Freedom

Freedom is a terrible thing. Freedom with a nice severance package is not too bad.

Yes, for those of you who have not heard (and that's everyone who's not on Facebook), I have been "made redunant" by the Nielsen Corporation, owner of The Hollywood Reporter. Translating that Godless corporate gobbledigook into human speech, it means I've been canned. After almost eight years and a half-dozen rounds of layoffs.

I can't say I was overly surprised. I had been informed that another round was coming this week (this is the fourth time in a single year), but I had also been told my name was not on the short list (which was true for a while). But corporate politics being what they are, I was a pawn that was swapped out, sacrificed for the perceived success of the game. I think there's a chess term for that, but not being a chess player, I can't think of it.

In any case, there simply weren't very many people left there to fire, and they sacked ten of us, which leaves about 12 people to put out the book on a daily basis.

I can't feel too bad because the company I was in was stellar: from the co-publisher, the art director, top editors on down, folks were given their walking papers.

The severance package Nielsen provides is quite nice. For all practical purposes, I am fully employed well into August, with all benefits intact. It's a nice 10-week window in which not to worry too much about stuff. And even after that's expended, unemployment will cover expenses nicely for quite a long while.

So the biggest impact for me now is missing all the folks I've worked with at The Reporter over the last eight years. Every morning I've been getting up and taking the Gold Line into Union Station, then the Purple Line out to Wilshire and Western, where I stared at the Art Deco magnificence of the Wiltern Theater while I waited for the bus that took my down Wilshire and dropped me off a half-block from the office building. That's a routine that I won't have in my life anymore. Here's hoping that my next job will be as easy to access on public transit.

Today I sent an application into the Art Center College of Design here in Pasadena, since they need a design director (who also writes) to fill in for someone going on maternity leave. It runs July through December, so if it pans out, I might be getting salary and severance pay simultaneously for almost six weeks; that would be sweet.

But I'm not trying to plan out the future like that right now. Right now I'm accepting that this is one of those transition points that everyone encounters in their lives, voluntarily or not. So I'm trying to release all the things, good and bad, about this last decade in Los Angeles. There will be things to mourn. There will be things to rejoice in. There will be things to be very, very thankful for.

And soon, there will be a new place, a new job and a new phase of my life will begin. Right now, I'll try to enjoy this corporately enforced vacation. As Fritz Perls said, "You can't push the river; it flows by itself."