Getting Fired in the US has Nothing on Growing up in Colombia

I don’t care what anybody says. Winter is unnatural.

I hear it all. “You need the rain to have the flowers.” “It’s nice to cozy up with a cup of hot cocoa and a good book.” “If you can’t take earth at its worst, then you don’t deserve it at its best.”

Bullshit!

Winter sucks!

What is so great about layering and seeing everything around you die?

So, right after being fired, it felt nice to make it to Hawaii and feel the tropical breeze fingering my soul.

When people found out I was let go, they would asked me, “How ARE you?” The voice they used is probably reserved for when you lose your mom, or an arm, or your phone. You know? Real tragedy.

There is a part of me that feels like laughing.

My god.

If they only knew how tough things can get in Colombia and how crazy my life was.

I read that, in the United States, losing your job is ranked as one of the most stressful life events, along with losing a spouse or moving.

From this “Top 3 Shitty Things That Can Happen to You,” I think only losing a partner can be considered the most stressful event in your life. The other two are just unnecessarily tied up to our identities when they shouldn’t.

Maybe that’s why people cuddle me when they find out I lost my job.

But again, when you grow up in Colombia, losing your job in the United States is not that bad.

I remember one time the water company came to disconnect our service.

Illegally reconnecting your service was a practice many people in Colombia used. So when the water company came, they would make it really hard to reconnect the service. They would take the meter and a lot of pipe with them, so it would be nearly impossible to get water again.

But the water company did not account for my mom’s ability to not give up. We were going to have water, and she was going to make it happen.

So she went out and got herself an illegal plumber. It wasn’t that he didn’t have documents or was hanging about in Colombia’s version of Home Depot, just that he would illegally reconnect the water service.

This time, the guy she found didn’t know his ass from his elbow or, more importantly, his pipe elbow.

We lived on the highest floor of our building, which was the fourth floor. The “plumber” broke our pipes, and water gushed out and flooded the entire building. It took two hours before he was able to stop the flood. For the next month, I had to look at my neighbors, knowing they knew we had reinstalled the water illegally and that we were responsible for the mold growing in their apartments.

In the United States, there are unemployment services and severance packages. Colombia doesn’t have any of that. If you ask, I’m sure, someone would be willing to give you a kick in the ass out the door.

So, being unemployed in the United States feels comparatively very cozy, comfy.

I was cool as frozen blueberry pancakes.

Nothing could disturb my peace. My wife is American. She grew up here. She is the worrier; let her worry for the both of us.

That’s what I thought at a conscious level.

And then something happened, and I realized that maybe getting fired did affect me more than I thought.

And it happened one morning, when we were walking past the condo we were staying in Kauai.