2011

[illusionofjoy]

"Oh my god! 2011 sucked!" or some variation thereof was the repeated theme on my Facebook timeline since yesterday afternoon. If my very informal non-survey is any indication, it seems like I'm the only one thinking, "you know, 2011 wasn't so bad, all things considered."

At the beginning of the year my domestic partner True and our daughter Madeline moved into what had been effectively a bachelor pad with too much extra space. It didn't take long for the sun room to become a playroom and eventually the "captured bedroom" which I'd been using as an office/recording room became the baby's room. The remaining bedroom, long a storage space for my many mystery boxes was briefly occupied by True's niece who ultimately decided that Pittsburgh wasn't the place for her. It is now the office/recording room.

Speaking of recording, freed from the stress and chaos of the "flop house," I was finally able to be creative again. I finished No One Expects An Inquisition and let it loose on the world in November. I make no promises, but I feel that it won't take me five years to record another album. It is as if I've wandered out of the woods and now know which direction I am walking once more.

Arguably the biggest thing to happen to me in 2011 was the loss of my job. For over seven years I was employed by The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in the Pittsburgh office. A restructuring of the organization meant that pretty much everyone working in the Pittsburgh office, myself included, was laid off in the summer of 2011. The bank finally closed it's doors for good in December.

You might expect me to be more out of sorts about losing my job. Honestly, I find it, at most, an annoyance. I suppose most of that can be attributed to the fact that I pretty much saw it coming. The writing had been on the wall for ages as to what was going to happen to the Pittsburgh office and rather than scrambling around and getting myself twisted in knots, I decided to roll with it.

It's not that the situation is ideal; for one thing True and I are hoping to buy a house within the next five years and you can't get a mortgage on unemployment. However, I look at it this way: in the hierarchy of job loss, a layoff trumps a firing. Sadly, it is also better to get fired than to quit - in the United States when one quits there is no social safety net as the law takes the side of the employer over "the ungrateful leech" known as the employee. Seeing as how this ungrateful leech was good enough to keep around until the very end, I left my job with a severance package and the ability to collect unemployment compensation without having to jump through hoops.

While I've been attempting to scavenge the barren wasteland of America's modern economy for a new job, I've enjoyed something most young fathers don't get to: seeing my little girl every day. Up until July, I didn't see Madeline for about nine hours each day. Once I'm back to the grind, I'm sure I'll miss the time I could be spending with her while she's so little.

Overall, I think in 2011 I found some sort of strange peace. Everything everyone tells me I should be feeling - stress from job loss and unemployment, stress from being a new parent, etc. - just isn't happening to me. I like it.