So. It's my birthday. I'm 26.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I am now firmly out of my early twenties and smack dab in that comfortable mid-twenties age bracket where you are neither too young for things nor too old for them.
On the other hand, I don't think that anyone aspires to be mid-twenties, single, unemployed, and living with mom.
In my defense, I've had a rather busy year. I got dumped, fired, and pregnant, my dad died, my car broke down four times, and I placed my baby for adoption. I think I can be forgiven for taking a little time for myself to figure things out.
Part of me feels that, at my age, I should know what I want to do with my life. I thought I did, actually. But the more I look into certain degree programs, the less excited I get about going back to school. I'm not even going to get in to the cost of ASU.
At the moment, I have an AGS, a cosmetology license, and a notary commission for the state of Arizona. I sort of like that none of those things are the least bit related. It makes for an interesting resume. I've considered spending the next few years getting more interesting little certifications and qualifications, just so I could print up the world's strangest business cards. For instance, I'm considering learning to drive a forklift. How cool would that be if my business card said "Jill Elizabeth. Hairstylist, notary, forklift operator"?
(Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. It bothers me that I can't ever remember whether in cases like the preceding I should put the question mark inside or outside the quotation marks. I think I'm doing it wrong, but it doesn't look right when I do it the other way. Grr. Okay, end interlude.)
I've also recently got it into my head to become a CNA. And a pharmacy technician. And I'd love to learn stunt driving. And get a masters in social work - which of course means I'd have to first get a bachelor's in social work.
None of this has anything to do with my birthday, does it? I've slept seven hours in two days (I've been doing school presentations for LDSFS, and high school classes are early) so I have the attention span of a fruit bat at the moment.
But it's my birthday, and if I want to ramble, I'll ramble.
I have a personal history of bad birthdays. I had good ones as a child, but the older I got, the worse my birthdays became. I think it was my eighth birthday party when one of my friends convinced another two of my friends that none of them liked me anymore.
There was one year when I was late getting home to a family party, and I arrived to find that my relatives had eaten most of my cake without me. No candles, no singing. There was the year I was in a car accident. The year I started taking antidepressants. The year everyone but my parents seemed to have forgotten my birthday. The year I failed my driving test. The year my college roommate's bad hygiene made the dorm room smell like excrement. The year my mom was in the hospital for gallstones. The year I was in beauty school learning exactly how little talent I had for doing highlights. The year I had to work at the salon for ten hours all by myself. The year my dad had cancer. And last year, when I found out I was pregnant.
Happy birthday? Not possible.
This year's been pretty good, actually. I think partly because I had such low expectations, but there you are. I had to wake up early to do two more school presentations, but then I had brunch with a friend and then relaxed and played a video game and read a bit and went shopping and went out to dinner with my mother and came home to watch TV and chill.
Not the most exciting birthday in the world by anyone's standards. But nothing horrible happened and except for my birthday migraine, I feel alright. So far my 27th year is off to a dull start. But on the upside, dull is better than bad, and I did get a free Grand Slam.
Showing posts with label job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job. Show all posts
23 October 2009
03 August 2009
Ripped pants and other occupational hazards
I have a confession to make.
I have been doing something lately that I am in no way proud of, and I'm not even sure I should admit to it.
I have been watching "SpongeBob SquarePants." A lot.
I used to hate SpongeBob. I first watched the show when I worked for the Horribly Managed Children's Salon. I had heard of SpongeBob but hadn't been subjected to the questionable humor and inane story lines. Then came HMCS and their DVD collection, which included one disc of SpongeBob. You'd think that only one DVD would be a godsend, but the fact is I'd have been happier with about twenty SpongeBob DVDs. The fact that there was only one meant I had to watch the same ten episodes over and over, and mostly I only saw the first one on the disc ("Ripped Pants," in case you were wondering) because every kid wanted to watch it from the beginning.
I began to loathe SpongeBob. I found myself suggesting other shows to children, hoping against hope that even one of them that I talked to would choose something that would offend my ears less, like, say, fingernails on a chalkboard. But I was never able to talk more than one child out of watching it in the nearly two years I spent at HMCS.
I was terribly relieved, therefore, when HMCS got another SpongeBob DVD. At last, I thought, new episodes to get sick of. I eagerly slid the disc into the DVD player, wondering what childish adventures awaited me. I'm sure you can guess what came on, though.
That's right. "Ripped Pants." It was the first episode on this DVD as well. I think a little part of me died that day. Incidentally, during the time I worked for HMCS, I did tune in to SpongeBob at home once. The episode that aired was "Ripped Pants."
So, how did I end up watching SpongeBob SquarePants voluntarily; purposely? Well, the problem is that if you don't watch Oprah or soap operas, daytime and afternoon TV is a scary, boring place. SpongeBob is one of the more sane, normal, entertaining programs on the air between 2 and 7 or so. When I channel-surfed last week, my best TV prospects were a fishing show, a Bruce Willis movie dubbed (poorly) into Spanish, a show about people who had things left in them after surgery, and (I wish I was making this up) a cartoon of the crucifixion. Yes, that crucifixion.
Can you blame me for taking refuge in Bikini Bottom? No, it's not the smartest show on TV. It isn't even *a* smart show. But things could be worse. I could still work at HMCS. Frankly, ripped pants were the least of my worries there. I was about as happy there as Squidward at the Krusty Krab.
Did I really just compare myself to Squidward? I think I've been thinking too much. I need a TV break. I think there's an episode of SpongeBob on ...
