01/05/2020
They call me Zebra November: "they" meaning persons who identify others according to the initials of their given names, and who, in doing so, adhere to the phonetic alphabet established the 1946 ICAO Second Session of the Communications Division in pronuncing the letter "Z," and to the code words finalized in 1956 in pronouncing the letter "N." An imaginary minority, in other words.
In the past day or two, I enjoyed a discussion with a local friend (maintaining the mandated distance the law now requires) about the proposition that we have experienced a series of dimensional shifts since the start of the corona pandemic in this Our Year of the Rat 2020. Although I keep to a process-based interpretation of reality, I consider theses dimensional shifts a useful metaphor in exploring my own changed experience of life since the plague began. You see, today marks the end of a long journey through the criminal underworld commonly known as the financial industry, and the beginning of my own unemployment.
While I understand many people today have begun experiencing severe financial turmoil, this morning I summarized my own feelings at that prospect as follows:
Mood of a hardcore leftist [myself] finishing their contract in the financial industry to become unemployed precisely on May Day during an economic crash.
Paraphrasing the myself of this morning, I would have trouble conveying to you in language the extraordinary degree to which I exult in that escape. I recall the gleeful email I sent yesterday to my former coworkers that I sadly couldn't transmit outside the network: "Bridges Look Pretty While Burning," read the subject line, and the body included a link to a WikiHow article instructing the reader in trapping pigeons that my former coworkers could tie to their mouses ("your computer mice, not your pet mice: that would be chaos") along with my promise to complete a prototype birdcage and breadcrumb dispenser dropping rations onto the mouse at random intervals so that the pigeon wouldn't just move the mouse, but would click it as well. Later on I joined a conference call during which I informed the other attendees that, although I worked on the database patching team, "Today I did more work with buttons."
Despite all that, I saw the team leader this morning while returning my laptop, and she said something about me coming back for another contract later on down the road. Frankly, I find the thought bizarre, but then again, she has known me long enough to know that the behavior described in the preceding paragraph exemplifies my sense of humor.
Who can say, of course, whether I will crash and burn and need to return, but I couldn't feel more thrilled than I felt today to imagine the potential shifts my experience of reality might take. I'm glad to make my introduction to you today on that note, and wouldn't choose to make it on any other. I look forward to sharing with you my life's shifting developments from today onward, and to sharing alike in those you choose to share yourselves. At least for those of us residing in the higher latitudes of the planet's northern hemisphere, I'm optimistic we can expect brighter days ahead, and then of course darker ones. As it stands, I'm down, if only to explore the potentials.
