greetings from Brooklyn

I've been a little low since getting back from the Memorial Day festivities, partly because of money concerns. Even though my new medication has gotten me more normalized than I've been in a couple of years, I still haven't felt quite equal to going back to work, at least not the kind of work I used to do. Because I only have the absolute minimum work experience to do publishing publicity, meaning it would be almost impossible to land a job, I'm probably looking at administrative/executive assistant work again. And I always had trouble keeping those kinds of jobs because I generally got bored. Especially when I worked in professional firms (e.g., law and engineering), there was a certain ceiling, and a certain limit to how much I could learn about the business of the company. When I'd learned what I could learn, and risen as high at possible (which was often no rise at all), I would get bored, and start to think that I was very unhappy trading most of my waking hours for whatever the salary was (and I had pretty good salaries for a lot of the nineties, less so later on).

When I was having trouble leaving the house -- that is, up until about six weeks ago -- the plan was always for Barry to go back to work and for me to do whatever I could manage. But Barry's progress has been extremely slow. He's been going to a Department of Labor career counseling center, but has generally let weeks lapse between signing up for information sessions or meetings with the counselor. He's not dealing well with the idea of career change, but since the industry he worked in for many years basically no longer exists (NYC garment center), he needs to learn how to do something else. But he's been balking and balking. (Some years ago, he was unemployed for about seven months, and I tried to convince him to change his line of work, saying that I didn't think there'd be a living for him in the garment center until he was ready to retire. He went for career counseling, but when some options were suggested to him that required some retraining, he *really* balked and just waited until he was offered a garment center job. He only went to community college very briefly, and then mostly to avoid the draft, so he doesn't have much higher ed experience, and no school experience at all for thirty-odd years.)

I went to see Allen Toussaint in Prospect Park the other night (so, so amazing!), and spotted someone I'd interviewed with some years back, the head of a record group that puts out New Orleans, funk, and old rap and soul CDs. I'd almost gone to work for him, but at the last minute, I asked if he could possibly adjust the salary a bit or else let me have half-days on Fridays, and the deal went south. (I had been working at a law firm four days a week, at such a large hourly rate that I was earning over $40K a year, and the new job would have payed around $35K for five days, and I don't remember if that included bennies.) Now, of course, I would love to have that job at $35K, so I'm going to e-mail the guy. At the time that I applied, he was so busy that he hadn't had time to interview assistants, and I'm hoping he still needs someone, even a few years down the line. I think I could tolerate that office job.The Bright Mississippi