I still have all of "Ripped Pants" memorized, for the record.
I have been doing something lately that I am in no way proud of, and I'm not even sure I should admit to it.
I have been watching "SpongeBob SquarePants." A lot.
I used to hate SpongeBob. I first watched the show when I worked for the Horribly Managed Children's Salon. I had heard of SpongeBob but hadn't been subjected to the questionable humor and inane story lines. Then came HMCS and their DVD collection, which included one disc of SpongeBob. You'd think that only one DVD would be a godsend, but the fact is I'd have been happier with about twenty SpongeBob DVDs. The fact that there was only one meant I had to watch the same ten episodes over and over, and mostly I only saw the first one on the disc ("Ripped Pants," in case you were wondering) because every kid wanted to watch it from the beginning.
I began to loathe SpongeBob. I found myself suggesting other shows to children, hoping against hope that even one of them that I talked to would choose something that would offend my ears less, like, say, fingernails on a chalkboard. But I was never able to talk more than one child out of watching it in the nearly two years I spent at HMCS.
I was terribly relieved, therefore, when HMCS got another SpongeBob DVD. At last, I thought, new episodes to get sick of. I eagerly slid the disc into the DVD player, wondering what childish adventures awaited me. I'm sure you can guess what came on, though.
That's right. "Ripped Pants." It was the first episode on this DVD as well. I think a little part of me died that day. Incidentally, during the time I worked for HMCS, I did tune in to SpongeBob at home once. The episode that aired was "Ripped Pants."
So, how did I end up watching SpongeBob SquarePants voluntarily; purposely? Well, the problem is that if you don't watch Oprah or soap operas, daytime and afternoon TV is a scary, boring place. SpongeBob is one of the more sane, normal, entertaining programs on the air between 2 and 7 or so. When I channel-surfed last week, my best TV prospects were a fishing show, a Bruce Willis movie dubbed (poorly) into Spanish, a show about people who had things left in them after surgery, and (I wish I was making this up) a cartoon of the crucifixion. Yes, that crucifixion.
Can you blame me for taking refuge in Bikini Bottom? No, it's not the smartest show on TV. It isn't even *a* smart show. But things could be worse. I could still work at HMCS. Frankly, ripped pants were the least of my worries there. I was about as happy there as Squidward at the Krusty Krab.
Did I really just compare myself to Squidward? I think I've been thinking too much. I need a TV break. I think there's an episode of SpongeBob on ...
I still have all of "Ripped Pants" memorized, for the record.
01 July 2009
Pam's problems blow.
I recently read an article about how this summer has been bad for retailers, and how they’re not doing as well as usual, and how markdowns that usually take place in August took place in June. The article is here if you’re interested.
I’m sure it’s a fascinating article that makes a number of good points about … oh, I don’t know, the economy or the weather or something like that. I’m not sure, really. I got distracted when the article introduced me to Pam MacWilliams.
Pity poor pam. The economy has been tough on her family. Says the article, “She's spent only $200 this month on clothes for her family, compared with about $600 a year ago.”
Um, excuse me? $600 a month? Multiply that out and the woman spends $7200 a year on clothing. $7200. A year. On clothing.
Oh, Pammy. May I ask why? Why do you need to spend $600 a month on clothing? Does a new month necessitate a new wardrobe? Are January’s sweaters not good enough for February? Are your children taking growth hormones so that none of their clothes fit them from month to month? Does your weight fluctuate enough week to week that you need new clothing that often? Are you unable to pass by an item of clothing you like without buying it in every color? And where in the name of arse do you store $7200 a year worth of clothing? Is an extra bedroom serving as a closet?
Ah, but Pam doesn’t need to worry about storage space. Do you know why? She has a lake house. The article goes on: “She also hasn't loaded up her lake house with the usual summer accessories like blowup toys.”
I hate to repeat myself, but excuse me? A bloody lake house? You want to cut expenses, start with the lake house. And what happened to last summer’s blowup toys? The ones she loaded up the lake house with in 2008? Do blowup toys have an expiration date? Are last summer’s toys no longer fun or useful? Are her children (hopped up, perhaps, on those growth hormones) such terrors that they destroy a lake house full of blowup toys each summer?
The article quotes Pam. "I thought that the economy would turn faster," said MacWilliams. "I had high expectations. Now, I want to save more."
You want to save more? Sell the bloody lake house. Make your children wear something more than twice before buying them new ones. Something tells me that a woman who buys new blowup toys for the lake house every year and blows seven grand a year on clothing isn’t going to make her precious children wear the same swimsuit every time they swim. Her daughters probably have a swimsuit for every day of the week each, with a matching blowup toy.
You want to save more, Pam? You’re worried about the economy? Cry me a river. I’ve been unemployed since August. I spend less than $200 a YEAR on clothing. I’ve had the same swimsuit since I was twenty, and I haven’t bought any blowup toys since 2003. I don’t have a lake house. I live with my mother. And I can’t afford a vacation to Manhattan. Oh, did I not mention it? Pam is a tourist from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She was interviewed during a trip to New York.
You know what irritates me the most, I think? Not Pam, although she irritates me plenty. What irritates me the most is that the AP reporter who wrote this story thought Pam was a good person to talk to about the economy. Pam, a woman who is not only gainfully employed but who is married to a man who is also gainfully employed. A woman with a bloody lake house. The reporter thought that this woman represented concerned Americans and their economic woes.
