You hear the gunshots, and pray it is fireworks

[FrodosPet]

9. You live where you can afford to live

I no longer work at the office overlooking where Ronnie Greene was shot by Nathaniel Abraham, nor do I live in Pontiac (mini Detroit), so I am away from the worst of it. But where I am at, just on the other side of 8 Mile from "The City", is still a rough place to inhabit.

I am at an age where I feel lucky to have any job at all. I am blue collar: went in the military after high school, and afterwards vocational education in electronics and computer networking. But I never went to college, so I am probably not going to find a corporate management job (even though my imagination, talents, and experience would make me much better than many if not most people with those positions). I had to take several years off from employment in the computer field to care for family, so my skills are rusty (not to mention that most of those jobs in this area go to H1Bs) and I don't have the right keywords on my resume. My back is bad and my heart is iffy, so physical labor is out of the question. And the job I have can be stressful - often times working with the drunkest, rudest, and most impatient members of the public in a fast-paced, multitasking environment, that there is not a lot of physical or emotional energy left to go find a second job.

You gotta play with the hand you were dealt, not the one you want.