We Interrupt This Life To Bring you...

I am hearing a voice broadcasting through the room: "We interrupt this life to bring you the following important bulletin: We are putting your life on hold for a while. You have food, shelter, clothing and water right now. Apply for jobs all you like, but it's a week before Christmas, and no one is going to want to schedule job interviews until January. Look at apartments all you like, but you won't have the money to start rent payments.

"Feel free to move about the reality, but there is ice on the roads that is not your standard Seattle slush-for-a-day-then-leave stuff. Your usual cost-free method of getting about, bicycling, isn't going to help you much on ice. This is not a time for starting new adventures; it is a time for being thankful for what you have. You are a reasonably talented person, but this is as far as you're getting right now. This is not a time for thinking about where your talents ought to be taking you. Making plans based on your hopes being fulfilled is going to make you unhappy. That only works if you're Barack Obama. The mess that you are in right now was caused by everybody feeling entitled to success, causing reality to be overpriced.

"Please be assured that the space-time continuum is functioning as it should. Your movement through time plus your movement through space will always equal the speed of light. If you don't seem to be going anywhere in space, you're going all sorts of places in time that people in spaceships don't get to have. Enjoy this time while you have it. We will inform you when we restart your life."