It’s not the fall that hurts…

It’s when you hit the ground.

Phnom Penh’s answer to bhang lassi is a neat little recipe known as Happy Pizza. It is that old Italian favorite, with lots of green stuff sprinkled on top. It smartly does the trick for many hours of contented confusion, and I do need to pull the mental eject lever a bit more than usual these days.

So this is it. Two more days. And a sense of foreboding. Suddenly my optimism has all but vanished.

San Francisco is supposed to be my American Dream. With some help, I managed to get to an advanced stage in the recruitment process as Director of Technical Publications in a rather prestigious Silicon Valley firm. And it was only on a technicality that I didn’t get the actual job – the sitting director decided not to vacate the post after all. Who could blame her? As the economy goes south, people are understandably not so keen on job hunting.

It has been three months now, and what is all the more worrying is that all the jobs I’ve applied to on my own have responded to my application with either stony silence or a brief missive to the effect of “thanks but no thanks”. The only bright spot is a major air carrier has approached me for a rather less than senior post, but it is now the only thing on offer. The upside is that the biggest perk is free air tickets. However, it is far from a sure thing.

Nevertheless, I continue to submit my résumé just about everywhere that I have a reasonable chance. If you throw enough spaghetti up against a wall, some of it is bound to stick eventually. Yet I can’t help but confront the ghosts of my last sojourn in the U.S. ten years ago, when the sum of all my fears came to pass, and basically resulted in a financial train wreck and the crushing of my self-confidence. Older and more resilient as I am, it isn’t easy to face a prospect like that head-on, once again.

Add to this mix the sense of termination of one of the greatest years of my life. Those of you who have dedicatedly followed these pages bear witness to the endless adventures, the happiest moments, and the carefree existence, which of course, is all untenable over the longer term, and that starts right about now. My memory is constantly jogged into conjuring up images of amazing places, fantastic people, and no end to the untroubled fun. I can’t help but feeling a tinge of sadness and nostalgia.

There is an escape hatch. A former colleague put my name forward for a reasonably good technical writing position based in Bangkok. As time goes on, it seems more and more attractive, like the city itself. You know you shouldn’t, but deep down, you really want to surrender to it. It wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of my American Dream, just a postponement, until Silicon Valley’s prospects brighten somewhat. And I could continue doing the expat thing, which I enjoy immensely.

Nevertheless, I’m just wary that I’ll let so many people down, after trumpeting my imminent arrival Stateside for the better part of a year. And I will go. My flight is next week. I’ll at least touch base. And I will make every effort to get that airline job. But in the absence of even a single other U.S. prospect, if the Bangkok job does go through, despite all this hand-wringing, I reckon I’ll take it.