After applying to 74 jobs at G's school, 29 at the school I was temping at, and exactly 100 jobs on craigslist, I FINALLY have a job! I start tomorrow. I got an admin assistant position at the grad school at G's school. I have health insurance (soon)! Paid time off! Paid sick days! School holidays off (spring break, winter break, etc)! And it's all within a 5 minute walk from the apartment. Finally. A huge weight has lifted off my shoulders.

Last Friday my mom texted me and said she was coming to visit. I gave her the address of a friend of mine who just moved to DC to shut her up when I first came here, and lately she's been calling G constantly, as well as a few friends of mine. Where'd she get their numbers? She went through my phone a year ago. But she's been bothering everyone and finally she said she was coming to visit so I basically had to bully her out of it. She responded with one last text message, a phrase in Arabic that basically said that I'd see her next at her funeral. Not nice but whatever. On the Wednesday before that, I dropped $94 on an edible arrangements basket. I thought it would be a nice gesture. I specifically scheduled it to be delivered on Saturday so that they'd be home to get it. It was successfully delivered and they didnt' acknowledge it at all. Oh well I guess.

We worked a gun show in Waco this past weekend. T-shirt of the show: "Bush: Love him or hate him, he killed a ton of Arabs." Thanks, jackass. A dealer at the show was talking to G's mom about how he left his wallet in the bathroom, and opened his story with: "I was going into the bathroom to take an Obama..." Classy, classy people.

First day tomorrow!

Hey there

Long time no post I suppose. I'll make a list.

1. Three gun shows in a row for the next three weekends. Should be interesting. I'll do my best to post but frankly I've lost all motivation for everything so I'll try.

2. Work. I'm still with this crap temp thing but I've had two interviews in the past. One, I never heard back from at all, at the same school I'm working at now. The second, with this book distributor about an hour away that needed an Arabic language person. I interviewed and was, in fact, offered the job, but I turned it down. It paid less than what I'm doing now, but there would be an added expense--gas. A 2 hour commute each way in rush hour, a lot of work and responsibility, and working with Arabs and my boss who was pretty much exactly like my dad--he lectured all the time, would ask me questions and then talk over me when I tried to answer, on and on. So, I passed it up. I have an interview on Tuesday at a big company where I'm slightly optimistic, considering I was chosen out of what I assume are many resumes online, so we'll see.

3. My dad has been emailing me really rude emails about how I don't have a heart or a conscience or whatever, and I get his point, but it just pisses me off. I don't want to talk to someone who still belittles me. Enough of that. My mom called one of my very good friends and left her a voicemail. It's getting a little stressful. I just want some peace and quiet but I fully 100% intend to reconnect and talk with them, just not now.

4. Living with G is a little better, and it's getting better, but still there are issues of pace and absent-mindedness. He's just so laid back about EVERYTHING and it drives me insane. Take something a little seriously, please.

5. Boris, the cat. Still has ringworm but guess who else has it too? Yeah. Gross and also really hilarious. It's pretty much gone though, I bought some cream for it at CVS and so that's okay. Certainly cheaper than going to the doctor without insurance. He sleeps in our bed and so it was inevitable.

I have followers and comments on here from people I don't know, which is interesting and also really drives me crazy because I want to know who the hell you are! Oh well though, I suppose this is the downfall of being a wildly popular blogger (not).

I am smoking too many cigarettes and I assume I have a problem with that. The Arab in me is coming out in full force I suppose. Gross though. I kind of hate myself for that but G smokes so even if I didn't want to, it would still be here in front of me.

I guess that's it for now. Hope you're all doing well.

New Year

G and I adopted a cat. Boris Moscowitz. G came up with a story (admittedly while under the influence) about Boris' background--his grandfather was a stow-away cat on a ship that came through Ellis Island. He supported his wife and three sons by shining shoes on the streets of Brooklyn. Boris' father, Yuri, made the family rich through investment banking, and would have had a lot of issues with Wall Street's recent fall but he was smart and put away a lot and so they're okay for now. This cat is hilarious. He has an amazing personality. I'm in love :)

The Jewish new year is this weekend and G first wanted to go to his usual temple, a reform temple, but decided that it wasn't "traditional enough" and so now we're going to Saturday morning services at a conservative temple, and to be honest I'm nervous. I'm wearing a black dress, black pantyhose (hah) and black shoes. I'm nervous because I HATE ritualistic traditional things like this, and sitting through 2 hours of conservative Jewish stuff doesn't sound appealing to me. Buuut it's important to him so I'll try. And I'm gonna bake challah hahaha. I'm personally a big fan and it's an appropriate occasion so there we go.

