2nd Interview---ACED!

Yes, I just picked up two jobs in two days.
This last job is courtesy the Saiderrific Saidy, Siren of Blogdom, who turned me on to some links. I also got a call yesterday from a Manhattan-based place for an interview, also through the sources she found, but dig this--I'm going to pass on it.

"Why?!", you ask!

You know, I'm a little mystified myself. Let me say that I guess I got a bad vibe from the place. The clients are persistantly mentally ill, like with my present people, and I guess I must be ready to move on from that level of care. Persistant illness is a disorder that gets regulated through medication and behavior modification. I feel like I can do more than that for people. What it takes to help the persistantly mentally ill is kindness, patience, and structure. Surprisingly, after I typed that out, I realize I have those abilities. (You would never guess it from my Antics While Driving.) Many, or anyone can do this for them, both professionally and personally (and please, do).

But I have a little more ability that I want to put to the test.

My therapist told me that I'm compulsively analytical, and he was right. It is a living hell on my social life, but it's awesome in the therapist's seat. Awesome, I think, for my client, and awesome for me to go diving into those psyches and mine around--it's like a coral reef diver looking for precious stones. The scenery and the treasures are without comparison. That's right, I'm talking about you. Your mind is a wonderland. (Take THAT John Mayer.)

(Oh crap, I just went to his site to get those lyrics and it was playing the whole of a new song that actually rocks.)

So anyway, that's the job offer I took. Oh, um, make that job offers that I took. Yes, I accepted both jobs. One of them is a 'traveling' therapist. I'll be doing home-based therapy for families who request help. That'll be my evening gig which I can do as little or as much as I want. My daytime gig will be working at two nursing homes as a psychoanalyst for the patients. I'm getting work farmed out to me through a contracted therapist. He supervises me and keeps me in line with his mode of therapy, but I do the face to face.

What do they pay?

Are you seated?

Hey, what is the ettiquette on blogging financial stuff, anyway? I've never read salary information in the blogs I've scanned, nor in the ones I subscribe to. Isn't that funny? I've read some EXTREMELY personal and adult content, but nobody wants to give up the bling-bling.

Well, I won't be the first one to divulge. If you move I'll move! I'll just say that by the time I get my license in NY next year, I should have enough bling socked away to open my own office in sunny downtown Manha'in! Because I'm going to work like a hard-up pooch in this next year, I swear it. Then let's see where I move to when my lease is up.

Which brings me to...

To Live And Die In Harlem

I'm conflicted now. I don't dislike my apartment. It has what I need and I'm not cramped. That isn't to say it's big. Nor is it to say that I get to have hot water in the AM exactly when I need it. But I'm sticking by my decision, and when I want to get a shower that I can't access from my pipes, I can always go downtown to my health club.

Yet, I've mentioned before, I see myself moving into one of these new residential buildings springing up all over the place. They must be built by the same architects--red brick with beige brick cornices, and floor to ceiling windows. Looking inside from the street, you can see how roomy and geometric these apartments are. That's why I think they must be rediculously expensive. The ones on Broadway and Amsterdam, overlooking the Museum of Natural History?? in my dream neighborhood?? surely must be.

But what bothers me more these days is not the cost of where I want to go. It's the fact THAT I want to go. Why do I want to go?

I'm afraid to say it, because I think I know. I can't let it be true. I don't even want to type it.

I'll type it.

I think my people are bringing me down.
I've left some phone messages with my cousins, but none have called me back. True, I choose to call when I knew one specific cousin wouldn't be home, but she still hasn't called back. The others might have been ready to answer, and it was scary just trying, but now, it feels like they don't really want to call. Like they're worried that I came to NYC to scrub off of them. Or like I've got some kind of disaster that I'm waiting to visit on their cozy familial relationships. After all, I am the son of the prodigal niece, who picked up and left her marriage and all of them shortly after I was born. Well, she came and got me, so I'm cool with her decision, but hmmmmm, maybe they really weren't? But why would cousins MY age and younger give a crap? Maybe what they heard their parent and other matriarchs say?

Well, that's not something I take personally. In fact, if true, then I'm off the hook to reconnect with them, aren't I? One angst-ridden challenge--ELIMINATED. No sweat off my shnozz. I'll try a few more times though because I'm aware that I've begun and ended this whole scenario within the recesses of my own avoidant and paranoid little mind.

But how about all my peeps around me who are NOT related to me? Why do I want to leave them? Because I can? Or more like, because they won't? See, the Bradhurst Court that I mentioned is part of this neighborhood's improvement. It's happening all over--if they aren't brand-new, they are renovating the existing buildings inside out. I could move into either one of these, but I'm seeing myself going downtown to where the white people live.

There, I said it.

Reading "The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni" is tripping me out. Right now, I'm into her 70's period, where Angela Davis was captured, and she isn't afraid to call white people "whiteys", nor apologize for being angry with them and wanting, lobbying, for the Revolution that will topple white people into the streets (the one that Gil Scott Heron informed us would Not Be Televised). I'm eager to read Ms. Giovanni's book all the way through and see how she's matured in her thinking. Heck, she was almost half as young as I am now when she was writing these things, when she was just coming into her identity as a Black, and not a Negro.

But it's making me think, how loyal am I to who I really am as a Black guy in America? For a good long time, religion didn't just hide me safely from sex--it hid me from racial responsibility too. I gained the ability to say that I was a Christian first and anything else I was just incidental. Yeah, that's why I bounced my happy, naive little @$$ out to Missouri. That's where I learned that I was Black, whether I liked it, whether I didn't, whether I cared, whether I didn't.

I'm not Black because of any other single reason except that YOU see it. If the eyes didn't register any such thing as color, then I'd just be Alan. Or I'd be an American. Or I'd be a Christian. Or just a guy who's blog you're reading.

So why am I wanting to go more south on Manhattan? Because of what MY eyes see?

For now, no. I'm not giving into that.
Right now, I'm just getting a little tired of poverty.
One of my downstairs neighbors greeted me one day a few weeks ago. She was a thin, dark little woman with a strange vocal affectation. In my mind I instantly thought; "addict". And it isn't as if I have no professional or personally-related experience to draw from. Her man was with her, and though he was bigger, he was kind of too-accomodating, you know? Like he singled me out as someone he needed to be nice to, like I could do something for him if he played his cards right. I was at the mailbox when they were coming in and he says to me, "They should put a lock on this outer door so people can get their mail in safety," as if he were trying to meet me at my fears--join with me, if you please. Heh, I got 'em, but that one wasn't it. I was glad to tell him so. But his woman wasn't having it. From within whatever personal haze she was navigating from she goes, "They all move out eventually. I seen 'em come and I seen 'em go within a year. The white people don't stay."

She was sort of scoffing at my being here! That's what it was. Did she not notice that I'm NOT white? Yet I remember seeing her when I was moving in, and she saw my white friends helping me, and I myself am not exactly a baller, so she labeled me.

You'd think that would be upsetting. Yet, like my family, if I get rejected by this community, just because I use all my consonants when I speak, or because I buy my jeans at The Gap and not at V.I.M., well, that's a cross I'll bear. Then off I go among the white people with nary a look behind me.

But this time, I'd go fully equipped with the 411. This time I won't expect to be ushered in with open arms, because this time, I won't forget who and what they see when they look at me.

This time, I'm going as an adult...When I'm Forty(ish).

Me at 3/05/2004 04:31:00 PM

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