portrait of the whiner as a wage slave

I’m getting a slow start today on writing because I have been doing some job stuff. I know what you are thinking, isn’t that foolish girl always looking for a new job? And I confess, the same thought has occurred to me lately. But I assure you, I haven't always been this way. In fact, until about a year ago I never had the guts to quit any job, no matter how silly the pretenses for my employment there.

But the same teeny voice that cues you to be annoyed with my renewed job search leads me to doubt my resolutions as a human being. It’s almost as if, by quitting one job six months ago, I have given myself reign to quit any job once a juicer and less-suck-filled opportunity comes along. And I don’t like that portrait of myself. I much prefer to see myself as a prolonged sufferer – a worker who is able to withstand any amount of physical and emotional turmoil. I don’t like to see myself as a professional nomad.

That’s the dichotomy, I suppose, of not wanting to let people trample all over your mush-colored soul anymore but not being willing to trample on someone else’s. I am proud of quitting my corporate stooge-hood, despite the fact that my monthly wages now come to approximately ½ of my old every-other-weekly paychecks, and I don’t want to reenter the stooge-hood from another (cough, managerial) angle. But the kicker is non-managerial jobs that allow a person plenty of free time and freedom tend to be rather demoralizing. And so, the search continues. I’m thinking of a career in dog washing because dogs never talk back and while they may inflict slobber, they never bicker over coupons.

The real irony here is that I am willing to subordinate my writing-work to search for jobs washing dogs (or the elderly). Try as I might (and type as I might) I can’t seem to let go of that capitalist greed and acknowledge that work without any monetary benefit is still work. It’s a real psychological shitstorm.

Man, I'm such a drag lately. I promise I'll be fun (i.e., rowdy) again soon.

scantron sanity and misplaced quasi-political rants

I dreamed last night, or rather this morning sometime between 4:15 this morning when I woke up to use the bathroom and 6:35 when alarms started going off, that I was late to class. And this isn’t the first time that I’ve had this dream in the almost 2 years since I graduated from college. Oh, no. I have this dream a lot. And I think it’s pretty weird.

Well, I don’t think that it is ‘weird’ as in unusual, because I know plenty of ex-classmates who also experience this dream on a regular basis. I think that our brains were simply wired for so long to anticipate class-related stresses that when we don’t get that stimulus in the form of a sassy blue-and-white scantron form our brains get a little wonky. But when it comes to my specific dream, I tend to think that it’s a little weird.

First, I don’t like to think of myself as someone whose life stopped when I stopped being able to ride the campus buses for free. In fact, I’m starting to think that people put altogether too much emphasis on college, as both a requirement for future successes and as a transcendental epoch of total personal awesomeness. Obviously I think that going to college is a worthwhile educational experience and a must-have if you love school for the very schoolness of it, like I do. And a degree is, undoubtedly, something that you have for life. But it also sets you up for unrealistic expectations ($$$) and completely fails to set you up (in the liberal arts, particularly) for the harsh unfriendliness of a market flooded with young folks who can do a close-reading of Chaucer but are best suited for answering telephones and making schnazzy spreadsheets.

Don’t get me wrong. College = good. I might even go back to school. But especially with the fee increases (32% this year at my old stomping grounds) I think that it is becoming a very hard thing to justify without insuring a 32% increase in class availability, relevance, and (let’s face it) making it about 32% more challenging to get a B.A.. If it was me, I would want my money’s worth and in the case of college that means 32% more knowledge and 32% less sleep during finals. Somehow, especially in the candy-coated UC system, I don’t see that happening.

It may sound a little materialistic (yipes!) to note, but as the only member of my family with a B.A. I make far-and-away the least amount of money. And I don’t mean since I quit my corporate job; they made more than me when I was pushing paper all about.

Money isn’t the only measure of worth and it sure isn’t the best one, but I think that the UC system would do well to shift a little of the focus away from soul-bending experiences and educational enlightenment via sun-dappled Frisbee games and towards the real financial situation. For one thing, they are inflating the students’ ideas of how quickly they can pay off their loans and credit cards as easily as they are inflating the fees.

So, enough ranting brought on by watching footage of the student protests here in sunny California. My dream went like this: I was late for a class where I had to turn in a paper and my bike had two flat tires. While I was trying to borrow someone’s bike I realized that I hadn’t attended this class once all quarter (this is a common theme in these dreams) and I began to berate myself for my negligence. I finally took off running toward the building where I somehow knew that the class would be meeting, leaving my bike hidden behind a tree. Before I got there, I woke up in a mild panic.

