I’m entering the second month of work wind-down, and so far, it’s been very busy. I feel like I’m putting more of myself into a lot of different projects than I was before, and staying busy right now is a good thing.
People at work seem surprised that I haven’t completely checked out, including the COO, who I talked with briefly on Friday. I laughed and told him that as long as they’re still paying me, I’m working for them. It’s a measure of how strongly I feel about the mission and the organization; I have no beef with them, other than the fact that they didn’t plan well enough, but I want to see WRI succeed. I like to think I’ve also finally learned something from leaving some of my previous jobs, where I did a terrible job of staying in touch with people—some who I really liked, and some who I didn’t. I have a lot of regrets about that, actually. I was never able to maintain long-term friendships going back to the days when my family moved around a lot, and with a few exceptions, I don’t talk much to my friend group from high school. I’ve never been good at maintaining these kind of things, because I’m afraid those people won’t want to talk to me, but I’ve been working to get over myself and put myself out there some more.
In the meantime, I’m trying to average sending 1-2 resumes out per day, depending on what’s posted, but I’ve only heard one thanks-but-no-thanks reply. There are a number of job websites out there with pretty decent listings, but a lot of the social media stuff that’s suddenly entered my algorithm is about how people haven’t been able to get past the AI bots to have their cover letter seen by a human being. Having been on the other side of this, I know how hard it is to weed the wheat from the chaff, especially when you’re getting 200 applications each day, but I always did try to take the time to look at every submission myself. This new way of doing things seems capricious and arbitrary. I’m doing that thing I hate doing the most [see paragraph above] where I reach out to my network and kindly ask if anyone might know of anything. I’ve actually gotten a couple of good leads from friends, and I’m hopeful that the network will do what the bots will not. The LinkedIn post I put up about ‘moving on from WRI’ got a HUGE response from people, and I made sure to reply back to everyone that posted to boost it further. Here’s to hoping the right people see it.
I’m also looking at other ways to start generating income. There’s money to be made doing housepainting and light carpentry, which I have plenty of experience with, and our old friend Jen, a realtor, can funnel me work. I can load the OG-V with carpentry and painting gear and work for hire without a contractor’s license for what I’m told is pretty decent money, and she could share my name around with her peers. It got me through college, and it can work in the short term now.
I’m headed over to Brian’s this weekend to take stock of the EV project. Making a go of this would be the best possible option, although it would take me away from home for long periods of time. He’s been busy with personal stuff, but I’m hoping we can make a serious go of it in December.
At the house, I’m finishing up the Travelall floor and also looking at inexpensive ways to insulate for winter. I got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about the underside of the front porch floor, which had originally been sealed up with some sheets of plywood over the joists, which were filled with insulation. When Brian and I shot foam against the sill plate shared with the ice room, we never covered that area back up, and there’s a section of the office floor that hangs out over that open space. I got under there and covered it back up a few weeks ago, but I then thought about how our kitchen floor is always cold. In the basement we have insulation up against the underside of the floor but it’s not sealed with anything, which I’ve learned is basically useless. I did some research and found that some simple sheets of 2″ semi-permeable foam sealing the cavity between the joists would keep heat from soaking downwards into the unheated basement. So I’m going to do some experiments in the next week with that to see how well it works.
Meanwhile, my left wrist has been bothering me for the last couple of days—right after I had my checkup with my GP. I’m going to make another appointment to go back in and have him look it over, but what I fear is that this is the beginning of arthritis. About 30 years ago, I was mountain biking with Rob, and we were riding downhill toward our car at dusk on a dim single track. I cartwheeled over a chain spread across the trail, invisible in the fading light, and did a half-decent tuck and roll, avoiding a cracked skull—but I planted both wrists on the pavement as I tumbled. They hurt pretty bad for a week or so after that, but as a newly minted graduate with no health insurance, I couldn’t have them looked at. I’m pretty sure I fractured or tore some cartilage that day, and I’d bet it’s coming home to roost now that I’m older and the weather is colder.
