I was once speaking to a former female co-worker about waiting to hear the results of a job interview I had been to. I talked about being impatient. I talked about hating that lack of control that is inherently part of the job finding process for the job seeker.

Her response was "Now you know how women feel when waiting for a guy to call."

(At this point in the conversation, I went into my whole women's lib spiel about how women should feel at liberty to call up men and ask men on dates and all that stuff. Then she went into her thing about how things are different in the south. And then after a few more comments back and forth, she and I eventually decided to disagree and we finally digressed back to our original conversation.)

The whole job search thing is somewhat powerless. I guess that is one of the advantages to working for oneself. But is it really? In that situation it seems one would be trying to sell himself all the freakin' time. So for those of us who resign ourselves to work for "the man" (or "the person" to keep on the women's liberation theme), we just have to keep plucking away until we figure something out. This can really be tough if the job seeker isn't currently employed (for obvious reasons).

Then there's that whole thing of settling. If the job search is taking a long time, eventually a person will wear down, lower his (or her) standards, and apply for lower level and/or lower paying jobs. Eventually one of those will bite. Then it's a choice between settling for a while and accepting a less than ideal position in order to pay some bills and have some form of employment, or does one just wait for that ideal job to come along.

This whole "earning a living" thing can be a challenge.

Tonight I watched an Afghan (or Indian or something - it was in Farsi with subtitles) movie called "The Cyclist". (The following contains spoilers.) It was filmed in 1989 and told the story of this Afghan dude whose wife was really sick. In order to pay the hospital bills so she could get basic care he needed to come up with some quick cash. This was a poor refugee from Afghanistan, and he wasn't going to make enough money digging wells or doing any other of the cheap labor jobs given to the Afghans. So this con-artist came up with this scheme where dude would pedal his bike for 7 days straight. When getting the movie, I thought, cool... a movie about a guy that does a 7 day marathon ride. Ends up that wasn't it. Anyway, dude agrees. So he starts pedaling an old junker bike in circles within this small city courtyard. Crazy. The guy can barely even straighten the handlebars. So the con guy makes all these bets and they have a referee to ensure that dude doesn't cheat and the have two sets of doctors out there, one giving sustenance spiked with uppers for energy and the other giving him tea and such spiked with downers to try to put him to sleep. So anyway... the dude pretty much makes it (accept one night where he fell over asleep but no one noticed and they did a switch for a few hours so dude could sleep). At the end, dude didn't even want to stop riding. And the con people made a crap-load of money; probably enough to buy the hospital. And then the movie ended. So it was about the suffering of this one dude for his cause and the willingness of the people around him (even his son I would dare say) to profit from his suffering. (I'm not that good at movie analysis. I kinda got it, but the wording on the back of the DVD case helped with the my words.) I got the movie from the Nashville Public Library. Worth watching I would say.

Wonder if I could get someone to pay me to ride my bike in circles for a few days? Wonder if I could handle it when I don't even care to do 12-hour lap races due to lack of new scenery.