The Flood

Yesterday was a hard day - I have good ones and hard ones lately. However - I'm hopeful that I hit a turning point yesterday when the flood hit. I hadn't cried over this last month of loss and stress until yesterday afternoon. Although I was tempted to believe it was because I was growing and getting better at dealing with stress and the punches - but I knew better than that.

I cried, I screamed, I yelled, I pity partied, I wondered what my neighbors were thinking, and after an hour and a half of letting it out I was exhausted. I believe that it was an important part of the healing process - I felt much better this morning, and I have more energy to move forward and make things work without feeling trapped.

The screaming and yelling was something I don't typically do - I normally just cry. It's been suggested to me that yelling and screaming, in essence speaking what I'm really angry about, who I'm really angry at, is healthy practice. I was a bit skeptical, and, it worked. Then this morning I had a dream about the very person who suggested it to me. Coincidence - i think not.

Good Lord I Am a Crazy Person

I had an interview this afternoon for a job that I'm actually really interested in. I am happy with all the answers I gave, I think I made a good impression, and at the end of the interview I'm still interested in the position. Not like the last interview I went on. In that one I was happy with the answers I gave, not so sure about the impression I made and at the end of the interview I was no longer interested in the position.

At the end of this interview I asked what the next steps were. I was given a terribly vague answer, which I believe to be the truth as it stands, not a vague answer to avoid commitment or something. That said, the least vague answer was that they want to fill the position by the end of September. I personally would like to be employed before the end of September and in that moment expressed that I could be available at any time and was "to play all my cards" quite interested in the position. I hope that I didn't come off too needy, and rather came off polished and interesting.

When I got home I got a regret letter from that first company. It's alright - I was planning on turning down a second interview if it was offered to me, and yet something stung about the rejection. So I had a good interview and then two little things aren't exactly the way I want them to be and I can't handle it. I feel completely crazy and out of control. I mean the interview did go well and then because of two minor things I'm completely off, I'm quiet and surly with friends and I start giving into the voices that tell me I'll never get hired again and that I won't find another job I can stick at for more than 10 months and that I'm doomed to be a drifter.

After a normal feeling night with people who didn't know that I've been laid off I feel a little better. I'm sure this is a sign I'm taking a bit too much of my identity from being employable. And still it felt good to hang out with people and not be "the unemployed one." Stupid thing is that no one has treated me like "the unemployed one" it's something I totally put on myself.

See - these are the ramblings that go on inside this head. It's exhausting!

Another Good Use of Time

I have no idea why this is so freaking hilarious - and - these things make me laugh out loud!

So It's Week 3

Welcome to week three of unemployment! Can I get an amen? Or a woo woo? I would like to say that I've been using my responsibility-less time to it's full potential with plenty of reading, exercising and catching up with friends rolled in there with the job searching. Hmm - I've read 1 chapter in a book, taken a few walks, and caught up with no one. I have however played plenty of online games, watched a lot of television and woken up without an alarm.

After a few hard days I'm not as upset as I first was. I'm very thankful not to be working at my old job. For certain I would have liked to leave on my own terms, and, still can't think of any better reason than a paycheck to continue working there. I'm still trying to figure out what direction to move next - and if there's a way I can find a job to stay content at for more than 6 months.

I've also been wondering a lot about stress and my ways of approaching and dealing. It seems as though denial is perhaps my strategy. I say this because I think I'm doing well and then one little tiny thing hits and I'm off. Off to scary crazy extremes. I'd like to dig into that a bit more too. For now I think I'll play more games...

Can Eating Trail Mix Make You Smell Like Peanuts?

I know eating too much garlic can make you smell like garlic because it starts coming out your pores. Is the same true for nuts? I smell like peanuts - it's coming out of my pores and it's GROSS. This is one (of very few) nights I'm thankful I'm the only person sleeping in my bed.

One Thing

I had my cable turned off to save some money. Except I thought that perhaps the cable company would forget to turn off the signal - I know enough people who magically have cable in their apartments to believe it to be true. I was wrong. Yesterday I was just settling down to take a quick cat nap - taking advantage of having the opportunity - when it went out.

In and of itself this is not a big deal. I have some bunny ears, I can get some basic channels, and quite frankly I hope I'll stop being such a lazy butt with my time. However - when it actually went out I was terribly upset. Over cable! In that moment I realized how paper thin I am at the moment. I was actually having a good day - applied for a number of jobs, accepted an interview for a job that I could actually get into, and spent some time helping out a friend. One little thing like the cable going out and I could have cried. No joke.

It took pretty much the rest of the day to recover and this morning, after a good night's sleep I'm feeling better again. May try and take a hike, or a walk or something. In any case, what I'm trying to say, is that I'm frustrated with the fact that I'm so emotionally thin. It seems appropriate, and that doesn't mean I like it. I hope that I can continue to adjust to these changes without causing too much damage to my relationships. I think I tend to take my frustration out on my friends and I sort of realize it while it's happening, but I realize the extent when I'm out of the dark place. Here's to calmly approaching what's next.