I found out at the beginning of October that I was being laid off from World Resources Institute. For reasons far out of my control (but which anyone could see coming) our funding was constricted due to world politics and ongoing institutional challenges that weren’t addressed over years of rapid growth. My position, lofty as it sounds, became redundant, and my tenure made me expensive, so it was pretty clear I was on the chopping block. This seems to be a common issue with Gen X professionals in middle management—we’re too experienced and expensive to keep but haven’t ascended to the C-level to become bulletproof. They don’t offer a severance package, but they’re keeping us RIF’d folks on until December 1, and we keep our healthcare until December 31, so I’ve had some breathing room to get my affairs in order, polish the resume, and start blasting it out as much as possible.
After speedrunning through the first three stages of grief—I spent all of 30 seconds on denial, five minutes on anger, and two minutes on bargaining—I’ve been cycling between depression and acceptance, punctuated with moments of panic. I ran some numbers through Monarch, our handy money management app, and when I saw the first number it returned for our monthly outlay I nearly had a heart attack. I’ve been laid off twice before, and having always been paranoid about money, I keep an Oh-Shit fund at all times. Monarch’s estimate was much higher than I had bargained for, but when I started reviewing it I was able to chip away at a bunch of unnecessary line items to get to a number that was much easier to accept.
The big issue is going to be health insurance. COBRA, which has never been affordable or equitable, is the first option, and the number I got from our HR reps at work was more than our combined mortgage, car payment, and phone bill. The ACA Marketplace was my next stop, and while I didn’t dig too deep, the pricing there was more affordable per month—but with an astronomical deductible. So we’ve got to make some hard choices there. Next week I’m going to dive into that particular nest of snakes and do some comparison shopping.
I’ve signed up for several job search websites, some paid and some free, and have been using Claude to help me tailor cover letters to each position I’ve applied to. I’ve found it’s easy to ask AI to get the letter started, and then do a massive rewrite in my own voice to remove the robot from the text. As I expected, I haven’t heard much back yet, but I’ve got some friends at work who are putting the word out for me, with some success so far.
Another, more interesting lifeline could be teaming up with Brian to renew our work on Slowflake the EV project, with a goal of getting it running so that we can show it locally and drum up a project where someone else will pay us to convert their vehicle. There’s a lot to work out with this plan: I’d have to stay in Chestertown through the week and come home on weekends; I’d most likely be taking home renovation work on with Brian to cover our mortgage and bills; and I’d be away from the girls for a long period of time. But this one, I feel, has the most potential for growth. I’ve been thinking for a long while about my future as a creative with the ascendancy of AI, and it seems like a safer bet to stay employed is to make something with your hands that can’t be replicated with four prompts in a browser window. And if we owned a business we’d be in control of our own destiny instead of depending on others to make sure the train stays on the track. I’m still young, I’m healthy, and I can work with my hands—it’s something I look forward to. Maybe this is the time to take the chance and see where it goes.
The first step is to travel over to Brian’s, review our progress, and come up with a plan. If I’m out on the bricks in December, and we can plot out a solution to get Slowflake running—and make it happen, God willing—then we’d have a completed project to show and drum up some business. If we could get a paying project in the door for conversion, that would go a long way to making this a reality.
Alex Sujong-Laughlin writes over at Defector about falling down the doomsday prepping rabbit hole, and she put something into perspective for me that resonated deeply. I’ve also been thinking about this subject since the Second Coming of Cheeto, and given all of the warning signs and terrible news, I took some initial steps. She talks about her husband, a college professor, beginning his Intro to Government class with a lesson on the Hobbes vs. Locke philosophies: basically a Walking Dead humans-are-the-real-enemies mindset vs. a Star Trek we’re-all-in-this-together mindset. I definitely tend to be the latter rather than the former, but I also want to prepare for the Hobbesian hordes if and when they show up at my door. This paragraph really stuck with me:
The way you view the world determines how you live in it. These two theories also underpin the central policy differences between the left and the right. What is responsible for the problems in our world, and how do we go about solving them? If you believe that people are mostly selfish and hungry for power and resources, for example, you will be less likely to advocate for social safety nets. I realized that my anxiety was leading me into an imaginary Hobbesian hellscape, and I was using my impending parenthood to justify it.