The job market seems to be working out for my friends, but I'm still having issues. I've had a couple of interviews that haven't led to anything, and a couple of scams as well, but otherwise I'm just saturating the market with my resume and getting ignored. I'm trying to stay optimistic though. But I've been sick lately and I've missed two days of work this week already, which is a problem since I get paid hourly and it adds up quickly. But a friend of mine in Seattle started writing for a start-up news-blog/service/thing and threw my name out there so I'll give it a shot. I'm not sure what to write about though. She suggested sending in this blog but I'm not sure. I'd write about the Middle East and throw out my opinions there but I don't want to alienate anyone or be too controversial from the start. I should be doing that now but instead I'm doing this. My facebook has a lot of stories and commentary, maybe I could do a huffpost kinda thing. I don't know. I haven't been too inspired lately, which is sad. I have all these books I want to read but I lose interest right away.

I've been sick lately. I can't seem to eat anything without getting nauseous (no, I am not pregnant). My sinuses hurt, I have constant headaches, and I just feel like crap. I'd like to go get checked out but I can't really afford it at this point. Hopefully it won't kill me. It's making me miss work though. There's a woman with MS who works there and I'd rather not contribute to her demise. The office is so negative and unpleasant though, maybe that's what's making me sick. It's such a terrible environment there. There was a huge shake-up last week, and the director and VP of our department got fired, and now the IT department, who I technically work for, is in charge, so I'm slightly optimistic that they'll pull some strings and buy out my contract from the temp agency. They've been hinting at it. Of course, I could just be making up all these signs and they'll let me go as scheduled. I don't know. I'm just trying to make it paycheck to paycheck. Student loans are coming up though.

Overall though I think things are going well. We've settled into a routine. It's already mid-September, which is insane. Time is moving so quickly.

hah

i decided to use the career center to help me out in the job search. i searched dallas and 50 miles around it. that was the only specification entered. this was the only result.

My two best friends, guilt and obligation, have returned

For the past couple days I've been feeling kinda guilty about this whole situation and how it's affected each person of my family, but this morning I was greeted with a lovely email that kind of eliminated that, but still made me feel like shit. As a result, with 12 days left until unemployment, I've called in and crawled back into bed.

My father the attorney sent me this long, rigid, contract-like email, numbered and bullet-ed about how wrong I am for doing this. When my mom contacts me--and we've been a little in touch lately--it's pretty much always, "Hi, how are you, I miss you, I want to hear how you're doing." It's nice and friendly and it encourages me to respond. Not this email. It was impersonal and just full of negative things and very clinical. I will attach some of my favorite parts.

1 – “Teens” run away because they either live in “abusive” homes or they are bad.

However,

2 – “Adult” family members will always argue & disagree on many issues but they do not walk away from their families and stop speaking with them. This is true in every culture, society and religion.

Your actions do not qualify under either (1) or (2) above.

The quotes piss me off. This is how he opened the email. What the fuck is that?? You're not writing a contract, you're not sending a business email, you're writing to your daughter who you apparently want to get in touch with again and this is how you open? Point two is a good point but he's so cold about it, shit. So, skipping a couple of stupid sentences not worth your time, he continues with this:

Let me tell you how I see things & I am sure you have enough brains to understand:

Well isn't it nice that he's sure I have enough brains to understand. I'm pretty sure he's translating this directly from an Arabic phrase he likes to use a lot, and quite a bit gets lost in translation, but his patronizing intent gets through perfectly in either language. He then goes on to list, in bullets and sub-bullets, all the points he has to address and why I shouldn't be so grateful that he's outlined my life and how I'm insane to not follow his path.

• Abuse: his point: I wasn't abused. Yeah, I know. So I should be grateful that I wasn't abused, which is true, but in my opinion, pointing out that I wasn't abused shouldn't really be a thing to point out in the first place.
  
• Marriage: I wasn't forced to get married. Again, not even a question in my mind, and that he has to point that out shows a huge cultural gap that I didn't realize was this big.
• Religion: I wasn't asked/forced to wear religious clothing. Super. Because obviously I'm a very observant, religious person so that's a consideration. Or hell, it's not like HE'S a religious person either. I don't know how religious he could be or how he could even ask me to wear "religious clothing" if he enjoys whiskey on the rocks fairly often.
  
