Tendentious

Today I actually heard from a real recruiter with a real job possibility that matched my experience. This was immensely gratifying, because I've felt so damned inert lately. There is absolutely no financial necessity for me to do anything at the moment, because I am double-dipping, collecting both severance and unemployment. But because inactivity bothers me, I find myself at the store all day, ebaying old collectible card game boxes from our inventory (a business that's gone very well, generating good cash for the store).

But it's nice that the world still has stuff for me to do. Posting my resume on Monster up to now has generated little but serious messages from earnest Nigerians offering me once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Dinner tonight at Hibachi with Bill, the usual all-you-can-eat sushi experience. We got to chatting with our sushi chef (we always sit at the bar because it cuts down on the time that it takes for the softshell crab rolls to get to us). I love talking to Vietnamese who came to this country around 1980, as Choi did, because they are the most grateful and least cynical of Americans. Their experiences are remarkably similar: All of them have terrifying boat journey stories, all of them spent years in Thailand dreaming only of living in America. There are certain people who make my cynical impulses melt away when I talk to them, and they are often people for whom terms like "freedom" and "slavery" are not political slogans but real experiences.