For an entire week now, I have been proudly, boldly and joyously unemployed. Of course, I have a job lined up to start at school so I guess the term "between jobs"is more accurate but due to long-term unemployment issues of a good deal of the population thanks to the crappy economy, "between jobs" has become a euphemism for being unemployed. All in all, I just know I don't have to go to work each morning.

It's not that hard to keep busy when there is no work to go to each day. I've gone to the beach, I've gone to Harrisburg, PA., I've purchased a day planner, I've worked out for hours on end, I've put 800 miles on my car and slept until 11 am more often in the past week than I have in the past year. I think about being a student and wonder what it is that I will be doing for the next two years. I wonder if there are things about being a student I may have forgotten and if they are lost, like knowing Spanish, or easily reassumed like the often used cliche of "like riding a bike".

Monday, August 25, 2003

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Tomorrow, I am going to be a car owner. Tomorrow, I am going to pick up a motorized fuel-consuming machine that will be mine. My 2003 Nissan Sentra GXE in Radium needs a name. Tomorrow, I will drive it to the mall and through the reservation and take it around town and smile the whole while, even if I get caught behind the massive amounts of elderly people driving 10 mph under the speed limit in huge boats-for-cars because I will be in a car that is all mine. Tomorrow, I might find a suitable name, other than Car.

I will listen to music and drive my car up and down the back roads of New Jersey. I may or may not get "lost" and may or may not find myself on the other side of the Mississippi, not having to worry about a place to sleep because I can just sleep in my very own car
Friday, August 8, 2003

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The best anniversaries (or -versaries since I am pretty sure the anni- part is related to the word "year") is when you don't know you are having one. Like when the boy announced in June "today is our 6 month (anni)versary." Rightly, it was several months to the day after our first date but I had to teach him out to count the passage of time and pointed out that it was 5 months, not 6. Regardless, he remembered while I could only confirm this because I recall staying up the night before our first date preparing graduate school applications.

Although I am obsessed with counting things and contemplating the passage of time, it was a surprise to me today when I recieved an email announcing the fact that I haven't smoked in two months! I was totally thinking about having a cigarette some time this week with the endless cartons lying around the house, the opened pack left on my father's nightstand that will sit there until they return from vacation in nearly 2 weeks. I was thinking I had enough of this not smoking, I proved my point and now I can go back to normality. But 2 months? That's a lot of time to throw away.

"Countless times you've refused the offered cigs. More times than that you've craved nicotine, but opted for health, instead. You've endured teasing, lack of support, and feeling uncomfortable and out of place among smokers. You may have had issues with weight, anger, tension or sadness, but still you stayed SMOKE-FREE!"

I suppose a whole cigarette, a pack, a carton, lung disease isn't really worth it when you get such "inspiring" thoughts sent to you via email. I haven't smoked 900 cigarettes and saved nearly 0 dollars.

Tuesday, August 5, 2003

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Am I a nerd? Go ahead...you can tell me...

When people leave my company, as I will in 18 days, they send out an email thanking everyone for the pleasure of working along side "such a great bunch of folks" and for the "positive learning experiences" and "lifetime memories" that transpired in these dingy offices with yellowed weak lighting. Are people really that sincere? . . . ?

I wonder what sickly crap I will come up with that will be the equivalent of selling my soul. I wonder if I will be able to pull it off. I wonder if I'll survive the exit-interview without doing completely nuts and screaming about how I totally sold myself out of graduate school recommendations and a paycheck. Are jobs supposed to make you happy?

The thing is though, I didn't hate my job all that much. Occasionally, I loved it. Occasionally is a stretch. I don't think we have a word in English that means "at the frequency that asteroids fall to earth, striking and severely injuring humans.” Maybe that word is rarely. Rarely, I actually loved my job. Rarely, I actually loved my job when I wasn’t involved in mindless, repetitive tasks that were both thankless and senseless. Or when I wasn’t being essentially harassed for not being a robot.

