Hocus Focus: Ten ways to make time disappear when you should be searching for a job

T-minus 9 weeks and counting until my severance checks run out. Do I look nervous? I'm not nervous. Maybe I should be, but I'm not. Yet. Deep breaths. In. Out. Breathe. Yeah.

The key to keeping your head when looking for a job is to relax and maintain a positive outlook. I read that on a career-advice blog somewhere. I can't remember which one. I've looked at a lot of them over the past seven weeks. So, with a goal of not stressing out, I've been finding ways of keeping busy. Here are a few of them. (Okay, ten, because you know by now that I think in tens.)

1. Play with Diafol. This is actually a multipurpose activity. Playing with a kitten is a natural de-stressor. It also serves to tire him out so he sleeps through the night. And when Diafol sleeps, we all sleep better. And by we, I mean me, Drew, and Brittany, who seems to live here now. I can't really complain about her staying here. Drew was nice enough not to complain about Diafol. Though Diafol never takes a 25-minute shower and uses up all the hot water, so it's not an exact like-for-like comparison.

You say you want a resolution

It's that time of year again. The time when we all resolve to improve ourselves. This year I've actually put a bit of thought into it and have come up with 10 resolutions. (I love me a top 10 list, if you haven't noticed by now.) Without further ado ...

1. Do at least one thing every day to find a job. Okay, it's now been six weeks and change since I got laid off. I have applied for one job so far. And it wasn't even really a job. It was one of those things where they didn't have an opening at the time, but the company sounded cool and they had a link where you could upload your resume for "future openings." All through December I used the excuse that no one hires during Christmas time because they're too busy with holiday and year-end stuff. No more excuses. Time to get cracking. I have 10 weeks left until my severance runs dry. I vow to do something every day to move my search forward, whether it's applying for a job, updating my resume, researching a new company, etc. Monday through Friday that will be my job. I'll allow myself weekends off. And I'll start Wednesday, because tomorrow's a national holiday.

2. Read at least 50 books in 2019. Back in high school this would have been on the low side. I've slacked since those days. I can't have read more than 20 books this year. 25 tops. Somewhere along the line I got hooked on Mahjong Titans. What an absolute timesuck. This is a two-part resolution: stop wasting time on computer games and pick up a book. (Clarification: This doesn't include legitimate video games on the PS4, which are still allowed. This resolution is only about time-filler games on the computer. If somewhere someone over the age of 70 is playing that same game, that's the kind I'm talking about.)

Diafol 1, Christmas tree 0

Diafol has a new hobby. I'm sure he's not alone among his feline compatriots in wanting to scale the Christmas tree. I've seen enough cat videos over the years to know they love to climb stuff. He is a cat, therefore, he will claw his way up whatever obstacle presents itself, be it a living room curtain, my pant leg, or the Christmas tree.

It started off with him batting at the ornaments on the lower branches. Then he progressed to leaping up to smack things or grab at the light cords. And about a week ago he decided he would attempt to summit the entire 7 1/2 foot tree.

Drew's girlfriend Olivia suggested I get a spray bottle and blast Diafol every time he started on the tree. That works, sort of. If you do happen to catch him in the act, a spritz or two will cause him to jump down and run away from the scene of the crime. But he quickly learned that if none of us were in the room to guard the tree, it was all his.

Which was bad enough when he was only knocking ornaments off. He's a lot bigger now than when we put the tree up. We keep feeding him, he keeps growing. Given enough attempts, it was only a matter of time until he toppled the tree. Which he did this afternoon when I was in the kitchen preparing lunch. I ran in just in time to see him riding it down to the floor. I'm no artist, but it looked a bit like this:

Let's call that the Pounce per Ounce graph. As the number of attempts (Pounces) piled up, and the weight of the cat (Ounces) increased, it was inevitable the tree would come down.

It is back up now, with two support ropes anchoring it to the nearby walls. Most of the remaining ornaments are near the top of the tree. He's broken four glass balls. The others have all been removed. I try to tell him Santa won't come if he keeps it up, but as Olivia points out, he's only living up to his name.

It's a wonderful tradition

I've earned some converts. I can't go as far as "disciples." I may lack the natural charisma and leadership presence for disciples. But people are coming around on It's a Wonderful Life.

We went last night. Alec and Val, Laurel and I--and Shane. He saw my post Tuesday and wanted in. Or maybe just wanted out of the house for a night. Whatever his reasons, we were 2 1/2 couples. Might have been three couples if he'd had more time to work up the nerve to ask a certain someone in his class out. Then again, that's a heck of a first date, to triple with a bunch of old people (to them; we're not actually old), so he would have had a nearly impossible sales job on his hands.

What a turnout at the Grand Illusion. I knew they'd been running It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas for a long time, but I didn't realize quite how long. This is their 48th year of doing it. Some of the people there last night seemed like they might have been there for all 48. It's a good thing we got there early, or we'd have never found five seats together.