I’ve always, since my early days, been focused on being as self-sufficient as possible: knowing how to frame and roof a house, plant and harvest basic crops, keep machinery working, handle weapons, and do basic repairs on most tools has been important to me not only because I’m cheap (and usually on a budget) as well as curious. This, plus my ADHD, has made me into more of a generalist vs. a specialist—something that bothers me less and less the older I get. There’s something to be said for stockpiling food for a Bad Situation, but much like she says in this article,
The amount of preparation I would have to do to maintain a semblance of normalcy in that instance would require such absurd investments of time and money that it would force me to adopt “emergency preparedness” as a main personality trait and hobby.
I think this encapsulates something I’ve been knocking around in my head for a while; I could spend immense amounts of time and money to prepare for the great unknown, but that would require a complete lifestyle change, which we are not prepared or financed to do right now. I’ll stockpile essentials—bullets, booze, freeze-dried food and water—but if the balloon goes up, we’re packing it in a running vehicle and heading north to the hills.
Jason Kottke posted a response to an interview I hadn’t been aware of until now: Ezra Klein interviewed Ta-Nahesi Coates for the New York Times, contrasting the way they each see the current situation in America. Andrea Pitzer took a look at what they said, and contextualized the different ways they see things:
It might sound pessimistic to see, as Coates does, the likelihood of many losses looming ahead, even as we fight for wins. But if you consider the long history of the problem at hand, it releases you from bright-kid syndrome, from the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world. You understand that to do so is impossible. You are—at most—going to be one piece of that solution in a chain of many people that begins before you were born and continues after you die.
Her take on things is really smart, I think, and sums up a lot of what I’ve been struggling with for the last ten years: I can’t fix everything, but I have to stick to my core values and continue to do what’s right for my people and my little corner of the world.
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
This article has been making the rounds, but it deserves to be shared: Noah Hawley writes about the ultra-rich and the point at which consequences or morality cease to be a factor to them.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
….just got my irons in a lot of fires. I was at the World Bank Monday to interview an old friend for a work project, and back there yesterday to do some filming. Work in general has been very busy, and the personal projects are all moving along at a brisk pace. BRB, will update more soon.
What a long, strange trip it’s been so far.
PS. my phone and email have been flooded with well wishes this morning; I can’t tell you how much that means to me.
oooooh, this essay on technology is really good: it puts the state of current technology and its cross-section with society in really clear perspective. I won’t spoil it for you: it’s a great read.
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It was almost 80 degrees here in Catonsville yesterday, so I pulled the Scout out of the garage after work, buttoned the sides of the soft top up, and pointed it north on the Beltway for her first drive of the year. I had a class scheduled after work up at a gun range north of the city: a free seminar on how to clean a shotgun. The class was run by the armorer at the range, who is the son of my CCL instructor, and about 20 of us found seats at clean worktables, waiting to begin.
Around me, the other guys pulled fancy new shotguns from expensive cases: tactical models with pistol grips, camouflage-patterned hunting models, and military-style breaching models with flashlights and shell clips. I pulled Dad’s humble New Haven 600, a Mossberg 500 license-built for department stores in the 1970’s, from its simple bag and waited for our first instructions. I’ve known that it needed to be taken apart and cleaned ever since I brought it home: the action was caked with carbon and dirt, like it had been fired for several years, dragged through mud, and stored in a garage.
