In which I tell you about my weekend. And the crazy fluctuations in my state of mind. (Seriously, watching your mind do whatever it does is EVER an exercise in weird.)
Friday night I went out and got drunk for no good reason. I hadn’t intended to get drunk, but I was sitting at the bar having a really nice conversation with one of the regulars and Amy kept pouring the way she does, and, well: shit happens. Saturday I had to get up about three hours earlier than I usually do and if it was a little rough, well, that was my own damn fault, wasn’t it!
Curt & Shelly came and picked me up and they gave me an egg biscuit and hash browns from McDonald’s the very minute I sat down in their ride (and OMG I srsly LOVE THEM for that). The drive to the Benton Franklin County fairgrounds was uneventful; we didn’t need to be there early because it turned out there wasn’t going to be a sound check after all. I was, hangover-style, a little agro that I’d had to get up when I did. We milled around aimlessly instead. Steve bought me a coffee. I love him, too.
At noon, Romagossa Blu kicked off the festival with a bang, and then Vaughn Jensen went up and smoked. Coyote Kings went on at 1:30 and three songs later I went up and joined them.
Playing festivals is great. The stages are huge, the crowd is way into what you’re doing, and there are actual professional sound people at the board. Monitors! Lights! No schlepping!
There was a wedding on stage directly after our set. I got to sing ‘At Last’ for the happy couple, then bluesman Billy Stoops officiated the marriage of (our friends and fans) Nancy and Steve right there in front of everybody. It was cute.
After the set I changed into comfy clothes and promptly started drinking the free beer from the craft services tent. I spent most of the day backstage because I could (UnTapped doesn’t take your VIP pass away after you finish playing, like other festivals sometimes do) but I did wander around enough to have seen absolutely everything. UnTapped has tons of beer and wine makers and lots of food and a scattering of other vendors. It’s a really cool festival.
A few of the NW players I met told me they’d heard of me, which was, as you can imagine, immensely gratifying. I was encouraged to move to Portland; I was encouraged to start my own band. In short, I got a lot of ego stroking, but – because the mind is a terrible thing – I somehow managed to feel self-pity anyway.
I know, right? WTF, Mush? Fun blues festival, stage time, free beer, beautiful weather, good friends, and my internal dialog is fux0red. This is what happens when one doesn’t deliberately choose the upside.
My (admittedly not accurate) perception was that the musicians got younger as the day went on. In the early afternoon we had guys pushing 60 but the kids in the headliner’s band all looked like they were still on the fresh side of 30. I was having, in the back of my mind, one of those completely negative “since I wasn’t headlining at 26 it follows that I suck” thought processes. Why? It’s stupid, but lemmie tell you what: all that crap about the negative psychological effects of unemployment? Appears to be true. After not getting yet another job, I’m having a glass-is-half-empty crisis in the form of a really insidious “I’m totally mediocre” mental litany.
It doesn’t help that this is my second long-term bout of unemployment in the last five years, either. Stupid job market!
I met a metric ton of musicians, including the superawesome Miriam (of Portland band Miriam’s Well) and her bandmates; Chicago tenor player Eddie Shaw and his son Vaan (who is a really cool dude); trombonist Ed Earley; and the headliner, Hamilton Loomis (who was not only a smokin’ musician but a really, really nice person), to name a few.
Loomis’ set was not at all what I’d call blues; his has been described as a “blues-rock-funk-groove-soul band,†and he did charts that broke down into funky Stevie Wonder grooves, charts that were pure rock, charts that were pure soul. It occurred to me that from here on out, it’s all meta. Every song will contain shades of every genre that’s ever gone before, and descriptors like “R&B” and “pop” and “blues” will go the way of the dinosaur. Listeners will be expected to understand music from a global perspective that spans the whole of recorded music.
In other words, it’s so meta it’s actually like this: I have some cheesy pop in my library that features a raga in the bridge, house with a gypsy violin in it, and funk with a banjo solo. There’s really no reason I can’t do R&B-soul-blues-jazz-rock and still get booked at blues festivals, that’s all I’m saying.
Applying this meta concept to the idea of “work”, I’m realizing that my bad attitude is stupid. I’m online all the time, so I know that very little can truly be monetized. All this free information on the Internet is there because people want to do it. They try and try and try to monetize and the vast majority of them fail; overall they do this shit for the love of it. Free ebooks, free TV series, free how-to videos, free games, free lessons, free recipes: some people manage to be offering the right thing at the right time and they break through to monetization, but most of them don’t. And that’s okay.
