The Despair of Poverty

Almost six months into my unemployment, I am feeling increasingly weighed down by depression and despair. I almost constantly have the urge to howl loudly and primally because the feeling is too dull to want to shed tears but too heavy to ignore it any longer. Last week I finally had to pick up my first box of food from a neighborhood food pantry. It feels so wrong when other people there were being handed towels and soap to use the shower inside the church, but I need all of the little bits of assistance I can get, and since I make too much money ($240 a week!) from unemployment, I can't qualify for food stamps. I've been in a terrible slump for the last week since I was turned down for that copywriting job at the University. It turned out to be a much niftier job than I'd originally thought and as many as thirty hours were available. I could do the job from home and I'd be working for the Park Service, the US Geological Survey, and the U of A. It would have been almost perfect. After that I couldn't find any other jobs worth applying for and now have a big blank spot in my job search log. Some other things have finally come along this week, though, so I hope to make up for it before I leave town for a few days starting tomorrow. Of course, a major development that came along a couple of days ago is a team position that Carl and I applied for at the beginning of the month. We've applied for self-storage onsite management jobs before, so we did so again when another opportunity came along. Then two days ago, we got a call from the person doing the hiring and yesterday, we found ourselves driving up to Casa Grande to meet him for a lunch appointment. The appointment was almost a bust because of a major communication breakdown in which I guess he expected us to show up at the restaurant and just know exactly who he was out of the entire dining room. We were quite angry when we thought we'd been stood up and as we were about to leave town, he called my phone and finally decided to check on us. We ended up having our interview over an hour after we'd originally scheduled it, but I'd like to think it went well in spite of things. I have no idea, really. Our being out of town is a problem for their hiring needs, so I don't feel good about them wanting to hire us. If they did, though, we would be starting a huge life change. The facility is in Apache Junction, in the furthest eastern reaches of the Valley, so far out there it's not even in Maricopa County even though it's part of the Phoenix blob. We'd be given a house, free utilities, a salary/stipend, and commission. It would be like running our own business without actually being the owners and we'd still answer to a general manager and the owners. The benefits, both financial and in terms of strengthening our relationship, would be so great. It would really fit into our plans for various things we want to accomplish as a couple. The drawbacks, though, would be living in a smallish desert town of a lot of retirees (and all of the ways in which it would not be Tucson) and I would have to again defer my full-time education. All would not be lost on the educational front, though, because Central Arizona College, the junior college for Pinal County, has a campus in Apache Junction where I'd probably be able to at least complete the basic math, chemistry, and biology courses needed for a BS in Rangeland Management. The courses would translate directly to those that I'd pay hundreds of dollars more for at the U. I don't know what else I could do from there, though, as any natural resource and agriculture courses available at CAC are held in classrooms at their science/ag campus in Coolidge, which is impossibly far away. Anyway, the storage people want to talk to us today (can't remember who's calling whom) to decide one way or the other, so Carl and I have agreed that we'll take the plunge and say that we are very interested and just hope that they are flexible enough to let us finish out our trip to Utah and then hit the ground running. We'll see. Meanwhile my UI had better show up in my bank account or I'm screwed to no end.