Frankly this makes me feel useless.

[mbarrick]

A friend from high-school just won a prestigious literary award. I think it is fantastic and I am happy for him and proud to know him. Nonetheless, it makes me even more dissatisfied with the current state of my life. I feel utterly unremarkable. So far my biggest claim to fame is having my photographs and website unfavourably associated with a double suicide in the local rags and The Globe and Mail. I go to my God-awful, soul-sucking job now where I am either dismantling everything I've worked on there for the last three years or sitting around with my thumb up my ass because I don't know what I'm supposed to be taking apart today.

I know myself. I'm going to have to crawl a little further into my own head before I come out again.  Prepare yourselves. This is the point where I start eating my own tail and looking back on things that I have done in an attempt to reconnect with the inspiration that I feel that I've lost.

Once again I've got a big, fat change thrust upon me  (I talk to people who have gone ten, twenty, even thirty years or more without having the company they work for taken over, their apartment burning, or any such other upheavals in their life and I wonder how people like that even come to exist). Who knows where this one will land me? I'm still waiting to hear about the job in Victoria, I've just applied for a job in Auckland, the idea of opening a store is still a very real option (made more real by a decent tax return - my first in 10 years). Here I am, 37 years old and once again, trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.

Comments

[princeoigan.livejournal.com]

I can vouch that Melbourne is one kick ass city! Alot like Vancouver, environmentally at least i think you'd like it here.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough Melbourne's been coming up in my job searches quite a bit. It seems to be a bit of a hot-spot for what I specialise in. I've already checked with the immigration requirements for Australia and I qualify... I could end up there as likely as anywhere else. The list of likely places, in descending order of likelihood are: Toronto, Vancouver, Wellington, Melbourne, Sidney, New York. The fact that Victoria and Auckland have come up are flukes. New York would be a *lot* more likely if American immigration wasn't retarded. Let's hear it for the vestiges of the Empire - it's still relatively easy to move from one Commonwealth country to another.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

a person i know from high school won a governer general's award for the illustrations he did for a kids book...pretty strange...

anyway i hope you find something soon, something more long term or secure...it's a crazy world these days and the private business world is so predatory that you never know where you'll be the next day...it's not like our parents times when you stayed in the same job for your lifetime...hopefully that government thing will come through, as that is a very stable environment for the most part...but even if not perhaps you'll be lucky and find something overseas which would be cool in its own right...

[valerian.livejournal.com]

Personally I'm crossing my fingers for Victoria. I have no qualms about moving far away mind you - travelling doesn't bother me. But there are a lot of reasons for Victoria being the best place right now: my business, Michael's family (who are on the Island), it being a much cheaper place to open a store, and still being near Vancouver for working on our bid for C12... I wish we could get into New York though. But that's a longshot.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I was just doing some research on the UK as well. For a moment there I though I had enough points for that also to be an option, but not quite.

[valerian.livejournal.com]

Cost of living is very high there... maybe it's for the best.
;)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

In several ways you have hit the nail on the head.

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

I can sooo relate... I'm trying to figure out what's next as well! You'd think will my crasy life so far I'd happy without major change for a while - but no :)

Heraclitus would be proud

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

You, my friend, are the poster child for change :-p