I do what I do for the love of it: I sing, I take pictures with old film cameras, I publish thousands of words online per year, I share recipes, I comment on tech. These things are fun, and I don’t need to feel guilty – or mediocre – about not turning them into money.
I have this belief that life is structured like this: there’s this job thing you do, and it pays your bills. You do not love it. You’re very fortunate if you like it. It takes up much but not all of your time, and it subsidizes the other things you do. Some people get paid a lot to play at whatever they play at and they don’t have to do the job thing. They are rare and special, and I am not one of them.
That’s my job meta. I don’t like it, but I don’t think I’m eligible to transcend it because it seems that if I was I already would have. So, I believe that I need a job, and I don’t have one, and it’s messing with my head. Since I can’t through any amount of effort on my part cause a job to exist, I need to do something else meaningful to structure my time.
Tomorrow I’m going to visit the WorkSource office and find out what options are available. I’m ready for some options. I’m a displaced worker, I guess, since there aren’t any ISP support gigs around here and I’m 41. I think I might be eligible for grants and scholarships.
I think I’d really like to go back to school. I’d much rather be in class than on the job market since the endless rejection, poverty, and uncertainty is, um, starting to bug the shit out of me.
I mean, sure: I love having nothing but free time. Who doesn’t? I like eating when I want, sleeping when I want, playing guitar when I want, going out when I want: it’s fun. I read all the time, I can meditate whenever I want, or do push-ups and crunches when the mood strikes rather than when I have to. The freedom is great, but apparently I just can’t stop worrying about what will happen. What will happen when my benefits run out? What will happen ifone of the minimum wage jobs I apply for actually offers me a position I really don’t want?
Anyway. Sorry about the digression. All the pics from the blues festival are here, if you want to check them out.
My next gig isn’t until July, but we’ll be playing The Pastime at the Ritzville Blues Brews & BBQs festival, which should be a total blast.
In which I tell you about the things I thought.
This morning – where “morning” equals 12:30pm, which is when I got up – I informed the universe at large that I needed some answers to yesterday’s questions, and then I didn’t really do anything very focused about it. I was going to meditate, but didn’t. I watched part of Darshan: The Embrace and was reminded that there are gradations, that even past basic satisfaction some things are much better uses of a life than others, but beyond that basic concept I remained at a loss as to what to do with mine.
I bumbled around feeling blue because I didn’t get that job, and I looked at my finances and began to resign myself to the idea that if I don’t happen across a $500 windfall in the next few weeks I really and truly might not be able to see Amma’s U.S. tour this year.
That thought makes me want to cry. I’ve never once missed a summer tour since I met Her, though some years I had to drive pretty far, get a hug, and leave immediately. One year I got darshan and then slept in the parking lot because I couldn’t afford a motel. This year, though, the closest tour stop is five hours away over the Cascade mountains, and I don’t have a car. I’m not insured on my brother’s truck and it needs tires anyway, so taking it is sort of out of the question.
What I really wanted to do this year was go to the Chicago programs and see everybody, which seems selfishly ambitious but, really, the math is interesting: flying to Seattle and back from here costs $200, flying to Chicago and back from Pasco is about $200 more, and the Seattle program has a retreat fee associated with it that pretty much eats up that difference.
Perhaps I’ll end up with a bus ticket to Seattle and one night in the program hotel. A single program – especially if it’s Devi Bhava – is better than nothing. We’ll see.
At some point this afternoon, I think while I was making a cup of tea, it occurred to me that the very best, most wonderful life I can even imagine living would be as a member of a band that was essentially a cross between Stormy Heaven and Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns doing extremely intelligent, musical, funky music that just happened to have devotional lyrics. Yeah, hanging with awesome musician/seeker people, traveling a lot, eating groovy food, meditating, laughing, grooving, and taking random yoga classes in different places while on tour: that’s my ideal life.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to create that reality. Not to kill the dream but I’ve already been in two bands that tried to do that, and, well, neither band still exists. I doubt that the audience to support that lifestyle even exists: people want sexy music more than evolutionary music, when it comes down to numbers. And before y’all holler at me for being too critical, I’m not closing doors: I’m just admitting I have no idea how to open that particular one.
