I am a TERRIBLE blogger! I have not posted to this thing in over a year! Part of the reason is pure laziness, but most of the reason is the total lack of anything interesting happening in the last year.
Living in Geneva was a lot like living in a snow globe: it is pristine, perfect, picturesque, and EXACTLY the same every day. Once I moved out of my crazy landlady’s apartment into my own tiny studio a few blocks from my office, my routine never changed. Each day, I would get up, walk the dog, shower, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, walk the dog, shower, watch TV, Skype with my mom, read, then go to bed. Repeat.
So now you can pretty much consider yourselves caught up on everything that happened between September 2011 and July 2012, with one exception:
At my contract renewal in March, my section chief tried to get me into a staff position. There is a general rule that any consultant or intern has to wait six MONTHS before applying for a staff position. However, in the past, there had been kind of a roundabout way of doing it, a loophole, and my boss tried this. This was nice of him, since it meant that he thought I was doing a good job and wanted to keep me around. And it would have meant a lot to me, since I had already had to train my “supervisor” twice (same woman, she just wound up with a 5 week break between contracts and seemed to forget everything during that time) and she made more than twice as much money as me. Money was really tight in Geneva. I did not have a sofa, stove, TV, or even a shower curtain in my apartment. All apartments are completely unfurnished and even at IKEA, stuff is expensive. So a staff salary with real benefits would have made all the difference to me. It would have meant a career. But unfortunately, someone in Admin in charge of approving my new contract informed my boss that the loophole had been closed last year and consultants could no longer wiggle around the six month break rule. And that was the end of that.
I decided at that point to renew my contract until July 15th, as my apartment rental contract ended at the end of July. This would give me a couple weeks to wrap up my life in Geneva and then move back to the US to hopefully find work closer to home. I thought that having a year and a half in Egypt, working at a human rights org and then at the law firm, and then all my UN experience would help, and the job search would not take so long, or be so depressing, as it was in 2008-2009.
Alas…
It is true that things aren’t as bad as when I left the US in 2009. There are at least jobs I can reasonably apply for now. Most of the time, there are a couple possibilities announced every week. It used to be the only jobs available were for Executive Directors or Fundraising Managers and required 10-15 years’ experience. Also, I am allowed to buy insurance now (thanks, Obamacare!), whereas I used to be uninsurable, thanks to tendonitis in my ankles (pre-existing condition disqualification), so being in the US while I search isn’t as risky as it used to be. I have even had a couple close calls with really good phone interviews, but in the end they went with somebody else. I am not sure if my international experience is hurting me with domestic hiring managers who think I won’t be a good fit, or that I will abandon the position once an international post opens up. But the fact remains that I am moving into my fourth month of unemployment and the jobs I am finding to apply for pay in the $40-50K range (I am already imagining the blog post I will write in the future entitled “Under-employment,” assuming I ever land anywhere.
On the bright and shiny side of the coin, Oregon is amazing at this time of year. We had our first snow today, just a sprinkling of flakes in amongst mostly raindrops. The mornings smell like wet juniper and sagebrush and the evenings smell like smoke from all the fireplaces. I have been doing most of the cooking, as I have really missed having access to the Food Network, actual pots and pans, a stove, and affordable ingredients. I just finished an article on the Lilly Ledbetter case for a local civic organization’s newsletter and I think I’ll keep doing similar things to keep my skills up to date. I go to the gym a lot, I am up to about 4 miles a day on the treadmill, mostly running, and then I walk the dog or take him to the great new dog park in town in the early afternoons so he isn’t bouncing off the walls. I have been meeting a friend to swim in the pool we grew up in and I still somehow manage to watch a ton of TV and read mysteries every evening.
Except for repeated blows to my self-esteem thanks to the job search, the day to day grind of my kind of unemployment (with supportive, understanding parents, a big warm roof over my head, and an outfit made entirely of sweatpants and sweatshirts) is actually kind of awesome.
If you are reading this, thanks for waiting over a year for this post. Now that I have nothing else to do, it probably won’t take so long for the next one.
P.S. The pic above is about an hour before my parents steered our canoe at top speed into a tree, flipping all of us into the very high, fast-flowing, and totally obstacle-free river. All of us and all of our stuff were completely fine, except for the blue Oakleys I'm wearing, which were never seen again.
