Limbo

Theologians assure me that the hilarious party game "The Limbo" is based on an old christian myth. Souls that weren't chummy enough with Jesus to get into heaven but were just too well dressed to go to hell ended up in a halfway state called Limbo. Unlike heaven, Limbo doesn't have a theme park and waterslides, but unlike hell, it doesn't have office work (oh SNAP!) . Since everyone in Limbo is well dressed, no one wants to get down on hands and knees when they want to walk under a stick, so they developed the style of bendy walking that we see in the modern Limbo today.

It turns out that I, like a well dressed atheist, am also in a sort of limbo. And not the fun kind that's easier on roller skates. Currently I'm stuck oscillating between two towns (Rossland and Revelstoke), with nowhere to live and no job. That on its own would be no problem, because I'm not about to run out of money and there's still time to find work and housing and all that stuff. The problem is that I seem to take one step forward on each of these fronts, and then just as I'm about to write a blog post celebrating my successes, quickly take a step back of identical size. As you can see, this situation would be much harder on roller skates.

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook (or as I like to call them, my REAL friends) may have seen a status update claiming that I'd found a house in Rossland, and the only thing that would draw me away from this house to Revelstoke was if I got a job doing admin stuff for a heliskiing company. Well, now that house has fallen through. Which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't cancelled all the other house enquiries I was making, but I had. So now I'm starting from scratch. And before you get all excited and claim that this is God trying to get me to go in The Sound of Music, I haven't heard back from them either. Maybe they're just getting delayed finding enough wimples to fit all their nuns, but it seems more likely that they ditched me in favor of Beard Guy.

So, back to square one on housing. The job search is also back to square one, but to be honest it never really left square one so much as getting really close to the edge of square one and looking hopefully at square two. In a devious catch 22, I met a guy while hitching from Rossland to Revelstoke who told me that the Rossland pizza joint needed someone to fill a vacancy. After arriving in Revelstoke I sent the pizza shop an email with my resume etc. Lo and behold, my aggressive self-marketing campaign paid off, and the next day they asked me to come in for an interview. OK, sounds good so far. The catch was that the email came in on Saturday morning, asking me to come in at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon. But I was in Revelstoke, and had no way of getting to Rossland in time (they're 300ish kms apart and my primary mode of transport is being moderately shaven and waving my thumb). So I emailed them (no response) and tried calling them a few times, but couldn't get through.

The diabolical thing is that I wouldn't have found out about the job unless I went to Revelstoke (and thus met the informative fellow hitchhiker), but by going to Revelstoke I prevented myself from going to the interview. I hope that anybody out there who believes in intelligent design reads this and realises that either it's wrong or God is a bit perverse.

Hopefully this week will bring some progress. I'll keep you posted.

Is it Fate?

First, to clear the air - lots of things have happened and I'm behind in my posts. I'll get some stuff up ASAP, but I need to do real life things like sort flights and get insurance and fix my poor poor skis. However, this is too significant to sit around on my laptop for weeks.

Most young boys grow up wanting to be firemen, or cowboys, or merchant bankers. I always wanted to be a 19th century German nihilist. While other lads were playing racist shoot-em-up games or conducting risky imaginary financial transactions, I was trimming my imaginary moustache, puffing on my imaginary pipe and keeping a keen eye out for the ubermensch.

And so, in later life, when I discovered The Sound of Music, it was natural that I would form a deep and lasting bond with this exceptional piece of musical theatre. Admittedly, the main characters are Austrians, and the whole point of the thing is that they're explicitly not Germans, but it's still great. How could you not fall in love with characters like Captain Von Trapp, the strong but secretly sensitive submarine captain, or Maria, who casts off the shackles of Christian pity to embrace the shackles of married life.

And so, it was with much excitement that I saw this entry in the Revelstoke Classifieds. Surely it can't be mere chance that one of the ski towns I'm thinking of heading to is performing The Sound of Music. And auditions are this Thursday! And the audition song is "Edelweiss"!

I suspect that when Nietzsche commanded us to embrace fate he wasn't thinking of travelling 13000kms to audition for a community musical. However, The Sound of Music hadn't even been written in Nietzsche's day, and I reckon he would have loved it.

As the Mother Superior would have said, "What is it Maria you can't face?"