Later in the afternoon, vaguely I thought about writing for a living. Not out of any burning passion to do so but because so many people swear that that’s what I should do. I’m certain I could crank out quite a volume of words if I did it full time, I just don’t know how to outline a book or even really to write in a format longer than a typical blog post. I don’t know where book ideas come from, really. It occurred to me that I need someone to write my outlines for me; I could probably crank out a book in a few months if I just knew what to write about and it didn’t require any heavy research!
I happen to follow a couple of sci-fi writers on Twitter. One seems to be solvent; another is poorer than I am. Both have several books out, and both write for a living. So. Yeah. I already know that being a good singer, even a really good singer, isn’t enough to make a living at it, so I have to assume that being a really good writer would be equally lucrative, which is to say: not very. Like music, ninety percent of the money goes to the top ten percent. Everyone else does it for love.
Which brings me back to my personal trifecta: get a real job, go back to school, or pursue some as-yet-unthought-of third option like joining an ashram.
I don’t know. I just don’t know. They say you need to follow your joy, but I’m so freakin’ mellow that I’m not that sure what my ‘joy’ is. I know what I don’t like, but I could be pretty comfortable doing any number of things. I’m too pragmatic to invent an ideal life and then be able to keep a straight face while looking for it; I know that most people aren’t deep, smart, rich, or beautiful, and that the vast majority of us just get to be common. And a common American life these days is to have a day job and some debt and a nagging suspicion that you took a wrong turn somewhere, tempered by rare transcendent moments on the weekends or in times of loss or during that one week per year that you go on your spiritual retreat.
What’s remarkable, really, is how lucky I am. I’m poor and jobless, yes, but I’m also incredibly comfortable: I’m not homeless, thank God. I have this cushy room, and family around to keep an eye on me, and a 7Mbps feed, and the mildest, sweetest weather in the world. I have an embarrassment of free time and I read, nap, walk, play, drink, eat, and pursue my interests on my own schedule. I’m a woman of leisure. The only problem is that I’m on the dole, and that the dole will end eventually.
I have no savings, so I don’t know how I could afford to move without a job lined up beforehand, and since I’m essentially a call center drone (and an old one, at that) it’s not like I possess the kind of skill that companies hire long distance for. I want to move to a city, kind of, but not only am I concerned about my hire-ability (I’m a big fish in a small pond in this town and yet I’m consistently clocking in at “runner up”) I don’t think I’m willing to leave Bindu behind or move her in her dotage and subject her to ten-hour days alone in an apartment while I work and commute…
Ah, hell. A day of thinking about it has gotten me two things: an idea of what my ‘joy’ would be (and the feeling that that’s a nifty daydream, but nothing more), and the idea that what I really need is to become a more desirable employment candidate. I have mad experience, yes, but only in a very specific industry, one that is changing so rapidly – devolving into resellers, monopolies, and outsourcing – that my experience isn’t really terribly relevant to anybody.
I might just take a year and do this. I’m probably eligible for grants, and I think if I do it I can stay on the dole for the duration, which would have the benefit of saving me from a terrible part-time job. After all, no matter what, I’ll always have debt.
In which Wednesday is hump day, and it totally feels like it.
Yesterday, I did a bunch of exercises. Then I walked all over town. Today my glutes hurt.
Last night, I went to GoHo (aka The Golden Horse) with Kit & Cat and had a marvelous time. They invited me backpacking with them sometime this summer, but only if I agree to carry the liquor.
Today I started reading American Gods for the One Book, One Twitter read-a-long.
I packed my lunch into a bento box because I miss the whole cute bento lunch thing:
Just now, I received a lovely and polite email from Integratechs informing me that they hired someone else. I was the runner-up, apparently. (Or maybe I wasn’t and they just say that to everybody. Either way, being second-best is hardly a consolation when you’ve been out of work for half a year.)
Tonight, I intend to eat a burrito (aka Cinco de Mayo) and then go to open mic at Barnaby’s with TonyG (aka the Wolf) and Toni (aka Betty), where I intend to drink SEVERAL cocktails because I don’t have a goddamned JOB, people.
Tomorrow I’m going to think. A lot. About things. Here’s a list:
- Should I move away? If so, where to?
- Should I go back to school?
