Back in February I posted a link to Don Peck’s article about the long unemployment crisis and the impact it’s likely to have on our country and our culture. It clicked with some long-floating anxieties, and, sure enough, in April, my company closed its virtual doors. The company gave me a little bit of severance, better than a slap in the face but not by much.

It had been a long time coming. Sometimes I look back and I’m surprised that we lasted as long as we did.

The job search was… both better and worse than I expected, really. I decided that I would submit one job application or sit for one job interview, every weekday, until I found a new position. Weekends and Fanime I kept for myself, and I did take one “vacation” day. Job searching took up about two hours out of every day, and interviews generally took between one and three, depending on how much time I had to spend getting there. It felt like a light search, but others tell me that it was actually pretty aggressive.

By the numbers, this comes out to:

Twenty-six job applications
Nine interviews at four companies
Two interviews canceled due to layoffs
One trans-continental flight

And, the payoff:

Two job offers.

One was about what you would expect from a post-layoff offer – a solid company full of nice people, about the same money and a much more troublesome commute – but I lucked out on the other. It’s going to take me out of the Bay Area, away from most of my friends and most of the things I know and love, but for my career, it’s a big enough step up that I don’t think I could have very well refused it.

From my very limited tour of the job market, it feels like there is work out there, and it’s not only possible to find a decent position, but it’s even possible to make the best of a layoff and come out somewhat ahead. Times are still hard, and it takes a lot of ground-pounding to find that work, but it’s out there.

Edit: I am now doubting my memory, and it is possible that he was from Namco. I think it is funnier if someone from Capcom is talking high-and-mighty about creativity, because they made exactly the same game four times, so much so that they can be beaten with exactly the same inputs.

RCE: I like your work! It’s very original. It’s not like all this other fan stuff.

Friend: What do you mean?

RCE: Some of the fan stuff has pretty good technique, but it has no life. I mean, why take someone else’s character? Why not make your own?

Adrian: Well, there’s something to be said for using existing characters because they have resonance, isn’t there? They say something; they have power. People respond to them. It’s like retelling myths or something. You don’t think anyone wrote them all from scratch, did you? Why do you think people built so many churches, or did so much religious art?

RCE: Yeah, well, I’m an athiest.

Adrian: You should still be able to appreciate, for example, La Pietà…

RCE: “Well, like I said, it’s fine technically.”

Adrian: “You can’t find the emotion and life in La Pietà?”

RCE: “Phh.” RCE exits, stage left

Friend (unfortunately steamrolled): “Uhh…”

This blew my mind, and I’m still having a little trouble wrapping my thoughts around it. Michelangelo’s Pietà is one of the single greatest artworks in all of human history. If following some school of “atheism” means being unable to appreciate its beauty and emotional weight, it says a lot more about its followers than it does about La Pietà.

I don’t know that I like realizing that about people.

Kir-tat gave me a link to Elves from her DeviantArt page, and I think I got about as much traffic from her than I’ve gotten in the entire lifetime of the site so far. For one evening it was the #6 most popular “recent upload” on DeviantArt. I’m really, really proud of that. The credit for the sheer prettiness of her art is hers alone, of course, but I’m happy to have been a catalyst for it, in my own small way.

My favorite comment from her page, by Cielle Du Ciel:

I had I hard time telling if they were male or female, too… I’m wondering if their adrogyny was intentional, so as to represent the story and its four versions. Whether or not it was, that’s how I understand this piece, and I love it. It combines perfectly all the different versions of the story, I think, a beautiful and perfect way to get its message across. I could comment on everything, but, I think reading the story speaks for itself.

On that note, I have to laugh a little bit with those who are so preoccupied with the idea of it being “yaoi”. Read the other versions, guys, the one *kir-tat happened to link isn’t the only one.

(Only about one in 20 people read all four versions, sadly.)

Of course, this is the Internet, and the very next comment (which has been blocked, and the author lost to the sands of time) reads:

i love the detail great pic but are they lesbians

*HEADDESK* They are if you want them to be, sir. They are if you want them to be. That was the point, if you will.

Besides this, I’m still a little worn-out from the post-creative afterglow that is finishing First and Last and Always. I promise that this is a temporary thing; Fanime starts in six days and counting, and cons never fails to give me a kickstart, just from the sheer wonderful fannish energy I pick up. So far I’m planning to hang out around Rem’s table in the Artist Alley for a while, and I have a few other offline friends to see, but that’s about it so far. If anyone would like to meet me there, please let me know! I love meeting new people at conventions (except for this guy), and it always blows my mind a little bit that people are actually reading this site.

A friend of mine linked me to a little bit of pre-Fanime hilarity, which… really has to be seen to be believed. Enjoy!

Compare this to Japan, where an apple costs at least ¥398 (about $4.25 at time of this writing). That’s one apple. You can see it off to the right. It’s a beautiful apple, uniformly frosted red all around, and it’s pretty big big enough to make me spread my fingers a bit when I hold it, but it’s just one apple all the same.

Truly, I live in a land of plenty.

On the other hand, I wonder sometimes if we pay something for that abundance. It’s easy to think of food as a commodity, to think that one apple is the same as another, but that really isn’t the case. Food is a biological product, the end-result of some living thing and the environment around it, its lineage, handling, and care. For example, the Red Delicious is very red, but it’s only nominally delicious, because it’s been bred to be harvested early, in enormous quantities, and trucked across the continent. On the other end of the spectrum, Japanese farmers have made a science out of growing delicious, picture-perfect apples. That apple was simply better, crisper, sweeter, and better-balanced than anything I’ve ever bought at Safeway (or Whole Paycheck, for that matter, or even farmer’s markets and freeway-side stands), and I would love the chance to indulge in more, if only once in a while. At $4.25 each, Japanese apples could get almost as expensive as a bad Starbuck’s habit.