Watching a movie I haven't seen in years is sort of like re-reading a favorite book. Certain details pop out at me in such a way that I begin to wonder if I noticed them before and forgot them or if this is the first time I picked up on them. Like when George tells that kid to stop annoying people as he steals Mary away from him at Harry's graduation party. There is a lot more humor in this movie than it seems to get credit for, probably because it tugs so hard at the ol' heartstrings in other places.

And, yeah, I cried at the end. Again. Laurel didn't seem to notice. Maybe because she was crying too. (I noticed.)

We went out for kebabs afterward and discussed the movie. Everyone had different favorite parts. And everyone voted to go again next year. I'll just pencil that one in for now, considering tonight was only my sixth date with Laurel. If we do wind up there for the 49th annual showing, we can look back on last night as the start of a nice tradition.

Bedford Falls, here we come

Quick, name the five longest movies you've ever watched.

Did It's a Wonderful Life show up? I was at Olaf's last night with Laurel and her neighbors, Alec and Val (a nice couple slightly older than us), and we got talking about Christmas movies. None of the three of them had ever watched It's a Wonderful Life all the way through. Laurel and Alec both have seen parts, but said it was too long to sit through the entire thing. Val has never seen any of it. I tried to explain that it's not that much longer than most movies, but most people think that because they only ever see it on cable, and the commercial breaks make it run for three hours, sometimes longer.

It's kind of unfair what cable has done to It's a Wonderful Life. On the one hand, having it on some channel somewhere almost every day from Thanksgiving through New Year's means that everyone has had a chance to see it, multiple times. On the other, it's almost turned it into a punch line. Which it doesn't deserve. It's a great movie, and it fully deserves the tremendous audience it's garnered over the past 70 years. And I, despite being the only one who wasn't imbibing, may have gotten a little obnoxious about not letting that go.

But I prevailed in the end. Sometimes persistence pays off. Laurel and I and Alec and Val are going to see It's a Wonderful Life tomorrow night at the Grand Illusion, uncut and uninterrupted, the way Frank Capra intended it when it was first released back in 1946. They run it at the Grand Illusion as a regular feature every December, and have for years. I've seen it there twice, though not in years. I haven't actually seen it on TV in at least 5-6 years.

So I'm jacked. I only hope no one notices if/when I start crying. Because I always do. Usually it's the part where Mary doesn't recognize George that sets me off. Plus or minus five minutes of that scene, anyway. Shhhhh.

It really is a small world after all

So I walk into Conagliatelli's for my date with Laurel last night, and she's sitting there in the booth Drew and I always pick, grinning at me like she has a secret she can't hold in for another second. Before I even get my coat off, she says, "Your mom wants you to call her." I'd never noticed her dimples before, but they were impossible to miss with her cheeks so swollen in that smile.

I was racking my brain for any relevant conversation we might have had last Friday. All I could think of was how I told her never knew what to get Janice for Christmas and always wound up at the liquor store on Christmas Eve, which Laurel found ironic since I don't drink. But there hadn't been any mention of calling her, or her calling me, or anything else that would account for the 100-watt grin I was enduring.

Next she points to her teeth, smiling even more exaggeratedly so I can get a good look at how shiny they are. I'm still mystified. Finally she says, "I just had my annual cleaning."

Janice is her dental hygienist. And has been since Laurel was about 16. She's been hearing stories about me, every six months, for the last 12 years. Some of which do not match up to my recollection of what actually happened. Like apparently Janice told her I wanted to move to Cuba and become a communist after college.

How to ruin Thanksgiving dinner without even showing up

One of my favorite things about my old job was the two hours of volunteer time we were allotted every month, which I spent with my kid brother under the cover of "mentoring troubled youth." I may have been laid off, but I'm sticking to routine, at least for now. Yesterday I met Shane at Java Joan's at the usual time. I saw my first Christmas tree of the year there, though I couldn't tell if they were done decorating it. There were only seven ornaments on it, and the lights didn't seem to work. Maybe Joan is making some kind of political statement.

We got our coffee and sat in our usual booth. Only this time when I asked Shane what was going on, instead of his usual initial response of "nothing," he launched straight into an impression of Rob bitching about how I portrayed him in the book. Rob claims he never drinks in the driveway like I said. "Never" is a matter of timing. He finished off part of the garage when I was in college and set up a card table and two chairs behind an old shower curtain so he couldn't be seen from the house. That was in response to Stephanie complaining about Shane always wanting to go outside to be with Daddy because he could see him out the kitchen window. Shane was 3 then. Please note in my book, Shane wasn't born yet. Stephanie was nowhere to be seen yet. Nothing Rob complained about was actually untrue. He just has a shit memory.

So while I was uninvited to Thanksgiving dinner, I was present as some kind of invisible guest, pilloried in absentia by Rob and his partner-in-moronity Pat Donovan at subsequently louder and louder volumes as the day progressed until Stephanie finally lost it. She slammed a wooden spoon against the table, snapping it in half and then tossed the handle on Rob's plate. Shortly after that, he and Donovan relocated to the gentlemen's lounge out in the garage. Apparently Donovan didn't find any of my descriptions of him flattering, either. (They weren't meant to be.)