Well, you know what, Pam? You know what, Associated Press? My aging blowup toys and I spit in your general direction, and we don’t consider any of what you had to say as news.
I’m sure it’s a fascinating article that makes a number of good points about … oh, I don’t know, the economy or the weather or something like that. I’m not sure, really. I got distracted when the article introduced me to Pam MacWilliams.
Pity poor pam. The economy has been tough on her family. Says the article, “She's spent only $200 this month on clothes for her family, compared with about $600 a year ago.”
Um, excuse me? $600 a month? Multiply that out and the woman spends $7200 a year on clothing. $7200. A year. On clothing.
Oh, Pammy. May I ask why? Why do you need to spend $600 a month on clothing? Does a new month necessitate a new wardrobe? Are January’s sweaters not good enough for February? Are your children taking growth hormones so that none of their clothes fit them from month to month? Does your weight fluctuate enough week to week that you need new clothing that often? Are you unable to pass by an item of clothing you like without buying it in every color? And where in the name of arse do you store $7200 a year worth of clothing? Is an extra bedroom serving as a closet?
Ah, but Pam doesn’t need to worry about storage space. Do you know why? She has a lake house. The article goes on: “She also hasn't loaded up her lake house with the usual summer accessories like blowup toys.”
I hate to repeat myself, but excuse me? A bloody lake house? You want to cut expenses, start with the lake house. And what happened to last summer’s blowup toys? The ones she loaded up the lake house with in 2008? Do blowup toys have an expiration date? Are last summer’s toys no longer fun or useful? Are her children (hopped up, perhaps, on those growth hormones) such terrors that they destroy a lake house full of blowup toys each summer?
The article quotes Pam. "I thought that the economy would turn faster," said MacWilliams. "I had high expectations. Now, I want to save more."
You want to save more? Sell the bloody lake house. Make your children wear something more than twice before buying them new ones. Something tells me that a woman who buys new blowup toys for the lake house every year and blows seven grand a year on clothing isn’t going to make her precious children wear the same swimsuit every time they swim. Her daughters probably have a swimsuit for every day of the week each, with a matching blowup toy.
You want to save more, Pam? You’re worried about the economy? Cry me a river. I’ve been unemployed since August. I spend less than $200 a YEAR on clothing. I’ve had the same swimsuit since I was twenty, and I haven’t bought any blowup toys since 2003. I don’t have a lake house. I live with my mother. And I can’t afford a vacation to Manhattan. Oh, did I not mention it? Pam is a tourist from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She was interviewed during a trip to New York.
You know what irritates me the most, I think? Not Pam, although she irritates me plenty. What irritates me the most is that the AP reporter who wrote this story thought Pam was a good person to talk to about the economy. Pam, a woman who is not only gainfully employed but who is married to a man who is also gainfully employed. A woman with a bloody lake house. The reporter thought that this woman represented concerned Americans and their economic woes.
Well, you know what, Pam? You know what, Associated Press? My aging blowup toys and I spit in your general direction, and we don’t consider any of what you had to say as news.
19 April 2009
Idle Hands
I’m a day early here, but I’m trying to keep to a schedule of an update every 5 days or so despite having nothing useful to say, and no ideas beyond how best to build certain animals out of Legos (which doesn't help my blog much).
A day early for what? you might ask. Which would be too bad, because I can’t hear you. But let’s pretend I can. A day early for my mother’s birthday, certainly. Monday the 20th is her 52nd birthday. Happy birthday, Mum!
Isn’t my mommy pretty?
But that wasn’t what I was referring to. In addition to April 20th being the birthday of my mother, Adolf Hitler and Luther Vandross, and the ten-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, and the 107th anniversary of the isolation of Radium by the Curies, it marks eight months since I was fired.
It was a Wednesday night, that August 20th. My manager – let’s call her “Bonia” – accused me of about fifty things I never did and then told me I was fired. The paperwork I had to sign was dated more than two weeks earlier, which says to me that one of the reasons she had for firing me – an incident about five days earlier – was just a smokescreen.
It’s just as well they fired me. They were real arses about me missing work while my father was having brain surgery. After he died they’d probably have told me, hey, it’s not like you can see him anymore, so get your duff into work. They weren’t very understanding about his having brain cancer. They seemed to feel that my concern over his illness should take a backseat to things such as sanitizing combs and sweeping floors. I guess my priorities were messed up. Clean floors are important, after all.
I’d never been fired before. I was rather proud of that fact. When I get a job, I keep it. I work hard, I do my job, and when it’s time to move on, I write a neat little letter of resignation and two weeks later I’m gone. But my employer – let’s call the salon “Bool Cuts 4 Kids” – decided, to hell with hard-working, honest people. Let’s fire the most reliable employee we have because she refuses to turn into a bootlicking kiss-arse.
Do I sound bitter? Oh, I’m bitter. I’m beyond bitter. The very thought of Sonia – er, Bonia – makes my blood pressure rise and my fists clench. She said (after accusing me of a lot of bad things, mind you) that I shouldn’t hesitate to list her as a reference, that she’d put in a good word for me. Well, I don’t know if she’s a liar or simply won’t talk on the phone, but I haven’t been able to get a job since then. Anywhere.
So, I’ve been unemployed for eight months. I’ve been a busy girl since I was thirteen years old, when I started washing dishes and clearing tables at my aunt’s restaurant. This is the longest I’ve gone aimless in twelve years. If I wasn’t working, I was going to school full-time, and there were many semesters that I did both. I’ve never enjoyed work. I like slacking off, watching TV, reading. I always thought that unemployment would suit me.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me state now emphatically just how wrong I was. Unemployment does NOT suit me. Unemployment is a rotten thing.