In Japan, though, that was more-or-less a standard apple, and by Japanese standards, it was quite reasonably priced. I found apples just like mine in every grocery store I visited, at train station fruit vendors, and sometimes in department stores and even 7-11s. Japanese consumers expect apples of that quality, and they’re willing to pay for them, so there are no cheap apples, only precious, semi-rare treats. Here in the United States, I’m guessing, we don’t and aren’t, so apples are cheap and plentiful, everyday in every meaning of the word.

I wonder, what does this say about them? What does it say about us?

A detective stopped me in the Akihabara police station and asked to see my identification, but he seemed to lose interest almost immediately once I took it out, and he only gave it a cursory glance-over. I couldn’t understand why he did that, until later when I was fishing around for my rail pass. If I have a particularly large load in my upper left pockets, I realized, my jacket makes it look a little like I’m wearing a shoulder holster. Handguns are highly illegal in Japan, so naturally I think he felt compelled to investigate. Really that was a very clever trick – he stood off to the side slightly while I did this, enough to get a look into my jacket and see that the bulge was just a pocket full of wallet, papers, and other random bits that tourists pick up. It stayed low-key, he was in full control the whole time, and I didn’t even realize he thought something was wrong until much afterwards.

A few days later, on a much lighter note, I visited an onsen bath, about an hour south of Tokyo proper. The hostess mistook me for a girl at first and nearly handed me a key to the women’s locker room. She caught herself in time. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me, and I’m used to laughing it off (really I think it’s a nice sort of compliment).

It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind overview tour, and I’m still a bit shocked that it’s coming to an end. Right now it’s some ungodly-o-clock and I’ve been traveling all day, so I’ll post more pictures when I get a chance.

I haven’t done much writing in the past couple weeks, but I think I’m ready to start up again. One of the handwritten First and Last and Always pages got wet somehow, and I have to rewrite it. That should be a good place to start; it’ll be nice to build up some momentum. Some free time is coming up on my horizon, so here’s hoping everything will fall into place.

In the news: Last week, a high school in Mississippi decided to cancel their prom rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend. It plays straight into stereotype, unfair as it may be; another high school there held out until 2008 to hold its first racially-integrated prom. People can be stubborn like that, I guess.

Stepping up to the plate, supporters of the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (a queer-youth advocacy group) have pledged enough money to hold a “second-chance” prom that would welcome all students, regardless of orientation. I hope it succeeds.

That was the idea, at least. In the grand scheme of things, I know, one night isn’t much.

When I got back, I cancelled my preorders for Assassin’s Creed II and Settlers VII. In case you haven’t heard the news, Ubisoft has developed a copy-protection system that requires a continuous connection to their servers. As interesting as the games are, that kind of disconnection yoyo is more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t trust Ubisoft to keep their servers online once the game stops selling. There are plenty of other games to keep me occupied, and even when there aren’t, I should spend more time writing. Even with the weekend out, I shouldn’t be this far behind.

After I make myself some lunch, I’ll go work on First and Last and Always again. We’ll see. Given the complications that keep coming up, I’m going to stop announcing specific posting days. Right now, all I’ll say is “soon”. Poke me and see what I’m up to; I’ve pretty much been asking for it.

Expect it Monday or Tuesday.

Sorry for the lateness.

Usually I prefer to let people explore the Brain Food links unguided and draw their own conclusions, but I think Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America over at The Atlantic is worth a particular mention. One in eight Californians is presently unemployed, nearly one in ten Americans, and things don’t seem to be in much rush to get better. I’m not sure if the long-term effects will be as bad as Peck projects, but the possibilities are definitely sobering.

It makes me a little bit grateful to say that I have a job to complain about. I have a few responsibilities there that will no doubt distract me over this long weekend, but I’ve finished dinner now and a few other chores, so I’m going to settle in for a weekend of writing now. The alarm clock is set for 7:30 AM tomorrow morning. At some point I will have to leave the apartment to do laundry and get some sunshine, but aside from that, after I finish this post I plan to reboot my laptop, open up First and Last and Always, and start writing.

Before I go, I found for you an upload of P!nk’s very awesome Grammy performance, and you can click through to a preview of the upcoming story. Those of you who know how to get in touch with me outside of this site are welcome to poke at me once in a while and make sure I’m not wasting time.

First and Last and Always
By Adrian Mailenna
For Hannah, because she made a difference.

Even with his heart pounding in time to the DJ’s command, a hundred and twenty-six beats per minute, Jamie could feel the one it skipped. Someone was watching him; he’d felt it, uncoiling a tight, nervous desire from the base of his spine, sliding it up his back until it made the hairs on his neck stand on end and his knees go weak, made him excited and just a little scared.

For months he’d walked past the door here, stolen glances past the curtain at the slender, pretty boys dancing together here, taking each other home, but he’d never dared step in before. Now he wasn’t sure whether he should have come. Someone would notice him; someone would tell; people would know; they would be polite of course, nothing overt. It was the twenty-first century after all, but he would hear their whispers, notice their sideways glances in his direction, and he would move again, unable to cope, unwilling to be that token friend, unwilling to be treated so differently. It wasn’t his fault he’d been born this way.

But there was that look. It promised so much.

Staggering off the dance floor, he scanned the crowd as he made his way, panting, to the bar. Through the back of his mind he remembered a glimpse of perfect golden skin and kinetic black hair beneath the DJ’s lights, but most of all the flash of bright green eyes, inviting and seductive, even from across the room. Somehow he knew he needed to find them.

He hopped up onto a stool. He needed a drink, too. It was hot out there.