Interrupted

As I've already mentioned, I've been sleeping better since the RIF actually happened. But I must say, I have been having a lot of strange dreams lately. I often have vivid dreams, and I'm going to take the fact that I'm having so many of them as a good sign that I'm finally getting enough rest and my creative batteries are starting to recharge.

On the other hand, the subject matter may be an indication that I'm not completely at ease these days.

Sunday night:
• Someone was trying to perform some operation that I was convinced was going to kill me.
• I'm in a coma for what seems like months, if not years at a time, and every time I wake up, the organization of the company has changed, with only a few people providing any kind of continuity for me.
• I've been laid off again, only this time they've got extra security detail (in tidy white uniforms, like a milkman or 50's gas station attendant), and I have all this extra crap in my office that I have to take home -- papers, books, boxes, several extra pairs of shoes, roller blades, it goes on and on. Where the hell did all this crap come from?

Last night:
• I'm driving to the office when suddenly my car veers hard to the right, flipping over when it hits the curb. I pull myself out, more or less unscathed, but I figure I should at least get myself checked out, so I ask someone to call 911 for me. The call never gets made, but as I walk through the field towards the nearby gas station, I find my cellphone lying in the grass (it must have fallen out of my pocket during the flip) so I try calling myself but at some point the call gets disconnected.
• I'm at the office of the company that I'm going to interview at, although the interview isn't today. I guess I'm just here to drop off my resume. But, hmmmm, I don't seem to have it with me, despite having a huge stack of papers -- notes, random junk mail, paper recycling -- in my briefcase. Seems like a nice office though. I see a few ex-coworkers from the last job who have already started. It smells busy. You can hear the buzz of...quiet. Of people working. Ain't no screwin' around here.
• I couldn't find my car in the parking lot, so now I'm riding with Earl, a buddy and helper (henchman?) of a friend. Somehow my car got taken away in a mix-up during some weird deal that went down. (drugs? money laundering? I have no idea.) On the way to the car, Earl spies a friend of his that's involved in a scuffle and tries to intervene, managing to get himself shot as we make our getaway. As we go off road through some nasty hills, he tells me he's fine... but I know he'll be dead before we get to my car. Watching us pass over the rough terrain, I wonder if my car could possibly make the journey back even if I found it.

So yeah, weird dreams.

Anyway, I think I was finally settling into things by yesterday morning. Despite the weird dreams, I had slept soundly. Over the weekend I'd started reading Journey to the West again (which I started reading about 4 years ago) and was planning on getting back to it later in the day. I also watched an on-line tutorial on character animation using Flash and thought I could either look for more tutorials or try doing a few tests on my own. I studied a little Chinese while eating breakfast (leftover pumpkin pie from the previous day's "friends Thanksgiving"), and was surfing online for places to learn massage therapy when the phone rang.

It's a woman from the career transition service that's being provided as part of our severance package. They've got a bunch of resources and some seminars that I figure might be a good way to get my head back into the game of looking for a new job. Not 5 minutes later, I get another call -- a headhunter. We chat only briefly before I get a call-waiting beep. It's a hiring manager from a local high-tech company -- he got my name from a former coworker.

I have to admit that I was a little troubled when I met up with a bunch of folks last week and heard that most of them had already been contacted by headhunters or had job interviews lined up.

So I got my calls, and I have to schedule the interview after I'm sent the guy my cleaned up resumé.

And I've got to clean up my resumé. And it seems like a really exciting opportunity, and honestly... I'm not so excited. I mean, I am. I'm excited. I can tell how cool it would be to work on the project he's describing. And I can tell I'll be engaged. But I can also tell that I'll feel in-over-my-head again, and I'll have to put in the extra hours and work my brains out, again. And I wonder if I've had enough rest (or will have had enough rest) to dive back into this. And there's a little voice in the back of my head that keeps asking me if this is really what I want to be doing.

And I know I haven't had enough time to sort that one out.

And that doesn't even get to the FEAR and the well of SELF-DOUBT that always threatens to drown me.

Bah.