Today is Friday the 13th.
Many people consider it an unlucky day. Personally, any day you wake up in Bakersfield is an unlucky day in my book, so today is just another day at the office for me.
Luck is something that's been in exceedingly short supply these last few years. There have a lot of sleepless nights. Sleepless weeks of sleepless nights. When I lost my job. When the boyfriend lost his. When we lost the house. And when we ultimately moved here. That was a month of sleepless nights all by itself.
But recently it seemed my luck had changed. Ever since I returned from my unplanned family leave back in February, I've had more work that I could possibly imagine just a few short months ago. A few of the projects have been out of LA, but the bulk of the work, and several new steady clients, are from right here in Bako. I was able to enjoy my newfound good fortune for a couple of days, but then the sleepless nights returned with a new fear...
We might not be able to leave now.
Even after we bought the house, we still imagined we'd be headed back to LA, if not tomorrow, then in the near future. Once the economy revived and things returned to something resembling normal, the opportunities in the city would blossom and we'd throw the house up for rent and hightail it back over the mountains. But that doesn't appear to be how things are going to shake out.
The economy is limping along in the most anemic of "recoveries". And the advertising business I once knew is gone, wiped out in a tsunami of new media. I still get daily job updates for greater LA and the pickins are less than slim. Full-time jobs are a thing of the past, especially for someone my age. And more and more of the contract work is being run through bid sites where you have to compete against the whole wide world, playing "how-low-can-you-go" with Sanjay in Bangalore. I recently saw one interesting project that seemed right up my alley, but then noticed the current bid on the job was from someone in Moldova for $1.26 an hour.
But no worries. I had more than enough local work here.
And that's the problem.
I can't imagine turning my back on this now. It's taken me almost two years to get steady work here and the thought of trying to do it all over again somewhere else is frightening. Especially in someplace like LA which is swimming in out of work ad people. As hard as it may be to accept, I'm beginning to think we may be stuck here.
That's what I think about, wide awake at night.
In bed.
Flicking the cockroaches off me.
PS. Friday the 13th appears to have already hit Blogger. It was down all morning and now I see yesterday's post vanished. C'est la vie.
