Monday, July 2, 2007

some things

i've spent the majority of my time this week trying to figure out 3 things . . .

(1) where am i going to get a job? i basically have two skills: waiting tables and reading papers. it's been hard to do either because up until recently my thrice fractured once dislocated right arm has been bound and gagged.

(2) where am i going to live? right now i live with my fiance's parents. imagine moving back in with your parents, only this time they're very concerned with what you do with your penis.

(3) how is a story i'm working on going to work out? it's ugly right now---hideously ugly. i wouldn't even think of posting it here. but it's consuming a lot of my thought, so i thought i would mention it here and maybe it'll make me feel better and can continue moving forward with it again.

another random thing that's been pestering me: hemingway was a douche. those of you who know me well know of my long running affair with this writer, but seriously, he was a total douche. how do you continue an affair with a man who's a douche?

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the trouble with trying to get a job at a restaurant is that restaurants have very strict hours when they will discuss anything with a potential employee (2-4, most of them). if you don't know how to get where you're going, this window can prove to be really small. i missed my turn on friday trying to go in for an interview and ended up in a place i knew must exist but never wanted to really find out where---you know, "that part of the city." that place where kids think it's funny to jump in front of cars and get them to stop, then decide that playing in the street is just so much fun, they'd rather not go back to the sidewalk; the place that people strap tires on front of their cars to substitute for bumpers. i'm not stereotyping---these are things i saw in the 45 some odd minutes that i was lost there. and i might have been perfectly comfortable except that it had an odd feeling of the foreign for me. it seemed more like the streets of brazil i've driven than anything i've seen in the states. in fact, it was remarkably like it. bordering on the third world. wreckless. unsupported. it had all the ear-marks of a society in decay, and i wondered who let it get like that.

and then (after backtracking endlessly) i met the manager i was supposed to see. he was white, and had what was essentially an A.C.T. specially designed to weed out the uneducated or non-white for me to take, with questions like, "what was eleanor roosevelt's middle name?" and "what is the name of the street the white house is on?" and some other ridiculous ones about white american history and upper-echelon neighborhoods that no one could possibly be familiar with unless they lived there, none of which had anything to do with the restaurant business or waiting tables. and i'm not sure if it was just a trick of the eye, but i'm almost sure it said "vote republican" at the bottom.

1 comment:

Julie said...

I love this post, even if there's no poem included. I hope your job hunting and writing get easier -- have you applied at a newspaper? Maybe you could get your own column and get paid to write scandalously brilliant things. And use words like "douche."