It worked well for me at first. Nine days after I was fired, my dad fell asleep on the couch and he never woke up. Eleven days later he died – a combination of a blood clot, an infection, and massive brain damage from a stroke (caused by the clot). Having a job would have been a complication I didn’t need at that time. I never thought that, at the age of 25, I’d have to plan my father’s funeral and write his obituary. I relished the time I had to grieve and … well, grieve, mostly.
But long about January, I started to get restless again. Bored. The quiet time I used to enjoy had become a burden. I’d wake up in the morning (afternoon, if I’m honest), have sugared cereal for breakfast, spend three hours playing video games, eat dinner, and watch TV and mess around on-line until I couldn’t stay awake any more. If the TV shows didn’t change, I’d never know what day it was. It was excruciating.
Desperate for a change and tired of 24-hour celebrity gossip, I started working on little projects to occupy my time. I started sewing again. I made five dresses and a hat, as well as curtains for my mother’s office. Sewing was fun because it meant I could go shopping (never mind the fact that I had to dip into my pathetic savings to do so). It was something to do, and it was easy to find progress. At the end of the day, I could hold up a dress and say, hey, I made this.
But I somehow lost the manual for my HuskyStar and the buttonholer wasn’t working, so, crabby and bored, I turned to cross-stitching. Again, I could easily see my progress. I went through one, two, three projects. I did more shopping. And again I tired of it. My embroidery floss kept getting tangled up. I lost count of stitches. I couldn’t find patterns I liked.
So I switched to scrapbooking. More shopping. But now the scrapbook I started is, essentially, finished, and I’m bored again. I’m even getting tired of my video games. I find myself longing for the repetitive days of up-at-eight, work-at-nine, off-at-six. While I don’t miss being covered in other people’s hair, I do miss being gainfully employed and feeling like I was contributing something to society. And the boredom is taking its toll on me.
I can’t focus on books – I haven’t read anything in months. I can’t write any more – it feels forced, and the snark that used to come so easily to me is an effort. I can’t focus on TV – only “Lost” and “24” hold my attention. I have no attention span and nothing to do – a deadly combination. I’d go back to school, but who the heck can afford ASU these days? Especially with no job and no income in the foreseeable future.
On the upside, I’ve got plenty of time to learn fascinating things about history. For instance, Tuesday is the 1,256th anniversary of the founding of Rome. People always say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. I think I could do it. It would give me something to do. Maybe I’ll start with Legos.
A day early for what? you might ask. Which would be too bad, because I can’t hear you. But let’s pretend I can. A day early for my mother’s birthday, certainly. Monday the 20th is her 52nd birthday. Happy birthday, Mum!
Isn’t my mommy pretty?
But that wasn’t what I was referring to. In addition to April 20th being the birthday of my mother, Adolf Hitler and Luther Vandross, and the ten-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, and the 107th anniversary of the isolation of Radium by the Curies, it marks eight months since I was fired.
It was a Wednesday night, that August 20th. My manager – let’s call her “Bonia” – accused me of about fifty things I never did and then told me I was fired. The paperwork I had to sign was dated more than two weeks earlier, which says to me that one of the reasons she had for firing me – an incident about five days earlier – was just a smokescreen.
It’s just as well they fired me. They were real arses about me missing work while my father was having brain surgery. After he died they’d probably have told me, hey, it’s not like you can see him anymore, so get your duff into work. They weren’t very understanding about his having brain cancer. They seemed to feel that my concern over his illness should take a backseat to things such as sanitizing combs and sweeping floors. I guess my priorities were messed up. Clean floors are important, after all.
I’d never been fired before. I was rather proud of that fact. When I get a job, I keep it. I work hard, I do my job, and when it’s time to move on, I write a neat little letter of resignation and two weeks later I’m gone. But my employer – let’s call the salon “Bool Cuts 4 Kids” – decided, to hell with hard-working, honest people. Let’s fire the most reliable employee we have because she refuses to turn into a bootlicking kiss-arse.
Do I sound bitter? Oh, I’m bitter. I’m beyond bitter. The very thought of Sonia – er, Bonia – makes my blood pressure rise and my fists clench. She said (after accusing me of a lot of bad things, mind you) that I shouldn’t hesitate to list her as a reference, that she’d put in a good word for me. Well, I don’t know if she’s a liar or simply won’t talk on the phone, but I haven’t been able to get a job since then. Anywhere.
So, I’ve been unemployed for eight months. I’ve been a busy girl since I was thirteen years old, when I started washing dishes and clearing tables at my aunt’s restaurant. This is the longest I’ve gone aimless in twelve years. If I wasn’t working, I was going to school full-time, and there were many semesters that I did both. I’ve never enjoyed work. I like slacking off, watching TV, reading. I always thought that unemployment would suit me.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me state now emphatically just how wrong I was. Unemployment does NOT suit me. Unemployment is a rotten thing.
It worked well for me at first. Nine days after I was fired, my dad fell asleep on the couch and he never woke up. Eleven days later he died – a combination of a blood clot, an infection, and massive brain damage from a stroke (caused by the clot). Having a job would have been a complication I didn’t need at that time. I never thought that, at the age of 25, I’d have to plan my father’s funeral and write his obituary. I relished the time I had to grieve and … well, grieve, mostly.
