A new job

13/12 - I got the call when I was in the Sherwin-Williams store in Natomas. While they took care of the product transfer, I stepped into their cavernous warehouse and answered the call from an unfamiliar number.

"We'd like to offer you the job," said the woman on the other line. 

"I accept," I said with no hesitation. 

I got the job as an office technician in the mental health office of San Quentin State Prison in Marin County. That was the end of a job search that lasted damn near two years, back to when I was laid off from Bleacher Report while waiting for a train in a crowded train station in Paris, in January 2017. 

Relief is the only thing I felt. Weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I wanted to sit down on top of a five-gallon bucket of paint in the warehouse because my knees had gone a little weak. I was, and still am, simply ecstatic that I no longer have to write a cover letter and fill out my education and work history for job applications. 

It's been a year and a half since I returned to California from France. I have no concrete number, but I estimate that I sent out between 150 and 200 applications. Since September, when I connected with a job developer through the California Department of Rehabilitation (it turns out that my heart condition makes me disabled), I have turned in more than 70 applications.