On the (Cleveland)-Plus Side

It's now been a week since I got laid off. I've been measuring it in these terms, just like I remember measuring time elapsed after a devastating breakup -- e.g., "at this time last month, everything was fine...."

So I'm going to try and end this week on an upbeat note. In the spirit of Clare's Three Beautiful Things (Clare is, coincidentally, also out of work right now), here are some advantages to my situation:

1. I now know what time the mailman comes, as well as the garbage truck. Added bonus: I've gotten a feel for who's home on my street during the day, based on whether or not they've brought their garbage cans back in. Turns out there are a lot of folks around, which is always a good thing.

2. Whenever they ask me for money, I always tell panhandlers "Sorry, I can't help you. I just lost my job." Now, I'm not lying to them. (Everyone knows it's bad luck to lie to bums and hobos.)

3. I can start to systematically go through the list I used to keep on my desk titled, "Things I would be doing if I wasn't at work." One of those things is to explore each floor of the Cleveland Public Library downtown, particularly Foreign Language, so I can do some comforting left-brain stuff like boning up on a few of the many languages I can read marginally, like German, Italian, Russian, and Dutch.

4. I am going to be doing some pro bono work with the Cleveland Memory Project. This is, essentially, crossing enemy lines. But frankly, my vision for connecting Cleveland to its past (and thus, enabling it to reach its future) is much, much more in line with Bill Barrow's than with the methods of my former employer. And I've just got to use what I've got to do right by Cleveland.

5. I can bake bread every day, if I want to. When I feel untethered, this is what I always go back to. Because jobs come and go, but bread is forever.