When It Rains It Pours (long. personel)

[CaptSensible]

4 years ago the internet company I was working for closed up shop. I was making good money. I had bought a house in Van Nuys Ca not long before. If any of you know Van Nuys, it's a little suburb deeply lodged in the San Fernando Valley. Back then Van Nuys wasn't on anybody's top ten list of places to live in Los Angeles. I found a nice pocket there that I really liked. It was modest but it was my first house and I loved it. I was comfortable there. It was home to me. I had an extra bedroom so when any of my friends needed a place to stay or were down on their luck they were always welcome. It felt good to be able to help out my friends.

Even though the tech bust had just happened. I had great credentials under my belt and thought it couldn't possibly be that long before I found another one.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I didn't get very many responses to my resume. One of the HR people I talked to told me 300 resumes a week were coming across her desk for the position.

My serverance carried me about a year and a half. Unemployment a few months more. It was getting desperate.

I had a 67 convertable Firebird, I sold it on the same day the cable guy came buy to pick up the cable box.
Not a good day. Everything looked terribly bleak.
I figured the universe had finally found me out and decided to take away everything that meant something to me.
A small house that I called home and a car I got great enjoyment from. I never needed a mansion in malibu or a ferrari. Just a home and some fun transportation. I was approaching 40 and slowly losing everything I had worked for.

I was invited to move up to San Francisco by friends to play music, which is what I had done before my internet life. I was under a great deal of stress, couldn't pay the mortgage etc...so I decided to rent out the house and head up to S.F. It was an impulse decision and it was a nightmare. The cost of living was staggering. I interviewed with The Acadamy of Art College when I was up there for a job as an Internet Producer. The first thing he told me was that FIVE HUNDRED people a week were applying for the job. Needles to say I didn't get it BUT I did get a job doing computer graphics for a jewelry company for $11 an hour. It was tedious, demoralizing work. Demoralizing because my boss was a control freak and her employees were just pieces on a board game she liked to move around.

I decided to sell my house in L.A. and come back to Los Angeles. Over the last 2-3 years I hadn't been working I'd amassed quite a bit of debt that was crushing me. IRS, AMEX, DISCOVERY, etc...The house that I'd loved and wanted to grow old in I was about to sell to pay off debt. I knew that selling was a horrible decision. The real estate market was skyrocketing and my mortgage was only 1200.00 a month. I was drowning in debt though and the interest alone was killing me. There really wasn't another option. If I sold I could pay off all my debts and have a little bit of a nest egg left over that would help me out until, hopefully, I could find a job. I spent the next year in L.A. "doing lunches", re-calling all my contacts etc...
Nothing, Nada, Zilch.

I was living in a nice little one bedroom here in "The Valley" as angelinos are apt to call it. I remember lying in bed freaking out. I'd been back in L.A. for a year. I was thinking that all the money I had in the world was slowly dripping away. The thought of paying rent for another year killed me. I wanted to invest in real estate but was far from being able to afford anything in L.A.
I'd been researching different cities for a few years and kept coming back to Austin Tx. I kept hearing about it from friends and people I'd bump into. Kept reading about it. I'd been there several times in the early mid 90's and loved it. What Austin afforded me was a higher quality of life at a lower cost of living. I found a great real estate agent there and made plans to fly down and look at some houses.

I found a great house. Put down a deposit and before I knew it I was in escrow. Since my mortgage was only gonna be about 1,000.00 a month I'd get a couple of roommates and only have to pay for the expenses of the house which would cost me less than the rent I was paying here in L.A.

The idea was that I would pay less per month while I owned something that was gaining equity. I'd be able to focus on music and writing and live an "artist's" life.

Which brings us up to now. I'm nearly all packed and getting ready to make the big move. I'm slowly filling up another box. Almost ready to be taped up when I get a phone call. It's my partner from my last job. He just sold his website. They want to keep him and his team on and to build up what they already have. He wants to hire me as his creative director.

You should have seen the look on my face. For a split second I thought "BUT I WANT TO GO TO AUSTIN!!!".

4 years go buy. I can't get arrested. In one month a buy a house AND get offered a fantastic job.

I'm going to rent out the house in Austin, Keep my apartment here and start my new job in September.

These were the toughest 4 years of my life. At a number of points during that time to say I was low would have been the understatement of the decade. I really hit some severely low points. I questioned everything, my abilities, myself, my life, my place in the world, everything. The only thing I was able to do was to carry myself through it with a modicum of grace and dignity. Somehow I took most of it in stride and rolled with the punches to the best of my ability. Somehow I held on to the faith that It couldn't stay like this forever. Many days that faith grew very thin and was tried many times but I still held on.

Needless to say I'm absolutely ecstatic and joyfully looking forward to starting my new job.

I tell you guys this so if there's anyone out in a similar situation maybe this will serve as a tiny light of hope. Along they way I kept telling myself "Life goes in cycles, Life goes in cycles". I had never been in a low cycle as an adult that lasted that long so it was incredibly difficult if not impossible sometimes to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

If you do the best you can, and hold your head up as much as you can things sometimes turn out ok [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Hope this helps.