- Why am I now the second choice rather than the first when I’m trying to get a job? Am I underqualified? Too old? Something else?
- Is Walla Walla kicking me out again?
- What about keeping one’s 87-year-old grandmother company? I’m single and childless, and she likes having me around. Isn’t that good enough? There’s a time-honored spinster tradition I wish to ruminate upon.
- What do I want? I mean, really?
- Does this mean I can’t see Amma this summer? Will I seriously have to wait until November to see Her?
I’m accustomed to being able to afford to see Mother every summer. I’m accustomed to having something to do. I’m accustomed to getting hired when I interview. I’m missing my old friends, the people with which I have actual history that goes back farther than a few months. I’m accustomed to knowing what to do next.
In other words, I feel poor, lazy, unemployable, lonely, and sad. Which sucks. Wait, I just got a text… Jules is gonna come get me! We’re going to eat Mexican food and drink margaritas and I shall endeavor to feel fortunate… at least until I feel drunk, that is. Excuse me now, please, while I put on some clothes.
Being a running list:
In which I eat REALLY OLD FOOD. For fun!
I’d never eaten an MRE in my life. So it was about time, I think.
MRE stands for, obviously (not) enough, “meal, ready-to-eat.” If that doesn’t convince you that the military is awesome, I don’t know what will. Because HELLO? MEAL, READY-TO-EAT? What?!
Anyway. My dad rolled into town yesterday, and when my brother and I were over visiting him he produced a couple of vegetarian MREs from the case of meals, ready-to-eat that my uncle had given to him. I immediately freaked right out with joy because I’d had no idea there was such a thing as a vegetarian MRE, and I pretty much wanted to eat one on the spot except I’d just had a Gardenburger.
Behold! Two vegetarian MREs of my very own! They’re adorable, dense little aardvarks of beige-colored food goodness, OMG would you just LOOK AT THEM:
MREs are irradiated and VERY well-packaged (read: you could probably store one under water for a year), so they last a disturbingly remarkably long time. People have been known to eat them five, ten, even fifteen (or more!) years after they were manufactured without dying.
Each meal contains about 1,300 calories (nearly an entire day’s worth of calories for me) and weighs probably 1-1/2 pounds.
I opened one of the packages on the spot and oohed and aahed over the contents, and then I got online and read about C rations (what grandpa ate in WWII), K rations, and MCI (what dad ate in Vietnam), (all of which came complete with four cigarettes at every single meal), MREs, FSRs (they have caffeinated gum in them, for reals) and other kinds of pre-packaged meals (like HDRs – humanitarian daily rations).
My dad, who couldn’t use his computer because I was in the way, commented that he could almost see the blog post taking form in my head. “You’ll have a few thousand words, probably,” he remarked.
“Oh, man! I totally want to try the Indian food meals!” I replied, apropos of nothing. “And look! Omelets! There’s no fuckin’ way those are edible!” I tried to get dear ol’ dad to give me all of the vegetarian MREs he had – apparently meal 12 is a rice and bean burrito! – but he would only part with the pasta dishes because he doesn’t like noodles.
Today, I decided to go ahead and eat one of my precious veggie MREs. It was labeled “Meal, Ready-to-Eat, Individual, Vegetarian, Menu No. 14,” and contained the following items:
Pasta with Vegetables in Alfredo Style Sauce
TS Fruit (Pineapple)
Granola Bar
Peanut Butter
Crackers
Fruit Filled Bar
Hot Sauce
Accessory Packet D (Lemon Tea w/Sugar, Apple Cider, Salt, Chewing Gum, Matches, Toilet Tissue, Towelette)
Spoon
Flameless Heater
Yay! Science! Quite possibly fatal science! Let’s rock this project!
I opened the granola bar first. It was technically edible, but the oils in it had gone rancid some years ago. I ate about 20% of it, but the smell bugged me. If I was truly hungry, though, I would have eaten it anyway. It may not have contained all the nutritional value it once did, but I’m sure it was harmless.
The fruit bar didn’t smell or taste bad, but it did look a little weird – the fruit had turned black, and the bar was kinda smashed. I took a couple of nibbles, but didn’t finish it.
