All good things

1. Before moving to Liverpool, Lynette and I lived in the second rainiest city in the United Kingdom. This spring has felt so much sunnier than my last, and I’ve happily and hungrily drunk it all up. Gus and I spend a lot of our time at the park a ten minute’s walk from home. He’s three now, and I can finally trust him off-leash if I bring the good cheese with me. He runs in big, ecstatic loops through the wildflowers and the long grass.
   

2. The other day I told a friend that, over the past couple months, my journalism career had seemingly risen from the dead; she told me it had never gone anywhere.
   
   According to a memory on my phone, my UK visa got approved a year ago yesterday. I’ve lived in England, officially, for a year now: a year during which I have struggled enormously with the precarious state of my writing career, as well as the general difficulties of moving to a different country. Since leaving my last staff job nearly two years ago, I’ve also been going through an identity crisis, and so has the journalism industry.
   
   I wanted to quit. I was ready to quit. I applied to dozens—hundreds—of non-journalism jobs in our old city, here in Liverpool, and in neighboring Manchester: copywriting and editing jobs, library jobs, teaching jobs, civil service jobs, high street retail jobs, restaurant jobs. I’ve never heard back, even for an interview. Not even for the community coffee shop and garden where I thought I made a good impression on my tour and for whose loooong application form I waxed poetic about my favorite vegetable (garlic, if I really had to pick, though I also love potatoes; these are very pedestrian answers, I realize now, but I was being honest for some reason). Not even an interview!!!

   So I started dog sitting, and dog walking, and going to other people’s houses and sleeping there while watching their dogs. I have had a not-small amount of shame about this, which I’ve finally decided to get over. There’s nothing shameful about having to pick up odd jobs to make a living; writers and artists without generational wealth have always and will always (until the revolution, at least) have to cobble together whatever gigs they can find to survive.