But long about January, I started to get restless again. Bored. The quiet time I used to enjoy had become a burden. I’d wake up in the morning (afternoon, if I’m honest), have sugared cereal for breakfast, spend three hours playing video games, eat dinner, and watch TV and mess around on-line until I couldn’t stay awake any more. If the TV shows didn’t change, I’d never know what day it was. It was excruciating.
Desperate for a change and tired of 24-hour celebrity gossip, I started working on little projects to occupy my time. I started sewing again. I made five dresses and a hat, as well as curtains for my mother’s office. Sewing was fun because it meant I could go shopping (never mind the fact that I had to dip into my pathetic savings to do so). It was something to do, and it was easy to find progress. At the end of the day, I could hold up a dress and say, hey, I made this.
But I somehow lost the manual for my HuskyStar and the buttonholer wasn’t working, so, crabby and bored, I turned to cross-stitching. Again, I could easily see my progress. I went through one, two, three projects. I did more shopping. And again I tired of it. My embroidery floss kept getting tangled up. I lost count of stitches. I couldn’t find patterns I liked.
So I switched to scrapbooking. More shopping. But now the scrapbook I started is, essentially, finished, and I’m bored again. I’m even getting tired of my video games. I find myself longing for the repetitive days of up-at-eight, work-at-nine, off-at-six. While I don’t miss being covered in other people’s hair, I do miss being gainfully employed and feeling like I was contributing something to society. And the boredom is taking its toll on me.
I can’t focus on books – I haven’t read anything in months. I can’t write any more – it feels forced, and the snark that used to come so easily to me is an effort. I can’t focus on TV – only “Lost” and “24” hold my attention. I have no attention span and nothing to do – a deadly combination. I’d go back to school, but who the heck can afford ASU these days? Especially with no job and no income in the foreseeable future.
On the upside, I’ve got plenty of time to learn fascinating things about history. For instance, Tuesday is the 1,256th anniversary of the founding of Rome. People always say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. I think I could do it. It would give me something to do. Maybe I’ll start with Legos.
28 December 2008
Year in review
Warning: this is a long one.
It’s the end of the year, and we all know what that means: the media – or “the media” if you prefer to be snarky about it – will be counting down lists of the best, dumbest, and most amazing people, animals, natural disasters, and celebrity meltdowns of the past year.
Animal planet, for instance, has a special airing soon about the ten most amazing animal moments of 2008. E!’s “The Soup” will do some sort of soupy countdown as well – a clipdown, I believe they call it, since it’s all TV show clips commentated on by the delightfully snarky Joel McHale. In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King listed his favorite movies from this year. The list goes on and on.
I actually considered counting down my ten favorite countdowns, and I still may do so. But with all the emphasis on the best of things, I always get confused. I think, hey, wasn’t this in fact a spectacularly crappy year?
So without further ado, I give you my personal top ten suckiest moments/events/whatever of 2008.
10. My car. Period. This was not a good year for my car. Of course, it’s a Chevy, so no year is a good one and every mile I drive causes more and more cash to fly out of the tailpipe like it does in those commercials. I think the bloody thing’s worth maybe a grand now. But even for my bottom-of-the-line, stripped down Cavalier, this was a bad year. The EGR valve croaked. Two of my three A/C control knobs broke. It really started to get that Old Car Smell. The little ashtray-drawer-thingy snapped off. The latch on the boot broke. A tire went flat in the 3rd Avenue parking garage. The paint started peeling off aggressively. My gas mileage tanked. The belt driver (whatever the H that is) had to be replaced. The foam in the steering column hardened, causing my horn to blare randomly, frequently, and without warning – often at 2 or 3 in the morning, for five minutes at a stretch. And more recently, the battery died. A fairly new battery, I might add.
All this is just in the past year. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve also had to have the brakes fixed, a new A/C installed, the starter repaired, and the antenna reattached. And the windshield wipers replaced five times. And like four new batteries. And the stereo replaced.
My next car will be German or Japanese, I promise you that.
9. 2008 was the year that an old friend from my past made a reappearance.
Acne.
I had horrible acne as a teenager, and I was terribly relieved to find that as I entered my twenties, my skin cleared up. I had, oh, three or four good years. My skin looked great. A trifle pale, certainly. But that’s my normal hue. I could use WiteOut as a concealer, I swear it. But every so often I’d get a nice rosy glow in my cheeks, and darned if my face didn’t look fantastic.
But then it happened. Long about … oh, March or maybe April I think, I started noticing blemishes where there once were none. It started out small – a red bump here, a red bump there - one, maybe two at a time. But then a new one would pop up while the others were still out. Three zits, and then four marred my face.
By November, I was back to using a medicated facial cleanser, toner and moisturizer, the kind that peel off a layer or two of the epidermis as they “clean.” And you know what? I’ve still got acne. Five zits on my face, two on the front of my neck, three on the back of my neck, and one or two little guys behind the ears.
I’ve tried concealers and foundation. The blemishes suddenly match my skin … and I end up looking warty instead of zitty.
Sigh. Goodbye, lovely skin of my twenty-second and twenty-third years. I’ll miss you.
8. My favorite antidepressant stopped working. Oh, Zoloft. What happened? We used to work so well together, you and I. Sure, we had our ups and downs – dosages upped and downed, that is – but once we hit the right number of milligrams, it was magic, wasn’t it? I felt normal. You didn’t have many side effects – mostly headaches, and I was used to those. Together we got through beauty school and fibromyalgia, and you kept me from hauling off and hitting people (although in all fairness, most of them deserved to be hit). We were a team, Zoloft! But I flew too close to the sun on wings of serotonin. I took you for too long. And you couldn’t help me anymore.