The accessory pack is the best part because it not only has salt, matches, and toilet paper, but it also contains the famous tiny glass bottle of Tabasco sauce that MREs are famous for:
The crackers also smelled just slightly rancid, but were certainly edible. I put some of the fortified peanut butter on them. I was certain the peanut butter would smell off because it contains so much oil, but it didn’t. I ate one cracker and about a third of the peanut butter.
Then, feeling a little nervous, I turned to the most foreign and interesting part of the MRE: the flameless ration heater. I read the directions twice, grabbed my water bottle and pouch of pasta, and proceeded to “cook” my dinner.
The directions have you open the heater bag, insert your entrée, and add a few ounces of water. Then you fold the bag over and put the whole thing back into the entrée’s box. Let it sit horizontally for a minute, then prop it on a “rock or something” (that’s verbatim from the instructions, I kid you not) for another eleven minutes. Apparently the heater is non-toxic and can safely be thrown away.
I nuked a mug of hot water, poured the apple cider mix into it, and drank it while my entrée was heating. The cider tasted just fine.
The heater bag emits steam and makes homey little gurgling noises while it heats your food. It’s SO FREAKING COOL. It’s charming as hell because it’s warm, food-oriented, and a bitchin’ use of science. I can imagine it being really pleasant if you were somewhere cold and/or dark, because you could hold the thing while your food was heating and feel good for a few minutes.
Lacking a rock in my bedroom, I leaned mine against a wooden asana next to my yoga mat. I’m such a fucking hippie.
The entrée, when I opened it, was definitely hot. It was, I think, supposed to resemble shells and cheese, but I don’t know if the sauce was actually supposed to be cheddar-colored or if it had discolored with age. It had virtually no aroma. I tentatively took a bite.
Amazingly enough, the peas were still pea-shaped and had even retained the slightest amount of texture. I can’t recall what other vegetables were in there… carrots, maybe? The dish was much more palatable after I salted it, and that’s saying something since I never salt anything.
About an hour after I ate the entrée, I mixed up the lemon iced tea drink mix. It tasted just like instant iced tea. I don’t know that I’ve ever drunk two instant drink mixes in one day before in my life!
The pineapple and the gum remain unopened. I’m definitely curious to see how the pineapple will look. I expect that the gum will be indistinguishable from new gum.
I learned how to date the meal, and it turns out that the components were packed sometime in late 2000, making the meal just shy of a decade old. The Tabasco has 1008 stamped on it, which means it was packaged on January 8, 2001.
I saw nothing that would make me suspect the safety of the food – no bloated packaging, no spores or mold on the food – but its age makes me wonder if I should really be eating it. (Hah! Too late!) Plus my dad has eaten some out of the same case and he didn’t drop dead, so it’s not like I’m undertaking a dangerous activity.
All in all, a really fun and weird experiment, and I pretty much haven’t had to leave my room all day.
In conclusion, the heaters are AWESOME, the food is probably meh if you ever have to eat it for any reason other than for fun, the technology that allows this stuff to still be edible after a decade is AMAZING, and the fact that I actually ate it means I’m crazy brave and fierce!
Want more pics? View my goofy MRE gallery.
Update: The gum was hard but otherwise totally fine.
Update: The pineapple smelled like pineapple and was juicy, but it was also brown. I didn’t eat it.
Update: MREs can be purchased on eBay. There’s a bunch of people out there who apparently collect them, and others who stock them in case of The End Of The World, and others who stock them In Case Of Emergency and others who take them camping and still others who are clearly batshit insane militia people. Point is, the vegetarian MREs are often sold separately! Yay!
Update: Now that I’ve eaten two of these things, I can probably go the entire rest of my life without needing to eat any more of them. They’d make killer diet food, I think.
In which even 10-day breaks don’t seem to lower the efficacy of these nifty little free programs.
Okay, so I told you I’m doing these online exercise thingies, right? Where you do, like, an “exhaustion test” (that’s some kind of sporty-person lingo, apparently) and compare your results with this little table which tells you how many reps to perform per set, and after not very long you can suddenly do, like, a surprising number of reps of these exercisey things?
You’re supposed to do the program three times a week, but in looking at my logs it appears that I skipped an entire week once. Which totally sounds like me.
And yet!, today I did 132 squats, 202 crunches, and 50 (modified, girl-style) push-ups!
Did you hear what I just said? Fifty fucking PUSH-UPS, people! You know how many reps I could do when I started? Six. Six push-ups. So we’re dealing here with demonstrable improvement in body strength.