The people weren’t so bad either. Some of them made me laugh. Some of them were interesting. Some got promoted when they knew little more than how to brown nose while I never got that big promotion to Level II. Some were self-absorbed egotistical people who believed my job was to serve them. Those people make me angry. The good people were essentially as common as albinos in the general population. Or midgets. And I love midgets.

All in all, I cannot imagine writing such an email telling everyone how great it was and all but dotting my Is with hearts. But, the truth, I don’t know if I should share that:

I would like to thank everyone for the opportunity to, as my supervisor said at my yearly review, have that “bad out-of-college first-job experience.” (We will ignore the fact that I have been working – unfortunately – for about 8 years in offices.) I wouldn’t imagine a more suited group of people to go through this experience with. Like midgets and albinos, the exceptional people here were people appeared with the same frequency. I use exceptional in the true sense of the word like awesome not meaning gnarly but actually inspiring awe. To those in this category, I have lifetime memories both terrifying and terrific. It’s tragic that I could have made more money and been given the same senseless tasks as a secretary in a suburban corporate farm, and for this, I will always remember my time here. I am happy my mid-20s were wasted away at such a pointless endeavor.

Seriously, they would so fire me on my last day for that.

Thursday, July 31, 2003

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When I left Brooklyn and moved back in with my parents, I thought I had months and months of endless time to do a mental list of things that needed to get done before I began school in the fall. I thought those weeks and months, those clichéd "endless summer days" were going to be laid out before me to investigate, turn about in my hands and mold into the best summer ever. Now August is a sneeze away and I barely have time to do things I enjoy. I always thought that I would be able to take the train into the city and wander the streets as I had spent my weekends when I was a resident. Not once have I done this. Not one weekend day was I free enough to just wander the streets of Manhattan, looking for answers to the thoughts in my head in the carved stone of older building or the steel of modern ones. I am not even sure if I have thoughts inside my head any more.

Granted, this summer was an unusually busy one. My older sister's wedding was an all-consuming event that occupied the majority of my time. I was either doing direct wedding-related services such as hand cutting large sheets of paper down to size for programs or doing things I never before imagined myself participating in like tanning which led my boobs to badly peel about a week after the wedding, which would have freaked out my boyfriend if it weren't for the fact that he was in mourning over the death of his mother and therefore not looking at my boobs during their molting phase anyhow. I believe I can attribute about 50% of "what has happened to the time?" phenomenon to my sister's wedding. (For those who attended, the pictures are in - just select the wedding and the password is the 4 digit date/mmdd.)

Another 25% of "where has the time gone" can be attributed to having a boyfriend. Seriously, sometimes the love and romance doesn't seem worth it when I realize I haven't slept in my own bed but for once or twice in the past 3 weeks. I have only given myself 1 pedicure all summer and paid for a second versus the usual summer ritual of weekly pedicures! Living in New Jersey means we are more conveniently located geographically which means I don't have to plan ahead to make sure I have clothes for the next day when it's a 10 minute drive to get them. Having a handsome and goofy boyfriend has its perks but sometimes I wonder what I would be doing with my time if I didn't have him.

But, we get a lot of things done together. In 2 and half hours this weekend, we opened a new bank account for me, went to his bank, ordered me a new pair of glasses, hand lunch, picked up his mother's mail, dropped off papers in Bloomfield, arranged to borrow heating pans for the Fiesta 2003, got into a fight and made up.

The funny thing about my new glasses, is that they are called 2.5, as in what I got on my yearly review. They are very stylish rim-less glasses that are ultra light at 2.5 grams but they are also the embodiment of 2Point5. I merely went to investigate the sign that said "Two Point Five" when the optician picked out a pair, plopped them on my face and I fell in love. 2Point5 is an under-estimated pair of glasses / office worker that has surprising capabilities and skills (I’ll show the magic tricks they can do when I get them). The boy isn't too into them but he doesn't like change any how.

