cruel cruel fate

I have been periodically applying and interviewing for jobs for a few months. No offers. Until yesterday. I had applied for a patent examiner position at the Patent Office in Washington DC in November, knowing that they would take a while to get back to me. Earlier this month, they did, after I had forgotten about it. They scheduled a phone interview, which I thought I bombed, and offered me a position yesterday. A position with great pay, in a new city, and a couple friends already work there. Everything I was looking for.

Catch.

Because of a hiring freeze starting March 1st, I would have to start on February 28th. That's this Monday. I would have to give two weeks notice and move across the country in 6 days. Even if I had zero responsibilities that would be difficult. I had to turn it down. From what I hear, there is no telling when they will start hiring again. Mad disappointed. Closest chance yet to get out of this rut.

first road trip of 2011

Made a quick trip up to San Francisco because my friend was in town for a couple days on her way back home.




















As always, click to expand and full set on flickr.

simpsons in la

Haha awesome. Woo Cerritos Auto Square!

quick update

A handful of things going on lately, but haven't pulled enough of it together to post. Maybe soon. Gotta get to editing some recent pictures.

three more quotes in scarlet

"To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter, It kept him down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus."

"He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here gone though fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray; here borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all.

There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken int he midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That self was gone. Another man had returned out of the forest--a wiser one--with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that!"

"But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed--of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it--resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

I find that the literature which resonates with me often contains familiar themes.