Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Today: February 26

Today:

It is two weeks until I am out of my terrible job.


Today:

I should have had a job interview, but as is the habit of the universe it was rescheduled just as I was completely prepared for it.

That interview is now in two and a half weeks, on the day I am scheduled to start the new job I don't want.

This new job is a job of desperation, which is what most of my job offers are for,
and I wonder if accepting it was the right thing to do, or if I should have held out for the customer service position that was also a compromise, but a compromise with a chair and a better paycheck.

It seems I am always in this position,
and I always take what is offered "now" rather than waiting
and am left wondering "what if" I had waited.
Taking the offerings of "Now" is what put me here, in a fast food restaurant instead of the temp pool at the university. Money and position now instead of the gamble for better later.

Granted, the last time I had fewer options, with a checking and a savings bled dry,
and two kids to support with sketchy financial assistance.
The financial assistance was a cruel joke, then, and little more than a memory now,
but now I am in a better place. I have a paycheck or two coming, money in the bank, and a few more interviews lined up.
I still have those two kids though, and they need stuff. Pretty soon my daughter will be borrowing my jeans, but until then I have to do something about the plumbers crack exposed by hers.
So I took the sure thing.
Again.

I will go to the second job interview anyway. It is at least at a different time.
It can't hurt, right?


Today:


I medicated a rat. Again. Not a euphemism.

Today:


Arin and I turned "Bob" the tiger moth loose today.
Bob, who has twice convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt he was dead.
Bob, who has laid eggs in the glass bowl without the aid of a mate.
Bob, the mystery.


Today:

I went underwear shopping without leaving my apartment.
Assuming Victoria hasn't played musical sizes with my favorites again I will have new cheek-hugging cotton comfort within the week. The standards and then a couple with stripes, just because.

Today:


I brought home the gift from the foreign student at work.
She is one of my favorites, and I wish she had a better grasp on English, or I had a better grasp on Thai.
It is a tote bag she brought back from Thailand because I admired hers a couple of years ago.

Hers was baby blue with cowboys and bucking broncos on it, and she said she couldn't get the same pattern, and I said she didn't have to get me anything at all but she insisted, and when she went home over the winter break she remembered.
She was right. It isn't the same. It is pink and slick and shiny and has frothy coffee drinks advertised on the outside and looks like it is made of candy.
It is nothing at all like I'd ever have purchased for myself,
and I love it.
It is one of the hundred ways the foreign students have extracted me from my comfortable place.
It is a reminder that if I just go of certain expectations I might invite brighter, shinier things.
Even if they are pink.


Today:

I am sipping Earl Grey and dodging phone calls and wondering how to become independently wealthy when I'm not cleaning hospital water fountains. I would like to think I have the skill, but when I look at so many of my truly talented artist friends who work hard at their craft and still struggle, I don't merely entertain my doubts, I stand on my head and juggle for them.
I mean, I think maybe I could do it if I could find a niche, but the world is pretty well explored and I fear I don't have much that is new to give.

I will have to be brilliant.
More than brilliant, I will have to be lucky and blessed
and hope it is my time.

2 comments:

  1. I hope cleaning hospital water fountains works out better than the telephone receiver jobs in Hitchhiker's.

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    Replies
    1. I am hoping the entire human race is wiped out by a virulent disease caused by a dirty water fountain when I am surreptitiously ejected from the planet.

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