And I was a miserable harpy again. Dr. Zenner – you remember him, right Zoloft? He said that if I leave you alone for long enough, when I go back to you, you’ll work again. And we’ll be so happy together.
In the meantime? Bupkis.
7. I met another old friend this year, one more crabby and vindictive than acne. I had my tonsils out in 2007, and I enjoyed a good nine months of good otolaryngological health. Not a rhinovirus or a streptococcal amoeba or a sinus infection in sight – and I’d been a walking strep virus for ages.
In March of 2008, I got strep throat. Well, I told myself, removing the tonsils wasn’t a foolproof solution. I did work closely with children (until #3 happened) and germs were germs. I doubled my use of hand sanitizer and turned away when someone coughed. Strep returned again in March, then May. And June. And again in November.
On the upside, that’s only four cases of strep compared to the ten a year I was used to when I had tonsils. On the downside, that’s four more cases of strep than I had in 2007.
I’m not sure what else can be removed to help remedy the problem. As soon as I find out, I’ll schedule a surgery.
6. I bought myself a shiny new Dell laptop computer back in … oh, February, I think. It came with Windows Vista installed, and I was (pathetic as it is) used to Windows 2K. But, I told myself, new is good. And I got used to the little “quirks” (bugs) that came with Vista, and I came to like it well enough.
Until October, that is. I’d installed Service Pack 1 (which was supposed to fix said quirks but brought with it two bugs for every one bug it fixed) and on the advice of Scott, my computer-genius big brother, I had Windows set to check for updates nightly.
Mid-October Windows strongly recommended some sort of antivirus update. And fool that I was, I clicked “Ok.”
That, my friends, was the beginning of the end.
This all-important, Strongly Recommended update caused my computer to commit hara-kiri. It would not start up. Start Up wizard couldn’t fix it. It would not boot manually. I could not access my files. My computer, an integral part of my life, was a $750 paper-weight. And I completely. Freaked. Out.
Fortunately, I had Scotty, my own personal Geek Squad. He employed every tool in his mental arsenal to fix my problem. He tried removing part of the hard drive. He tried hack after hack. Finally, using a CD that booted Ubuntu, he retrieved my files from Windows. And when I had them all backed up, he cleared my hard drive off, cleaned up my computer, and downgraded me to Windows XP. He also did a little research, and apparently hundreds if not thousands of people had also lost hard drives to this Strongly Recommended update.
Scotty, you saved my tuchis. You rock. Thank you for losing hours of sleep to keep number six on my list from ruining the whole dang year.
5. Did you know that people in their twenties can get gum disease? I didn’t until the über-helpful dental hygienist told me that I had it. So do you know what I did for my summer vacation? I got my gums lasered four times (and my insurance only covered three). My poor gums. They ached. They stung. They bled. They … healed. But unless I brush and floss vigilantly at least twice a day for the rest of my mortal life, it will come back. And you know what? After a treatment I couldn’t eat anything crunchy for a week. No potato chips! No movie theater popcorn! No regular popcorn!
It was brutal. Especially considering how many movies I saw this summer.
4. Numbers four and three on my list sort of tie for general suckiness, but after considering my sizeable debt, I ordered them as I did.
At the end of July, my boyfriend of four months dumped me. And he gave me the “it’s not you it’s me” routine, just like they do on television. He encouraged me to get angry with him for it and then got offended when I called him a rude name.
Things only got worse between us but I’d rather not get into that.
3. I was fired from my job of nearly two years. I hated management, but I was starting to build up a clientele and I loved working with little kids. I was good at what I did. I had seniority. I was responsible. I filled in at other salons as they needed me. I kept my trap shut when they transferred me to a salon I didn’t want to work at.
But my manager, Sonia, was (pardon my French) an absolute horse’s ass, and she played favorites like one would play a piano. And I was not one of her favorites. So she made up stories about me stealing and messing with the computers, refused to believe me when I told her the stories weren’t true, and canned me. Five days after my dad had brain surgery. Then, after she fired me – in front of a co-worker she insisted sit in on the firing – she said to me offhandedly, “Oh, sorry about your dad.”
I have no qualms about saying that if God is just, this woman will roast in hell for eternity. She treated me like manure and fired me because she could. I hate her like poison.
2. My father’s brain surgery – his third in a year – was because – I believe it was a year to the day from his initial diagnosis – we discovered that his cancer had come back with a vengeance. One month, his MRI was clear. But after he went to the ER because he was having trouble speaking and writing, they did a scan and discovered a huge tumor had popped up out of nowhere. It was aggressive, and it was going to kill him. We were told he had a few months to live, they weren’t sure exactly. They did surgery to remove what they could, and to insert chemotherapy wafers in his brain.
The surgery was on Friday. He came home on Monday night. Eleven days later he lost consciousness and never woke up.
1. Eleven days after he passed out, he died. My father. My daddy. My friend. The best, smartest, kindest, most insightful man I’ve ever known. I miss him so much that it hurts – it’s a physical ache that won’t go away. His death devastated me and I’m not sure I’ll ever completely recover. I’d give the world for five more minutes with him. One more minute. Anything.
