Getting back to what I've been doing the past couple weeks...

First thing Monday morning (and coincidentally, the day after my weird QOTSA-spawned turning point), I get a letter from the lawyer of my San Francisco apartment's landlord. You see, I'd been subletting my flat to a friend (whom I've never actually met) of a friend from Maui for the past couple months while I determined whether or not I'd be staying in Palm Springs, only it turned out that my subletee--a male model from New York, no less--had his model pay liened by the government for unpaid taxes and therefore, couldn't pay his rent. Finding himself in a bind and not wanting to stress me out, the Model decided to rent out my apartment to THREE other people (he actually said it was two people, and didn't tell me until after the fact anyway), and then those three people decided to have a party and the neighbors called the landlord to complain and the landlord (who's Chinese, and doesn't speak a whole lot of English) showed up and the people there had no idea who I was. So, not wanting any "funny business," the landlord KICKED ME (and my "guests") OUT.

This, of course, was more than a little disturbing on so many levels but I promptly bought a ticket to SF and requested a couple days off from The Desert Sun in order to deal with the situation.

That whole week was a mess--at work, I was feeling frustrated by nonstop last-minute assignments that weren't exciting or interesting to me, and were piling up to astonishingly undoable proportions. And the Editor (the one who hired me and who I do like a great deal) was insistent that we "have a talk" and I got the impression that it was time to come to a decision about my stay there.

He had already done the career equivalent of the boyfriend who asks the girlfriend, "If I was going to ask you to marry me, would you?" Meaning, he'd already asked me a couple weeks prior that, if he was going to offer me the fulltime permanent position at the paper at this point, would I be interested? Then, I'd said it was too soon to tell and could I please have a couple weeks to think about it.

So here it was, a couple weeks later, and I would be going to SF to clear out my apartment. Some would take that as a pretty clear sign that the desert was where I should be. But clearly, that was not where my heart--or head--was at.