Plus I did over two hundred sit-ups today! Soon I’ll be able to do them consecutively. How cool will that be?
Since there’s a chin-up bar all handy in the basement, I’ll probably be doing the Twenty-five Pullups program when it launches. The last time I checked, I was able to do a total of ZERO CONSECUTIVE PULL-UPS, because girls and the upper body strength? Not so much. We’ll see if that’s changed after the other stuff.
Here are the links again, if you want to check them out:
Two Hundred Squats
Two Hundred Situps
One Hundred Pushups
(There are matching iPhone apps, but they cost a couple bucks each.)
Anyway.
In other news, here’s a link to The Hacker’s Diet, because it’s both geeky and tota11y full of teh win.
Let it be known that I’m so non-sporty I don’t even have a blog category for exercise.
In which what? In which nothing, really, I just wanted to post something.
Tuesday, I went for a superfun walk with Curt. It was beautiful.
There’s a slideshow here, if you have a hankering to see gorgeous eastern Washington in the spring.
Thursday, I had a wonderful interview. They told me at the time that they hoped to choose a candidate that very day; when I sent a ‘thank you for the lovely interview’ email the next morning I got a response informing me that they were considering a second round of interviews.
Just my luck; they have more than one really great candidate and they can’t decide. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I’m not getting any younger; if I don’t want to be a Walmart greeter within the next five years I really need to start collecting certifications and get some recent decent experience (i.e. no more fucking call centers). Maybe I should go back to school or something. (It’s not like I’m ever going to pay off my existing student loans; why not borrow more money, right?) I love school, and it’d be a hoot to be the experienced, hip old lady in class.
Not to mention it would keep me off the damn job market for awhile. Man, that would be great: to live like a college student again, borrowing money, studying things for their own sake, putting all the stress of ‘real life’ off into some nebulous future!
Man, college rocked.
I cut off about four inches of my hair with the kitchen shears on Saturday afternoon. I do this from time to time. The color is still pretty terrible, but it feels better now that it’s shorter. I haven’t been to a salon since I got laid off because I thought it would be prudent to reduce my expenses. My hair is half half-silver roots and half honey brown, and my nails and eyebrows look like crap. Glamorous!
Saturday evening I was supposed to meet with a someone about building his web site (I desperately need money if I’m going to see Mother this summer), but the meeting ended up being canceled. I hung out at the Peony for a few hours instead.
Today I watched the one and only Doctor Who episode featuring the eighth Doctor. It was totally cheesy and wonderful.
I made sushi for lunch.
The Curse™ is due any damn minute now. I’m bloated. And weepy! I also want to eat everything in the world. Twice. I feel unhireable, old, and fat. All I want to do is complain about how I feel.
Aw, hell. That would be a waste of everyone’s time. I guess I should just find some chocolate and go watch some British television on Netflix instead.
In which I just got out of a great interview. (And the gig is only a mile from my house! Guess who can walk or ride a bike to work if she gets hired!)
OMG OMG OMG I might soon be gainfully employed! In my industry, even!
The hiring company is called Integratechs; the gig is at Walla Walla Clinic, which specializes in family and pediatric care. (They apparently use a lot of cutting-edge medical technology, which bodes well for a girl to have fun stuff to learn and support.) The Integratech guy who flew in from Utah to do interviews was wonderful; well-spoken and intelligent. The local department head seems both smart and mellow and laughed at all my luser jokes. I could totally work for him.
I’m very glad I went with my instinct to dress more formally than I normally would for an IT interview; my normal slacker geek clothes wouldn’t have been at all appropriate.
I’d been sent a questionnaire to fill out prior to the interview. I toyed with doing short, terse answers but decided instead to be myself and give long, sometimes-amusing answers. Apparently it was the right approach as they said they’d enjoyed going through my answers. During the interview we more or less went over the questionnaire items in more detail, covering things like prioritizing and dealing with end users in a thorough but refreshingly light-hearted manner. (It’s nice to be interviewed by geeks rather than pure HR people. HR people don’t tend to understand what it is to keep the tech working.) (Although I don’t know that SLC guy isn’t an HR person; he focused on people skills, yes, but not in a pure HR kind of way. He was great at giving positive feedback. Anyway.)