I know that I could push it here, make some reference to dreams of the literal sense and the quickly evaporating possibility of the lower-middle class to achieve collegiate dreams, but I won’t. That would be way too liberal arts-ish.

The delayed "hella" is totally a better adjective

I don’t want to come out and say that I believe in omens, because most of the time I lump them in the crap pile with fate, destiny, karma and all of that other Buddhism-ala-It’s a Wonderful Life mumbo jumbo that assures nice people that being nice is the best way to be. But I’m only a weakly human and I was raised in a very superstitious family, so yesterday when I heard Billy Joel on the radio on my hurried drive to work (lost track of time, garage door opener wouldn’t work, daily caffeine had not been consumed) I suspected that it might be a good omen. Turns out that it wasn’t and I came home to some unpleasant news in my inbox, but it’s not a complete loss – Billy is good driving jams.

Since I have been trying to do this writing thing more earnestly, I think that I have started to get used to the rejection. It’s all part of the process and I realize that, just like I realize that having a super awkward day job is also part of the process. But if you take into the account the fact that a year ago I didn’t let anyone look at my work, perhaps you can understand the discomfort of waiting for acceptance/rejection for me. Pretty much I’m like a girl at the prom that has to wear headgear all the time and came with her best gal-pal as a date.

The whole thing is very ridiculous and to prove that I’m not taking myself and my sorrows too seriously I’ll tell you exactly why. I am by nature and by incredibly bad habit a compulsive email checker. Checking my email is the first thing I do when I get up in the morning (after deodorant, another compulsive habit) and the last thing I do before I go to bed. I am dependent on it as a source of communication and every empty inbox is a stark personal insult. Shouldn’t someone that I didn’t like in high school be FB-friending me right now?

The weird thing about making email submissions is that it completely shuts down this process. It’s not that I am dreading rejection, exactly; it is more that I have lost the aching curiosity to know what someone else might be telling me. It is very entertaining for my main squeeze, who is used to me leaning over mid-movie to minimize the window, click my gmail icon and hit “enter” twice in the manner of impatient people with saved passwords.

Last night when I got home we were sitting in the kitchen talking over the events our day (me: mean old chick that called me “young lady”; him: new John Muir obsession) and he asked me if I wanted to go and check my email. I declined; he inquired and I relented out of embarrassment. As I mentioned earlier the results of that swift double “enter” were unsavory, but my email reluctance was banished immediately.

Turns out that Billy Joel wasn’t an omen of creative triumph; he was an omen of triumphant bad habits. Today I’m going to be checking my email, hella.

Stupid instrumental music

I think that I have written before on the subject of my unerring promptness but I don’t mind repeating myself and besides, this time I have a new slant on the topic. My “slant” is that since I am unfailingly prompt I have exhausted my sleigh of Christmas related gripes and anecdotes prematurely and find myself with nothing to say about the holiday. (Further inspections shows that this is not a new slant on the topic, but actually a poor excuse for a lead-in to an entirely unrelated topic.)

The new and, I imagine, not particularly interesting topic is film trailers and more specifically, my overly emotional reaction to them. In order to justify the seeming left-fieldness of the topic I will begin with a small story about my day that ends with me getting teary over a YouTube clip and dribbling snot all over my brand new laptop (!!!).

So today I was doing what I generally do during the day. I wrote a little, screwed around on the internet a little, read all of the features sections of all of the hippest websites and completely ignored any of the pressing economic or political news, and then stared at a variety of blogs. One of these blogs (and I’m not a blog name dropper) discusses the Edwardian period, fashion and social trends of the 19th century and a whole slew of other literary nerd topics. Today the bloggist was on about the movie The Young Victoria, which I had never heard of. My ignorance is not startling as I rarely know about movies because I do not patronize the ugly younger brother of film, television, but I like to think that I keep abreast of high-budget period pieces.

Anyway, so I was watching the trailer that the blogger posted and the usual trailer dramatics unfolded: swelling music, cutaways to bold words on a black background, lovers staring at one another in ecstasy, someone walking purposefully with a pistol, ect. Exactly the sort of cookie-cutter antics that you would expect someone with the frightful disposition that I’ve got to get all disdainful about. But here’s the thing: I never get disdainful about movie trailers; I tear up, I giggle, and my heart throbs in time with the stupid instrumental music.