• Money: I wasn't asked to pay for anything. Except that each time I went out with my sisters, to see a movie or eat somewhere or go shopping, I paid for it. I don't mind it but it's something both of my parents tend to forget. Or the fact that I paid for all of my own expenses. I lived in their house for free, yeah, but any time I left and bought something, it was from my own money. This is also something they forget. I'm not complaining about it because I would have felt terrible asking them for money each time I left the house, but I think it's a significant thing.
  
• Education: "If you remember, I suggested you save ALL your salary for a whole year and then go to a law school of your choice." Except that I've mentioned SEVERAL times that I don't want to go to law school. But hey who cares about that.
• Career: He's offered to pull some strings in the ME and get me a job there. Because I really want to go live there. And when I turned it down he got personally offended.
  

This is how he does things. I don't appreciate it. It doesn't make me any more eager to get in touch with them. If anything, it just pushes me away more, and now that I think about it, it makes me more angry and resentful than before. He hasn't changed. He hasn't even pretended. He still talks to me this way even after I've left. So screw it. I can't decide if I want to respond with a rebuttal or just leave it alone. I'll have to think about it.

But in the meantime this email has made me chain smoke a bunch of cigarettes too early in the morning. Because I wasn't getting more and more tempted to smoke cigarettes as it is, I got a lovely excuse to have too many too early. My smoking habits are making me dislike myself. The apartment smells like cigarette smoke and marijuana. I won't be passing any drug tests any time soon.

I never read horoscopes (really!) but they're automatically generated on the bottom of my home page and this is what it says for this week:

At the start of the week, I promised you that life with improve as the week unfolds. Hopefully you can already feel this. There was a nasty Mars/Saturn link which is now over. In the next 24 hours, Mars will link next to Jupiter, the planet of good fortune and good luck. As you can imagine, this brings us all the promise of some kind of heavenly boost. For you as a TAURUS, this is taking place in your 10th House of Career. It suggests that one of your professional dreams is about to get a much improved chance of coming true. Good luck!

I've been working this shit temp job for about 6ish weeks now and it just gets worse and worse. I've never had a work environment like this before. In the time I've been here, people still don't know my name. One of the guys working here yelled at us (temps) across the room yesterday, "Is one of y'all's name Valerie?" No. It's not. We've been CONSTANTLY doing their work for 6 weeks, even things we shouldn't be doing, like their own personal projects, and yet they still don't know our names. People literally walk up to us every day and hand us things to do. Learn my name dammit.

There are 3 of us temps and one is gone; she quit today. This woman could not mention Barack Obama without somehow mentioning the Nazis or Hitler in the same sentence. She apparently had TWO interviews yesterday and was offered a job today so off she goes. I've applied to hundreds of jobs and have nothing. Frankly, I don't get that.

There's some huge project happening here in the next couple of weeks and I've been volunteered to to help out on the 1st, working from 7:30am to 4pm. The woman coordinating the whole thing (let's call her Suzie) comes up to our floor today to hand us the schedules. It should have been me and the other girl, but since she quit today, Suzie had to find a replacement. Her reaction when she found out the other woman quit? "Boo! Good for her but boo!" She then walks up to me, hands me my schedule, and says, "I hope you don't get a job soon too!"

Thanks, bitch. Seriously? Who says that? And no, she wasn't joking. And as if that weren't bad enough, I had to make a run to her floor to talk to someone else and she saw me and assumed that I was there to talk to her--"No! Don't tell me you got a job!"

G's mom pulled some strings and talked to some friends and I have an interview for a receptionist position Monday morning. After all of this I'm losing hope. I want to be optimistic but I don't fucking know.

A part of me is happy that I'm not the only one in this sort of rut. Everyone I've talked to is either unemployed or working a shit job and unhappy. The transition is rough.

I hope I don't get stuck in a receptionist/admin assistant career path. What a waste.

There's another gun show next weekend and G's parents have been mumbling about promoting me from door-sitter to cashier, which means I'll get to interact with every crazy who walks through the door. That should provide for some interesting experiences.

I am seriously considering going to grad school and somehow turning my gun show observations into some sort of dissertation. I'm not sure what I'll write about the gun show people just yet, but I feel like it could be a unique paper. Either way I need to go to school again because it's better than all this.