I also brought Dad’s cleaning supplies, so I started by polishing the crusty barrel to a mirror finish with a brass brush. The armorer walked over and I saw his eyebrows jump as he took in the condition of the rest of the gun. I explained where it came from and asked him not to judge me, and he chuckled as he broke it down so I could clean each part individually, assuring me he’d seen and heard worse. Over the course of an hour I was able to get the firing pin assembly, bolt, trigger group and receiver cleaned for the first time in decades, making a small mountain out of filthy cleaning wipes on the table next to me.
Seeing how the gun came apart was very helpful for me—I’m more than willing to disassemble almost anything, but where firearms are concerned, I want to know exactly how it comes apart and goes back together before I put a round in it and pull the trigger. Eventually I’d like to replace the original wooden forend on the gun with something lighter, and I knew before the class that removing it requires breaking the gun down almost completely. At the end of our time, he came back over and complimented me on the cleaning job I’d done, and then I watched as he expertly re-assembled the gun and racked the slide with a satisfying clack-clack, as opposed to the muffled whup-whup it made before.
I said my thanks, packed up my stuff, and enjoyed a twilight ride home with the warm wind in my hair.
All things considered, I had a really good weekend. On Saturday morning, I woke up at zero-dark-30 to drive down to Annapolis and pick up Zachary for another snowboarding day. We were able to get to Pennsylvania, get our gear and be on the slopes by 8:30.
Years ago, when I was mountain biking regularly with Rob, he taught me everything about how to do it right. Being a full 6 inches shorter than me, and having spent a ton of time on the West Coast biking on original trails, he knew what he was doing and would launch himself down mountain sides with abandon—but the key was that he was always in control. He showed me how to lean all the way back in the saddle and control my balance on the bike itself, anticipate obstacles and the right way to get over them, and just to generally not be afraid. After riding with him for a couple of seasons, I could keep up with him and follow him down steep mountainsides without blinking—often we found ourselves laughing the harder things got.
With Zachary on Saturday, we started on the intermediate slope and I followed behind as he snowplowed back and forth to get his balance and technique sorted out. We ditched our heavy winter gear after the second run, opting to go in longsleeve shirts under the warm sun, and by the fifth run he started carving back and forth—and I had to work to keep up with him. I found that I had to push myself to stay behind him, and that old familiar feeling of unease and exhilaration put a smile on my face. We went nonstop from 8:30 until about 3PM, and I tapped out when my right leg (my steering leg) started getting wobbly. Zachary did one more run by himself (another excellent sign) and we packed it in at 3:30. He’s ready to level up to the advanced slopes, and I’m going to have to spend some serious time this summer working on my core and leg muscles to be ready to follow him down those trails next season, as well as screw up my courage to follow him, just like I did with his dad 30 years ago.
Sunday morning Finn and I woke early, got some breakfast, and took Hazel for a hike in Patapsco State Park near the house. It was a beautiful day to be outside, and we got to talk about a bunch of different things while waiting for Hazel to smell the smells. She was happy to be out on the trails, and even though she claimed she wanted to walk as far as possible, I could tell she was gassed when we got to the top of the steeper climbs. I’m resolving to make hiking a weekly activity, both to get her out of the house, but also to try and re-connect.
Back at home, I put the carb back on the Travelall, drained as much gas out of the tank as possible, and did a wet compression test on the Scout 800. After monkeying with the distributor for a bit, I finally got it running! Once I sorted that out I jumped in and got it in gear and moving forward and backwards. This is a HUGE relief, and I’m extremely pleased with myself for sticking with it and diagnosing all of the issues up until this point. Now I need to sort the front brakes out to get at least a little stopping power, and I should be able to pull it around to the garage and swap vehicles out.
Back inside after the sun went down, I sat on the couch and mindlessly surfed the web with the dog snoring next to me, feeling the soreness in my entire body—my legs, arms, hands, back, neck, and brain. It’s been a while since I’ve gone that hard and it left me righteously tired. Given how fucked up current events are right now, it was good to have a bunch of wins close to home.