I think a lot of people do this…I know I do…You get together with your friends, and talk about different movies you have seen…Then you talk about movies you would like to see made. Or which actor or actress would best portray a certain character.

I got in one of these conversations recently. Me and Chris were talking about which actor would best portray the Devil. I don’t remember how it came up. But we tossed out ideas..Keanu? One of the Baldwins? Sean Connery? Who could really do this job well?

I am at a disadvantage. I don’t remember actors names..I just can’t keep up with the celebrity hype. When I see a movie, i think of the people as the characters they portray, and that is that. Some extremely famous people have pierced the void of my ignorance, so just coming up with the name of an actor was an accomplishment for me ( Tom Hanks! no wait…he couldn’t play the devil!).

Thinking of any person from the screen, who seemed evil or potentially evil, I remembered one annoying character from a TV commercial. A vacuous-sounding, California accented young blonde guy from the Dell computers commercials.

It is HE.

Can’t you hear it?

“Dude! You’re going to Hell!”

…i’m still laughing…

Today, i was thinking about how much I don’t like not having work. This is hardly new. I have a long-standing fear of the bottom dropping out. That I will be completely destitute. It has not happened yet. I’ve never been truly hungry or homeless. But I have been very close. I used to think of it as a steamroller coming up on to me, threatening to outdistance me and flatten me.

I do not cherish helplessness. I like being able to do for myself. And a steamroller coming up and flattening me would have the effect of NOT allowing me to take care of myself.

I had quite elaborate images in my head about the nature of the steamroller, and exactly how it would come up and come closer. I felt like I had to have a certain distance between me and disaster, a buffer. I knew that if I didn’t have a sufficient head start on the flattener that the smallest stumble would mean the end.

I was young and newly married. With the deadly serious naivete of youth, I felt that a single mistake would be the ruin of my entire future. Besides, i had no resources but my own. My family was not in the country. All of my friends had literally and arbitrarily shown me the door. And while I had an overweening sense of the guillotine-like permanence of any error, my husband seemed to think his life was carved every day anew on an etch-a-sketch: “I care not for the morrow!” Nor did he care for ephemeral things such as paychecks and rent.

So the steamroller was ever-present in my mind.

It occurs to me now to wonder why it was a steamroller.

Now, I think of it as a wolf. The wolf nipping at my heels.

This idea became very realized today. I was thinking about that wolf, I was staring him down in my mind. I thought, well, wolf. I don’t have a job, and you are waiting with bared fangs for the moment you can overpower me. But I have fangs of my own now.

And it is true. This time, I have weapons to fight back against destitution and abandonment. I have cunning and a quiver full of skills that I did not have when I was 22, and it was a steamroller I was dealing with. A wolf, you can fight and grapple with. A wolf can injure you, but it does not always kill you. A streamroller, however, is a different story.

A steamroller is a broad impersonal sweep. It has nothing to appeal to. It will flatten inevitably, the only question is whether it will flatten ME.

When I was 22, the forces that granted me employment or a working car seemed unfathomable and decidedly impersonal. I knew nothing about what I had to offer the world. Anything granted me was undeserved largess.

But I have since learned (In only 7 years! Imagine how much I will learn in the next seven!) that the worker is worthy of her hire. I discovered the rules of economics, that my labor and my abilities were a tradable commodity.

I had worth!

I really love feeling that in a job. I love knowing that what I do matters, in a very tangible way showing up on my paycheck. This is perhaps another reason why I find unemployment so decidedly uncomfortable–I long for the affirmation of another to prove my value.

But I also have seen the faces of those who assign worth. I know they are cheaters and liars, quite often.

Perhaps that it why I have left the steamroller back in history and think of disaster as a wolf.

You know, so much of understanding the world is putting it into the right context.

My world right now has to do with finding work. It’s a hard job, looking for work. There are so many unknowns.

I hate unknowns. My favorite way to combat them is to take stock of the things I DO know.

For example, I know that I can get unemployment checks for a 6 month period. These checks are 330 bucks a week.

That equals out to 8.25 an hour…That is, if I were working 40 hours a week.

Interesting little mathematical fact, that 8.25 an hour.

It’s more than minimum wage. But it’s less than working at In’N’Out burger. They advertise at 9.25, starting.

But _I_ have ambitions. I want to get a GOOD job, right?

So I look harder. I have to find a job that uses my skills, and pays me what I’m worth.

That little phrase begs the question. “What I’m worth”

I’m worth what I’m paid. But I’m not paid at all. Or, I’m paid 8.25 an hour.

And they are gonna lay me off after 6 months.

I had the opportunity to visit Southern California this weekend. I expect I may be down there more often as time goes by…Anyway, my funny boyfriend and I were looking at the different neighborhoods in LA.

As a northern Californian, LA is known as nothing else. Subtle distinctions such as “Orange County” or “San Bernardino” are seen as a sign of denial–a way for LA residents to distance themselves from the horror that is LA. After all, they are all just a bunch of uncultured, conformist, republican suburbanites, aren’t they? And the fact that LA has spread into several counties is startling to Bay Area residents, but not surprising once you consider their water-consuming, smog-producing habits.

With a sniff, we turn away and feel that someone ought to pass a law curbing the environmental hazard that IS Los Angeles.

So when my LA native boyfriend decided to show me around the area, I was astonished to discover that there were neighborhoods.

Traffic was awful; smog was incredibly awful, even leaving white buildings permanently smudged.
But through the air-muck, I could see mountains. There is nature there!
And there were places where the desert flora was untouched.

There are neighborhoods there, and cities. Here, I live in Sunnyvale, which butts up against Mountain View, Santa Clara and Los Altos. I couldn’t tell you exactly where the borders are, but I have a general idea. There are signs placed in discreet and ambiguous spots, to let you know that somewhere nearby, the next city begins.

In So Cal, you KNOW. There is some sort of edifice marking the entry into the next city. A stone concoction, or a large wooden sign saying “City Of Orange” or “WELCOME TO RANCHO CUCAMONGA” or “WELCOME TO CLAREMONT.”

I find this disorienting. I mean, I am pleased to know what city I am in, but I feel like it is too sudden! I haven’t had time to say goodbye to the city I am leaving. I was only beginning to enjoy the welcome of Upland, and appreciate the trees and flowers, when I am whiplashed into the welcome of Claremont. It’s terribly abrupt. It seems like there should be a buffer between the cities, a margin, or a no-man’s land to allow for some differentiation.

As with everything, there is a trick to the names of cities, too. I had learned some of this here, already. When cities were first settled, most of the time they were formed in the fertile valleys. All the people would go to the valleys, and make their houses and businesses there, and before you knew it, you had a city! Marvelous. But then all the people who had done especially well in the fertile valleys began to feel crowded and common, so they had to find a way to look down on the rest of the not-so-successful city-dwellers. They moved up the hill a little bit. Therefore, neighborhoods with “Hills” after the name are ritzy neighborhoods: Los Altos Hills, Oakland Hills. This holds true in So Cal, too. I got to go visit the very ritzy neighborhood of Claremont Hills, where the rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg lives.

But there are more! In So Cal, if “Beach” comes after a name, it’s expensive. Long Beach, Huntington Beach. That one is not so hard to figure out, even though there aren’t any beach neighborhoods in my neck of the woods. The one that surprised me was “Ranch.” If you have “Ranch” at the end of a name, it is also ritzy.

So I asked my boyfriend and anthropological guide for the day, “Does that include ‘Rancho’?”

“No,” he said. “Rancho is different.”

Hmm….These people are surprisingly subtle. They bear watching. Pay attention!