The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Posted
Apr 19, 1999 - 15:04

Tagged
Personal

Relocation

This semester has been my first full semester without attending any classes at the University of Idaho, due mainly to the fact that my money is running out. During the course of the last few weeks, as my impending poverty became more and more obvious, I considered what I might do, work-wise, around here, or elsewhere, in order that I might live in the level of comfort to which I am accustomed. The answer became obvious: it is time to leave Moscow.

I have been surfing Yahoo Employment for a couple of months now, noticing with interest the dizzying number of jobs in the Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area that pay well and for which I am quite qualified. I have decided, after some deliberation, to move to that area, so that I can work towards building some kind of reputation in my chosen field. I have been faithfully emailing resumes to various potential employers for web development positions.

The problem lies in my utter lack of motivation lately. On, or around, the first of March, I vowed that I would be moving in two weeks, around the middle of march. It is now mid-April and this relocation seems a long way off. There is much I need to do here in order to get ready to move — parsing my house for the junk, finding a place to sleep in the Bay Area, and making sure I have enough money for the move.

I was hoping to delay my relocation until I’d been offered a position and had a definite day on which I was to report to work. That was my initial plan, at any rate. It came as a great surprise to me that, despite my adequacy for all of the positions I sent resumes for, I have received no definite appointments for an interview of any kind. I have concluded that the Idaho address on my resume hampers my marketability slightly in the Bay Area.

Despite my having so much to do around here, including sorting through all my stuff to determine what I keep and what I dispose of, finding prices on a storage box, notifying my landlord, and all that stuff, I have spent way too many days doing nothing, save sitting on my couch and watching cable. I seem to have a little difficulty kicking myself in the ass and getting the stuff that needs done completed. As yet, I have done absolutely nothing to mark any progress whatsoever toward my goal. Sooner or later, my money’s going to run out, at which point, I’ll be stuck here, forever.

You see, Moscow is sort of a strange place. If you grew up in Southern Idaho, or some other lame place, Moscow seems like paradise when you get here and live here for a little while. After a bit, however, it begins to get routine—nay, oppressive—due to its miniscule size and lack of opportunity. For the unmoneyed, however, it is nearly impossible to move, once the daily grind and the $6/hour wage takes hold. At minimum wage, it is quite impossible to save enough money to move anywhere further away than Lewiston.

Of course, most of my friends suggest that I go down for a week, leave everything up here just as it is, get the interviews, snag a position, and fly back up to fetch a U-Haul truck. Perhaps that is the answer. Perhaps it will be easier to find a position and a place to live in the area, rather than from across a thousand miles of telephone lines and several websites. It certainly warrants consideration.

An acquaintance of mine from Wisconsin has an alternate plan. They intend to load up a U-Haul some day in the near future, and just drive out, finding a living space and a job as soon as they arrive. It doesn’t seem like I could do worse, opportunity-wise, in the Bay Area than I could in Moscow, but I seem to have this unconscious fear of committing to anything. Well, that’s not quite true. I can commit all day to deciding to do something, but I seem to lack that subtle, but necessary, element — activity. It’s one of those things that I wish I could eliminate from my psyche. Perhaps California will bring about certain changes in me that Moscow has as yet failed to induce. Perhaps, I’m just babbling.