I miss him. I don’t know what to do without him. But I have no choice. It sucks. It hurts. And it’s why 2008 will live in my memory as one of the worst years of my life.
It’s the end of the year, and we all know what that means: the media – or “the media” if you prefer to be snarky about it – will be counting down lists of the best, dumbest, and most amazing people, animals, natural disasters, and celebrity meltdowns of the past year.
Animal planet, for instance, has a special airing soon about the ten most amazing animal moments of 2008. E!’s “The Soup” will do some sort of soupy countdown as well – a clipdown, I believe they call it, since it’s all TV show clips commentated on by the delightfully snarky Joel McHale. In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King listed his favorite movies from this year. The list goes on and on.
I actually considered counting down my ten favorite countdowns, and I still may do so. But with all the emphasis on the best of things, I always get confused. I think, hey, wasn’t this in fact a spectacularly crappy year?
So without further ado, I give you my personal top ten suckiest moments/events/whatever of 2008.
10. My car. Period. This was not a good year for my car. Of course, it’s a Chevy, so no year is a good one and every mile I drive causes more and more cash to fly out of the tailpipe like it does in those commercials. I think the bloody thing’s worth maybe a grand now. But even for my bottom-of-the-line, stripped down Cavalier, this was a bad year. The EGR valve croaked. Two of my three A/C control knobs broke. It really started to get that Old Car Smell. The little ashtray-drawer-thingy snapped off. The latch on the boot broke. A tire went flat in the 3rd Avenue parking garage. The paint started peeling off aggressively. My gas mileage tanked. The belt driver (whatever the H that is) had to be replaced. The foam in the steering column hardened, causing my horn to blare randomly, frequently, and without warning – often at 2 or 3 in the morning, for five minutes at a stretch. And more recently, the battery died. A fairly new battery, I might add.
All this is just in the past year. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve also had to have the brakes fixed, a new A/C installed, the starter repaired, and the antenna reattached. And the windshield wipers replaced five times. And like four new batteries. And the stereo replaced.
My next car will be German or Japanese, I promise you that.
9. 2008 was the year that an old friend from my past made a reappearance.
Acne.
I had horrible acne as a teenager, and I was terribly relieved to find that as I entered my twenties, my skin cleared up. I had, oh, three or four good years. My skin looked great. A trifle pale, certainly. But that’s my normal hue. I could use WiteOut as a concealer, I swear it. But every so often I’d get a nice rosy glow in my cheeks, and darned if my face didn’t look fantastic.
But then it happened. Long about … oh, March or maybe April I think, I started noticing blemishes where there once were none. It started out small – a red bump here, a red bump there - one, maybe two at a time. But then a new one would pop up while the others were still out. Three zits, and then four marred my face.
By November, I was back to using a medicated facial cleanser, toner and moisturizer, the kind that peel off a layer or two of the epidermis as they “clean.” And you know what? I’ve still got acne. Five zits on my face, two on the front of my neck, three on the back of my neck, and one or two little guys behind the ears.
I’ve tried concealers and foundation. The blemishes suddenly match my skin … and I end up looking warty instead of zitty.
Sigh. Goodbye, lovely skin of my twenty-second and twenty-third years. I’ll miss you.
8. My favorite antidepressant stopped working. Oh, Zoloft. What happened? We used to work so well together, you and I. Sure, we had our ups and downs – dosages upped and downed, that is – but once we hit the right number of milligrams, it was magic, wasn’t it? I felt normal. You didn’t have many side effects – mostly headaches, and I was used to those. Together we got through beauty school and fibromyalgia, and you kept me from hauling off and hitting people (although in all fairness, most of them deserved to be hit). We were a team, Zoloft! But I flew too close to the sun on wings of serotonin. I took you for too long. And you couldn’t help me anymore.
And I was a miserable harpy again. Dr. Zenner – you remember him, right Zoloft? He said that if I leave you alone for long enough, when I go back to you, you’ll work again. And we’ll be so happy together.
In the meantime? Bupkis.
7. I met another old friend this year, one more crabby and vindictive than acne. I had my tonsils out in 2007, and I enjoyed a good nine months of good otolaryngological health. Not a rhinovirus or a streptococcal amoeba or a sinus infection in sight – and I’d been a walking strep virus for ages.
In March of 2008, I got strep throat. Well, I told myself, removing the tonsils wasn’t a foolproof solution. I did work closely with children (until #3 happened) and germs were germs. I doubled my use of hand sanitizer and turned away when someone coughed. Strep returned again in March, then May. And June. And again in November.
On the upside, that’s only four cases of strep compared to the ten a year I was used to when I had tonsils. On the downside, that’s four more cases of strep than I had in 2007.
I’m not sure what else can be removed to help remedy the problem. As soon as I find out, I’ll schedule a surgery.
6. I bought myself a shiny new Dell laptop computer back in … oh, February, I think. It came with Windows Vista installed, and I was (pathetic as it is) used to Windows 2K. But, I told myself, new is good. And I got used to the little “quirks” (bugs) that came with Vista, and I came to like it well enough.
Until October, that is. I’d installed Service Pack 1 (which was supposed to fix said quirks but brought with it two bugs for every one bug it fixed) and on the advice of Scott, my computer-genius big brother, I had Windows set to check for updates nightly.
Mid-October Windows strongly recommended some sort of antivirus update. And fool that I was, I clicked “Ok.”
That, my friends, was the beginning of the end.
