BASS drops today, so why aren't I writing about it?

All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog. It started out with it being all about me, but I discovered after not too long that even I didn't find myself that interesting, so I switched to talking about what I was reading. That was a good change, and I've mostly stuck to it. I'm happy to insert my own life into a discussion of what I'm reading if I think it'll make it more relevant, but I try to only make a post all about me when my own life is getting in the way so much of blogging about literature that I can't avoid it.

Now is one of those times. Today is the day Best American Short Stories 2025 comes out. For the last seven years, BASS is the one thing I've been consistent about doing. Even when I've quit on BASS, I've gone back later and finished it. Last month, I started working on the O.Henry Anthology, hoping I could finish it quickly enough to get to BASS today. I didn't. I'm only about halfway through O.Henry, and I'm not moving in any great hurry. I think I owe readers an explanation of what's going on.

Job front

I mentioned last month that I was about to start a new job, and that it was possible this job would keep me from being able to move forward with blogging. That job was as a 911 dispatcher. After more than six months of looking for work after leaving my job at NSA, I wasn't finding anything. For the most part, I wasn't even getting responses. There had been numerous instances of being completely ignored I found especially humiliating. I applied for an admissions counselor job at my alma mater, Walsh University. I was their honor graduate in 2000, and I feel like my resume since that time is nothing to sneeze at, so I thought I might at least get a call, but I didn't. I applied for a Korean language administrative job near Youngstown, about 45 minutes away. I was rejected for that without an interview, even though they're still advertising for it. How many Korean-speaking applicants do they get in Youngstown that made them so sure they didn't even need to interview me?

There have been many more indignities such as these I've had to face. Entry-level open-source intelligence analyst positions I didn't get past the first round with. Others where I've received responses that said, in coded language, that I was overqualified, no matter how much my cover letter and resume tried to account for that by explaining the unexpected change of life I've had and why it meant I was now applying for entry-level jobs. 

So when the 911 job only took into account my score on a civil service exam and my stated willingness to take it, I thought I'd better try, even though I had my doubts I'd be able to do it. I'm not a great multi-tasker, and midnight twelve-hour shifts sounded like they'd be a lot for me. They were. I've already quit that job. It seemed unlikely to me I'd ever become good at listening to four things at the same time, and I go to the bathroom more in 12 hours than all the other dispatchers I was watching did combined. So I'm back to no job, no prospects, and feeling like garbage. I still think I did the only morally permissible thing for me when I left the government, but it's gone even worse than my low expectations anticipated since early March.

Law School

Because I don't think my prospects are great, I've thought of going back to school. I took the LSAT in the beginning of October, and I'll find out the results on Friday. When I was taking practice tests, I wasn't doing that great, but on the actual test, I felt like I did amazing. That also had something to do with my decision to leave the 911 job. That job requires about 4-6 months of training before you're a real dispatcher, and after taking the test, I felt like I would have probably just gotten paid for those months of training before leaving to go to law school. That didn't feel like a fair thing to do to a kind of poor city that needs every dollar it has. 

Maybe I'm overly confident here, and maybe my LSAT score won't be that great, but if it is about where I think it is, I only intend to apply to one school, and I only intend to go if I get a full ride or something very close to it. I don't need more student loans at my age. If I can get this deal, then law school seems like the best bet for me. Even with all the doomsday prophecies about AI taking entry-level law jobs, I think this is a better choice than anything else I can come up with right now. I don't need the top job at the top firm. I just need a job. 

So close to retired and yet not quite there

I'm very lucky, and I know that. I have a pension now. Because the government drawdown included an offer for early retirement, I am now getting paid every month to do nothing. I get paid about as much as a technician at Jiffy Lube has to work 40 hours a week to make. In addition, my parents, who are beyond thrilled to have one of their children living near them, have helped us out financially with the move back. Without them, I wouldn't have been able to absorb all these months without work. I have a lot to be grateful for. 

With all that good fortune, though, I'm still not quite able to really retire, at least not if I want to live more than hand-to-mouth from now until I die. We got a late start on our 401K savings, and shaving off the last five years of my government career when I was making my highest salary really killed any hope I had of making up the ground. I'm going to have to leave what I have saved there for a long time and hope it grows if I want it to help when I really am too old to be able to work. That means I have to find something now.

When I first started looking for work, I wanted a real career like the one I had just before retiring. I was looking for something challenging and interesting. The longer I went without getting something like that, the more I started to think I'd be happy to do anything. Maybe, I thought, it'd be better to have a kind of ordinary job, one that didn't require me to learn anything new, because that would leave me free to blog and read and write. I don't need much in terms of salary. I just need a job of some sort. But when I apply for those jobs, no matter how much I try to dumb down my resume, I don't get calls. 

If I were really retired...

If I were able to really retire, I wouldn't go to law school. Law is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing I can think of. In fact, I'm not sure I'd even spend any more time than I am spending currently on literature (unless I somehow got paid to do this blog, and that was the thing making it possible for me to stop working, but that is never going to happen). 

When I left my job, the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do with my life was return to studying one question: Does God exist? Since I was sixteen, it's been the question I've been most interested in, although for many decades of my life, I had to put that interest on hold while I did dumb things like join the Marine Corps, go to grad school, get married, have kids, and work to support a family for over twenty years. 

Lately, I've found myself listening to podcasts and looking, at a beginner level, into philosophical discussions about God's existence. If I didn't have any responsibilities with my life, I can easily see that being what I'd do with most of my day every day. 

Of course, the question of whether God exists goes beyond philosophy and requires an understanding of science, math, history, linguistics, and literature, all of which I could dig into as much as my old brain could handle if I didn't have to worry about working. And maybe my current background in literature and even literary theory might be useful in thinking about the God question. Since most prominent thinkers involved in the discussion surrounding God's existence don't have backgrounds in literature, I might even be useful to such a discussion. So if I were really retired, I probably would continue to read literature critically, but all the other stuff I'd be reading would definitely change my output. 

"Isn't the ontological argument just a modus ponens argument that can be undercut using a modus tollens argument in response?"

Put it all together

To sum up everything I'm thinking in one run-on, stream-of-consciousness sentence, which is, it so happens, more or less how I actually think about my life at least once an hour, it would run thus:

I don't want to work anymore but I still need to work but I can't find much of anything so I should go do something that will help me find a job but that will require a lot of work and even thought I might enjoy that work I wouldn't enjoy it as much as other things and for the time being since I have some time maybe I should keep blogging about literature since I've been doing that for a long time but also maybe I should be getting ready for law school or maybe I should be studying the philosophy of religion since that's really the thing I'm most interested in in all the world but then again that's a pretty big subject and I'm new to it and probably too old to ever become an expert in it so maybe I should just read about it on the side and focus mostly on literature since I do sort of know about that already or maybe I'm dumb and I should quit thinking about stuff that doesn't matter and only think about a job and taking care of my family and what's wrong with me that I can't find a job. 

So to sum up, I may or may not be blogging on BASS this year, or ever.