Bitterland

Gather round children and I will tell you a tale of the early days of internet, back before MySpace and Facebook and blogging. Back then, we talked to each other on news groups: Usenet news. It was great; if I had had problem with my computer, I'd just post it on comp.mac and I'd get an answer within the day. Yeah, there are groups like that now, but this was highly concentrated brains. Once I got an answer from the guy who wrote the software for my mac. There were fun groups too: the alt. universe. I used to lurk in alt.callahans and alt.bitterness. I loved alt.bitterness. Everyone seemed so smart and tired and urbane. Oh, and bitter. I loved reading about their bitter attitudes and their bitter problems and their bitter lives. I tried posting once, but it wasn't truly bitter. You see, I was not a bitter woman. Not one bit. Bitterness was a foreign country which I could see from a distance, but I'd never landed there, not even briefly. I felt like a pretty lucky person, and that I was living a life I'd pretty much planned.

So then 2008 happened. I have my visa to that country now.

But I won't go there. I've seen it, and it's not a nice place. Not even to visit.

Now whining, that's different; I could take a long vacation in whine country.

First Post

I got the news two weeks ago: the agency where I've worked as a therapist for the past 19 years is going out of business after January 30th. So, I'm a middle-aged woman without a job, without a husband to take up the slack, in a poor county in a poor state in a bad economy.


Oh yeah, and my dog died 3 weeks ago.


I'm doing better today than I have in a while, so I'll take stock of my strengths: I'm well liked, I'll have a good reference; I have my license, so I can take insurance payments; my house and car are both paid for; unlike my some of my colleagues, I don't have to worry about supporting kids.


I've put up my resume on monster.com, and applied at one agency. It's for a supervisor position, which I haven't done for many years, but I'm pretty sure I can do it if necessary. I'll probably hear from them in a few weeks one way or the other. I'm considering private practice, but I don't know how that would work with unemployment insurance...I don't know how quickly I could build a practice to support myself.


I intend to use this blog to document my progress in this endeavor. And vent.


I have a sense of participating in an historical moment. Like voting for Obama, only without bumper stickers.