Thursday, September 27, 2012

Renting a Place for Life


As I mentioned in an earlier post, I flew back to New Jersey ahead of my family, giving my wife (she still doesn’t know I flew business class) a chance to get used to having to handle the kids by herself full-time. Yuppers, after an extended post-earthquake transition period involving the labyrinthine process of obtaining a green card legally, battling to no avail the immeasurable incompetence of the stewards of our health care system, bringing our new baby daughter into the world while managing not to take our eternally fighting and screaming sons out of it, and countless changes in plans for the future – move to Oregon (we flew out to make sure we’d actually like it), move to North Carolina (we drove down to make sure we’d like it), move to the Washington, DC area (until we drove down and I remembered how ridiculous the traffic is), go back to school to bring my forensics education up to date and finally get that crime scene investigation job (this idea will be forever on the table, somewhere between the napkins and the Tabasco), move to Summit, New Jersey or somewhere close to one of the trains that go there (for a business venture that would eventually fall through), stay in East Hanover since by this time our son was registered for kindergarten as well as fall soccer and my wife had made a bunch of friends in town (while my own social life existed almost entirely on my laptop), and finally, in a development that occurred while I was still doing pushups on the in-laws’ tatami floors, move out to Long Island to manage someone’s growing butcher shop collection (the guy decided to hire me on nothing more than a relative’s recommendation and my intense good looks)  – I am, I think, about to return to the world of socio-economic utility.

If that last sentence has you feeling like you’ve just been woken up mid-meeting by a co-workers hand-slap to the back of your head then you’ve got a handle on how I’ve felt for the last twelve months. (yada yada, poor me…)