I honestly think that I have the exact susceptible disposition that they use to gauge the effects of images and sound on the rampant, impressionable masses. When the trailer director wants sympathy, he gets it from me by the bucketful; when he wants me to feel uplifted by the idea that Sandra Bullock is saving some impoverished future footballer, I feel uplifted. And when someone stares into the camera and yells something about how their lover is their whole life and how their fate belongs to their country and the music gets louder and hyperboles flash across the screen like an ugly, sentimental crack dream? Sometimes I get a little emotional.

Afterwards I might re-watch the trailer to recapture a little of that prosthetic emotion but I never want to watch these movies. The whole thing is very funky and definitely un-Christmasy.

A whole pie and a pink lemonade

Have you ever left a restaurant during that tiny period of time after you’ve ordered your drinks but before the waitress has brought them? I have, plenty of times. I call it the soda-break-break and I actually feel pretty bad about it.

I remind myself frequently that it is not a case of the fabled “dining and dashing,” but instead a last minute choice to eat elsewhere. And I earnestly regret that the restaurant is out a few sodas (I won’t go into my theory about how soda is the best and cheapest liquid in the world here, because that won’t win my any sympathy points). But my real guilt comes from imagining the confusion of the waitress when she (yes, she, I’m being sexist today) returns. I also feel very sneaky rushing away from the table with my head down, shoulders slumped, giving a furtive “thanks” to the hostess, even though I am fairly certain that this practice is not illegal just in bad taste.

You might ask why I am doing this so frequently if I am aware that it is in bad taste. (On a side note, is eating out in bad taste these days? With all of those calorie lists on tables I’m not certain.) Last minute regret-driven decisions are just one of the many fantastic bad habits inherent in being indecisive.

Indecisive behavior is particularly cumbersome when dealing with restaurants and eating because it can be so easily shielded by a pretend politeness. No one wants to venture a food type and when the issue is decided, everyone wants to drive there. I am personally a master of the “I don’t care. What do you feel like eating?” line even when my soul earns for a burrito.

I suspect that you are thinking that while this is all well and good, repressing one’s desire for a burrito is not a crime equal to the soda-break-break. And I agree, the two are not equal. But the soda-break-break is an escalated version of the indecisive choosing conversation.

The break generally occurs on occasions when you have been seated and you know the moment that you sit down that you made the wrong choice. Anything could bring about this realization but my queries have revealed expensive food, loud kids, and a bitchy hostess with gauged ears as the main contenders.

For example, my personal-person and I were seated once in a Marie Calendar’s in some shopping mall somewhere. The moment that our asses hit the cold plastic booth it was as though a switch had been thrown. We suddenly saw the restaurant as it really was: cold, depressing, and filled with church-goers wanting the breakfast buffet at 2:20 in the afternoon. I stared in horror at an old man sitting alone a few booths away eating a whole pie and drinking pink lemonade. Not even cornbread could persuade me to stay.

We asked for two cokes, and when the waitress wasn’t looking, we made a soda-break-break.

The only way to get MORE carpal tunnel is to learn to quilt

Today I did a particularly uncharacteristic thing (only more shocking since the principal feature of my character is to resent any sort of change). The offending action was a massage, an unlikely thing because it is a frivolous expense and because I am prude unrivaled by anyone outside of the Shaker/Quaker demographic.

I went and got this massage (and hear my defenses, oh judgmental internet) not for some pansy relaxation, but because my mad carpal tunnel has been flaring up violently. Just yesterday I had my hand turn into a claw of pain when I was adjusting the quilt on the couch, and since I must have the finger mobility to pretend that I am cleaning my house, I decided to pursue some help. Of course I didn’t go to see the doctor, because I’ve been a million times since my fingers started doing their impression of heart-attack symptoms only to leave with a set of wrist splints and a heart pat on the back.

So I went and got a massage and though I was quite earnestly freaked out, I managed to calm myself by focusing on the fact that the massage person looked like gym teacher (you know, sneakers, gently balding, polo shirt). I did my best to focus on this and the periodic wild monkey calls in the soothing jungle tunes that they pipe into the rooms.

I would consider today as the most unclothed that I’ve ever been in public (note: not real public, this wasn't one of those middle-of-mall shacks that sells cellphone skins on the side). Is this admirable? Or does it just make me feel worse about my voodoo backsliding?

No answers here. I will admit to be writing this mainly as a distraction. A certain human of my personal acquaintance is making his radio debut and listening to it is giving me a alarming surrogate stage fright.