At the end of the interview, I gave them my references – SLC guy accepted the list and thanked me “for thinking ahead” – and I was told that they thought I’d be a good fit for the position! Squee! They usually don’t say that if you’re not at least in their top three. I get the impression they’re doing more interviews this afternoon, but I hope they continue to like me best!
The job would be, on average, 40 to 45 hours per week, and there are the normal benefits of health insurance and paid vacation. A little bit of flex time for personal appointments, etc, too. Very little to no likelihood that I’d ever have to work through a gig. Good atmosphere. Decent pay. Fun-sounding stuff to fix.
I’m VERY excited about this!
Since it’s a clinic, do you suppose they’d let me wear purple scrubs?
In which I just checked my voice mail.
I have an interview tomorrow afternoon for a helpdesk position at a “medical facility” (probably a clinic, but maybe a hospital, I don’t know because an outsourced IT company is actually doing the hiring). The pay range is $10-$14 an hour, DOE, which is about right for Walla Walla. The two guys I’ve emailed with so far, though, seem like really great people.
The job posting suggested that people without degrees or certifications need not apply, but I applied anyway and they called me back because YOU DON’T GET COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREES FOR TEN DOLLARS AN HOUR, not even with a high unemployment rate. Plus I also said I was studying for my CCNA, which is true in the sense that I looked at the books the other day, and false in the sense that I haven’t really studied in weeks because that shit is boring. I love networking, but they’ve somehow managed to jargonize and sterilize the material to such an extent that I can barely stay awake the length of a chapter.
It’s amazing. Really. Because I’ll read pretty much anything. I’ve read the back of my shampoo bottle at least two hundred times just because it’s there: THAT’S how boring the CCNA manual is.
But tomorrow’s helpdesk interview is not all that’s happening this week on the job front. Oh, no, it isn’t. A famous tea company also received an application from yours truly last week, and they’ve just called and left a voice mail asking if I can come in for an interview.
They’re in Tigard. Tigard, Oregon. Tigard, Oregon, the suburb of Portland. I haven’t called them back yet because my brain is broken. Sure, I could borrow my brother’s truck and zip over to PDX, crash the night at 80’s, and then pop over to Tigard and say hi to these lovely tea folks… but what if? What if what if what if? What if they actually hire me?
Li’l thought experiment here: could I actually manage a move to PDX? I don’t own a car, so I suppose I could just grab a Greyhound out there, crash with various friends, and take public transportation to work while looking for a roommate on the bulletin board at the local Whole Foods. I guess the dog could stay here with G’ma? (INSERT GUILT TRIP HERE OH GOD I LOVE YOU BINDU.) I could come back and get the rest of my shit later, once I make friends with people who have cars. Not that I have that much shit. Hell, I don’t even own dishes. Actually, I really don’t own enough shit to set up house. I have no furniture. No pots and pans. I’d probably need to rent a furnished room.
To take TriMet from, for example, 80’s house to the tea store in Tigard, though? SIXTY-SEVEN MINUTES, and it costs nearly five bucks. To be at work by 8, one would have to leave at 6:30, which means one would have to get up at… YE GODS. Early, yes, but not impossible.
I’d need enough money to survive until my first paycheck. I probably don’t have that, not since I’d be eating out and taking the bus for two to four weeks. Probably no way to borrow, either, since all my relatives are also broke.
So, um, yeah. It’s a definite maybe. Whatever that means.
Gawd. Should I call back? Or just pretend I never got the message? ARGH.
In which I make an admission. And then we move on, people! Nothing to see here!
Okay, so, like, yeah: last week was an embarrassing series of over-indulgences. I overate, I partied all night (booze ain’t diet food, and neither was that nacho cheese served at afterhours), and yes, I smoked cigarettes too. (Not a lot, but even one is too many. Those fucking things.) I didn’t do my Friday exercises, and I think I did maybe twenty minutes of cardio the whole week.
I haven’t weighed yet today, but there’s no way I shed two pounds, not with that Chinese vegetarian M-1 platter debacle. And those chocolates! Oh, and the Pepsi I decided I couldn’t live without. And the late night snacks. Argh!
Today begins a new week, though. A week in which I’m back on the diet, exercise, and non-smoking wagon of Self Love. This is a lovely, shiny new week. A week of awesome!
This post has been brought to you by the letter SHAME and the number CONFESSION.
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4 random books from my Library!