I would have to attribute 5% of time flying to aging and the decreasing relative percentage of my life that each day holds. For example, when I was 1 week old, that seventh day was 14% of my life. Today, I am 9699 days old, which is 0.0103103% of my life. This makes each day a smaller and smaller part of my life.

Along the same liners of relativity, the final 20% can be attributed to living in New Jersey. They say that if they sent someone into deep space, when that person returns everyone that person knew will either be really old or dead while the person would still be pretty much unaged. When walking the streets of Manhattan, constantly surrounded by life, time moves more slowly. When transplanted into the suburbs where great distances can be covered at 70 mph if you suspect no cops are hiding in speed traps, life passes and time is not experienced in the same way as it is when forced to pause at each corner for a light and to interact with other people on a continual basis.

This can best be illustrated by the car shopping trip I took with my parents this weekend. We took a county-route pretty far into New Jersey that has strip malls, car dealerships, a small amusement park and every major chain restaurant along its sides. We were on the road for maybe 45 minutes, stopping to walk around lots as, unfortunately, the dealerships were all closed on Sunday. My mother decided to take a large interstate home while my father and I wanted to go back the way we came. My mother did not want to “stop at every corner” (although there is maybe 8 lights in the 25 mile stretch of road) while my father and I found the interstate bland. “There’s nothing to see here. All you can do it go fast. Nothing happens when you go fast,” was all he said. It took us 20 minutes to get back home, and the only thing that occurred was the passage of time. p.s. I also got a new pair of sandals for 14.50 to replace my cracked-sole, stinky, 3-years-old, high-milage sandals.
Monday, July 28, 2003

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Planning is a good thing. Planning parties, especially given a week or two timeframe versus the endless weeks alotted to a weddings, which causes many "bright ideas" to develop that I manage to be left to execute, is great fun. Even the boy is in on the game with a page-long list of assorted liquors, preferred beers and other such alcohol to purchase at discount. Finding just the right party plates, caterer and decorations, especially if Oriental Trading is heavily consulted, makes for an attractive diversion and light-hearted times. Three words: cactus margarita glasses.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003

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These days remind me of what I used to feel like all the time and accepted as normal before I understood it didn't always have to be that way. That feeling itself is enough to drive me out of my mind. I don't want to be negative and I try to hyper-concentrate on the positive. I picture my sister's wedding and the ring I left on the bathroom vanity after I vomited on it is what comes to mind. I think about my new car and waves a naseau overwhelm me when I realize getting insurance in NJ is more difficult that becoming a lawyer in the same state.

There is so much forward wishing and thinking because right now, it is tough times. I want that carefree feeling rather than the continual desire to throw up. But there is some of that American Beauty plastic-bag-in-the-wind / dead-bird-in-the-grass / flat-rat-in-the-parking-lot going on. Maybe it is this that makes me want to throw up in my mouth. Maybe it is the kiss on the head when I am on the stationary bike and my nose begins to bleed as I am being handed a tissue. Maybe it is the streaks of color in the evening sky. Maybe there is no sustained stories, no plot lines and no sentence structure. Maybe it is only the moment and not the future I should relish in.
Monday, July 21, 2003

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The past week or so of my life has been full of some of the best and some of the worse moments that can be had and each and every one of them were about loving and the fortification of love. Everything from my father's smile to the boy's scrunched face caused tears for completely opposite reasons on the sorrow-to-joy spectrum. But I have not cried, I have not sobbed. Repeatedly I've allowed my eyes to fill with tears and the world now has a dewy look to it after all this time.

After feeling so often and so much mixed in with severe exhaustion, each moment has become heavy with emotion from picking out the bright pink cardigan last week to wearing it again to work today. I could use a long vacation and many hours of sleep but it is not something being offered to me right now so I'll clutch to my new purse that holds more than my old canvas bag and walk through the following days and weeks.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003

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