This all-important, Strongly Recommended update caused my computer to commit hara-kiri. It would not start up. Start Up wizard couldn’t fix it. It would not boot manually. I could not access my files. My computer, an integral part of my life, was a $750 paper-weight. And I completely. Freaked. Out.
Fortunately, I had Scotty, my own personal Geek Squad. He employed every tool in his mental arsenal to fix my problem. He tried removing part of the hard drive. He tried hack after hack. Finally, using a CD that booted Ubuntu, he retrieved my files from Windows. And when I had them all backed up, he cleared my hard drive off, cleaned up my computer, and downgraded me to Windows XP. He also did a little research, and apparently hundreds if not thousands of people had also lost hard drives to this Strongly Recommended update.
Scotty, you saved my tuchis. You rock. Thank you for losing hours of sleep to keep number six on my list from ruining the whole dang year.
5. Did you know that people in their twenties can get gum disease? I didn’t until the über-helpful dental hygienist told me that I had it. So do you know what I did for my summer vacation? I got my gums lasered four times (and my insurance only covered three). My poor gums. They ached. They stung. They bled. They … healed. But unless I brush and floss vigilantly at least twice a day for the rest of my mortal life, it will come back. And you know what? After a treatment I couldn’t eat anything crunchy for a week. No potato chips! No movie theater popcorn! No regular popcorn!
It was brutal. Especially considering how many movies I saw this summer.
4. Numbers four and three on my list sort of tie for general suckiness, but after considering my sizeable debt, I ordered them as I did.
At the end of July, my boyfriend of four months dumped me. And he gave me the “it’s not you it’s me” routine, just like they do on television. He encouraged me to get angry with him for it and then got offended when I called him a rude name.
Things only got worse between us but I’d rather not get into that.
3. I was fired from my job of nearly two years. I hated management, but I was starting to build up a clientele and I loved working with little kids. I was good at what I did. I had seniority. I was responsible. I filled in at other salons as they needed me. I kept my trap shut when they transferred me to a salon I didn’t want to work at.
But my manager, Sonia, was (pardon my French) an absolute horse’s ass, and she played favorites like one would play a piano. And I was not one of her favorites. So she made up stories about me stealing and messing with the computers, refused to believe me when I told her the stories weren’t true, and canned me. Five days after my dad had brain surgery. Then, after she fired me – in front of a co-worker she insisted sit in on the firing – she said to me offhandedly, “Oh, sorry about your dad.”
I have no qualms about saying that if God is just, this woman will roast in hell for eternity. She treated me like manure and fired me because she could. I hate her like poison.
2. My father’s brain surgery – his third in a year – was because – I believe it was a year to the day from his initial diagnosis – we discovered that his cancer had come back with a vengeance. One month, his MRI was clear. But after he went to the ER because he was having trouble speaking and writing, they did a scan and discovered a huge tumor had popped up out of nowhere. It was aggressive, and it was going to kill him. We were told he had a few months to live, they weren’t sure exactly. They did surgery to remove what they could, and to insert chemotherapy wafers in his brain.
The surgery was on Friday. He came home on Monday night. Eleven days later he lost consciousness and never woke up.
1. Eleven days after he passed out, he died. My father. My daddy. My friend. The best, smartest, kindest, most insightful man I’ve ever known. I miss him so much that it hurts – it’s a physical ache that won’t go away. His death devastated me and I’m not sure I’ll ever completely recover. I’d give the world for five more minutes with him. One more minute. Anything.
I miss him. I don’t know what to do without him. But I have no choice. It sucks. It hurts. And it’s why 2008 will live in my memory as one of the worst years of my life.
30 October 2008
Under my thumbnail
I've just decided that one of the absolute worst sensations in the world is the feeling you get when you've been pulling at a cuticle for a while and you realize you've pulled it one millimeter too far.
Right up there with it is the sharp stab of a hair splinter under that same cuticle. But blood aside, I managed at least to get the blasted things out most of the time.
Hair splinters are among the six hundred or so things about which no one will warn you when you contemplate a career in cosmetology. I suppose if I really wanted I could have avoided them by working at a full-service salon where 95% of the haircuts I did would be done with scissors only. But instead I decided to work at a place where 95% of the haircuts I did involved clippers and therefore hair splinters. (Scissors cut the hair straight across at the ends whereas clippers cut the ends at an angle, giving them the perfect shape to wedge underneath unsuspecting skin cells. Just in case you were wondering.) On the upside, I never had to do any chemical services and when I was alone in the salon I could play video games.
But they fired me, and now I have to get another job, one that I probably won't like as much - although almost anything looks better than CC4K when I recall the fun of picking someone else's hair out of my hyponichium.
Right up there with it is the sharp stab of a hair splinter under that same cuticle. But blood aside, I managed at least to get the blasted things out most of the time.
Hair splinters are among the six hundred or so things about which no one will warn you when you contemplate a career in cosmetology. I suppose if I really wanted I could have avoided them by working at a full-service salon where 95% of the haircuts I did would be done with scissors only. But instead I decided to work at a place where 95% of the haircuts I did involved clippers and therefore hair splinters. (Scissors cut the hair straight across at the ends whereas clippers cut the ends at an angle, giving them the perfect shape to wedge underneath unsuspecting skin cells. Just in case you were wondering.) On the upside, I never had to do any chemical services and when I was alone in the salon I could play video games.
But they fired me, and now I have to get another job, one that I probably won't like as much - although almost anything looks better than CC4K when I recall the fun of picking someone else's hair out of my hyponichium.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)