It was too late to enroll me in any special programs, or even advanced classes. We lived out in the boonies, so I didn't even have much of anybody around to get to know.

This is just more of the same. And I can't play her game anymore. If she wants to make her life a mess, if she has a burning need to cause herself problems... more power to you. But you can't do it to me anymore. I am having a hard time holding myself together, I have so many things that could go wrong and wreck me right now, and you're just adding to it. But soon it'll be you on your little voyage of the damned, once I get off at this uncharted island, thanks.

It's not just Moogie, though - it's my whole family.

Thursday after my interview I was sitting here trying to hack my resum� together as they asked, and my phone rang.

Generally, nobody calls me on my personal phone because it's the one I connect to the 'net with. The only person who really calls me on it is Gurugrrl, so I pick it up.

"Mike!" Chills run down my spine. It's my father.

"Yes?" We don't have a good relationship. I don't even try to hide the fact that he bothers me anymore.

He starts to say something, but about three words into it I cut him off - I already know where he's going. My cousin from Ohio is in town for the week and he wants me to come down and see her. I look at my watch and realize that the clock is ticking on me getting this resum� in email to the recruiter.

"No, I can't, I'm busy."

"Okay, then we'll come down..." He doesn't get it. He thinks the whole fucking world revolves around him, and nothing you have to do is important. It's gotten older than I can tolerate anymore.

I cut him off again. "No, don't come down here. I'm not answering the door, okay?"

"Well, don't you want to see your cousin?"

Grrr. "Look. Nobody called me and told me that she was coming until she was already here. I can't go and drop everything I have to do just because she came into town. If you had let me known, I could have planned around it, but I can't now."

"She's leaving on Saturday."

"I can't help that. I have a life, too, you know?"

"Okay," he says in his fake-as-shit whipped-puppy voice, and hangs up.

This is the sort of thing I have to put up with from somebody every day. They get pissed off when I assert myself. I guess they better get used to it.

Is it possible to put your family out of your life? I mean, once I move, can I just write them off? No contact, don't call them back, don't buzz them through the gate if they come to visit? Is it that easy? Well, it never worked before.

But I am starting to think that what Gurugrrl says is right - if I could just get away from them, and they weren't in my life causing me stress and generally making sure that everything is fucked up, then maybe I'd get something accomplished. Maybe I wouldn't be so depressed because I wouldn't be so stressed out all the time. I'd have my privacy and freedom, and from that I'd get my creative side back.

But it's true, they don't understand me. We have different priorities and goals. I strive for the long-term goal, they only see to tomorrow. I want to take the longshot chance of making the world a better place, and they just want to try to make it through the day. I see the forest where they see the trees. How I grew up with an entirely independent mindset of my whole family is either a testament to my own good sense and intelligence, or to my absolute stubbornness. Even when I was small I looked at my family and knew it wasn't right, and swore to myself, "I'll never be like you people."

What makes me sick, in oh-so many ways, is that I have become aspects of them, and some of them are aspects I don't like. I complain and nag like my mother (I swear, she missed her chance of being Jewish). (Yes, I know, ironically enough, I'm complaining now.) Sometimes I tend to thoughtlessly monopolizing someone's time like my father. I tend to paranoia like my mother. I worry and obsess on things like my father.

It's enough to make anybody sick.

Wish me luck tomorrow on my interview. I'm sure I need it.

restlessmind