Still Bitter

I had a dream last night that leads me to believe I'm still quite bitter with a girl I used to work with. She and Sheralee and I were shopping for black shoes at a mall. We went to Tiffany's only it was more like Nordstrom. Sheralee found some shoes and went somewhere else to look at something else. I found a pair and waited for this former coworker as she tried on every pair in the store. Then she started trying on dress after dress and it was taking FOREVER. I asked her to hurry up and she blew me off. I went to look for Sheralee who was at the basketball store (?) watching a game. When this girl came back she started screaming about how I didn't wait for her. We compared receipts and it turns out she took 3 1/2 hours longer than I did and I said something that I can't remember to her and walked off. Then I woke up in a state of complete rage and couldn't get back to sleep. It was 6:30 or thereabouts so it wasn't so bad. The rage though felt terribly real which is completely disconcerting because if you asked me I would have sworn that I had left her in the past and hoped I never saw her again.

In other news I had an interview this morning with a national car rental agency that I think went fairly well. I'm not overly excited about the job, but it's a decent enough opportunity to continue in the interview process.

Fantasy

I'm exhausted. Today was a beautiful day - I went up into the mountains with some good friends. We ate, browsed in some shops, hiked a bit and came back into Denver. In and of itself this is an exhausting day, and, I have so much on my mind at the moment that staying engaged in the moment and enjoying the day took so much work in and of itself. I hope that this doesn't continue. I hope that I can find a job soon - or at the very least settle into what unemployment payments will be like.

In a beautiful moment this weekend I was sitting in a friend's front yard talking about the past, present, and future using cards with words picked anonymously from a stack. The word I pulled for my present was fantasy. At first it seemed incredibly ludicrous - but when I sat with the word I realized that I would love to view life for now as fantasy. As in - I currently don't have to work, but should, barring something with the unemployment, have my bills paid for. This is a fantasy of mine. And - I have the opportunity to look at my future through fantasy eyes to perhaps find a job that I can love. One where I can wake up in the morning and not dread going into work.

That fantasy is so hard to find. I get totally bogged down in worrying about money, and searching for currently open jobs to get back to work as soon as possible. I'd like to slow down.

Is This What My Life Has Come To?

I'm watching the Super Sweet Sixteen movie on MTV while job searching. Like OMG I am not ROTFL.

Not as Bad as Originally Thought

So while getting let go, fired, the boot or whatever has not been easy, I'm beginning to see that perhaps in the short run it's not as bad as I originally thought. I took a generous offer from Sheralee and accompanied her on a work trip to northwest Colorado. I can search for jobs and field phone calls from here, so I'm basically getting a change of scenery while doing the work that I'm responsible for now - namely finding a new job.

While I've been here and perhaps just while I've been unemployed - it's mostly the same - I've realized that while I'm certainly stressed and worried about where the next rent check is coming from it's a totally different stress than working for a company that could care less about me. It's a different stress than dreading going into work in the morning. I don't stress looking for jobs, or answering phone screens in and of themselves. I stress about finding a job and about finding a good job but somehow it's different. Partially I suppose because I was already stressing about finding a new and good job while going through the motions at a really horrible one.

Don't get me wrong - it's not all sunshine and lollipops - and somehow while I wish that I didn't get fired some sort of huge weight has been lifted. I say this today. I say this right now. Tomorrow may be different - yesterday surely was. But I'm slowly learning that all I have is right now and I'd like to learn how to live with that in mind.

Job Hunting is Hard

Do you ever wonder if maybe you just don't know how to be content? I do. I really didn't like my last job. Almost every night I would think, or say to the person I was with "I wish we didn't have to go to work tomorrow. Then we could just stay up and watch movies and sleep in." The thing about working though is that you end up getting a paycheck for the time that you spend working. Turns out now that I don't have a job I like the idea of a paycheck much better than the idea of staying up late and sleeping in.

There's certainly a silver lining. I'm heading on a work trip with Sheralee this afternoon and I can get up whenever I feel like it in the morning. I can lounge around in my underwear until I feel like hopping in the shower and I can do laundry during the day when there's not as much demand for the machines. I've had a chance to read blogs that are of interest to me and I have all day and night to look for and apply for a job that I have a chance of liking.

Still - If I'm honest I'd really like a flexible schedule AND a large paycheck. Hmm - don't think that's possible though. If anyone has any leads on a job in Denver please pass them my way!

Holy Hell This is Funny

Star in Your Own JibJab! It's Free!

Update

I have been posting very vaguely about phone calls and things that I want for the past at least two weeks if not more. And the time has come, dear readers, to tell you the story. It is NOT the story I wanted to tell you, and still it's the one I have. So sit right back and I'll tell a tale...

Around July 4th I began looking for a new job. I haven't come right out and said it on this blog, but I do not like the company I've been working for, and finally got to a point where I was motivated to do something about it. I applied for a select number of positions that looked really interesting, and got called back for two of them right away. I'm sorry to say that a large chain store that sells organization products exclusively did not pursue me past the first interview. But that's probably for the best - I'm an organizational wreck, and probably wouldn't have fit in real well there.

The second job was more promising. I was extremely excited about it and made it through 5 rounds of interview. Yes, you read that right - FIVE interviews. The third of which had me spending 3.5 hours meeting with seven different people in groups and some one-on-one, and the fifth of which had me presenting to a group of people about the trip I took to Carnegie Hall when I was working in Grand Rapids. This was no ordinary interview process. The five interviews took place in the span of a little more than two weeks and then I started the waiting game. I waited, one deadline passed, two deadlines passed and before I knew it more than two weeks had passed. Each time I had contact with the company I was told that the team was meeting or that the contact person was on vacation - it seemed incessantly long to me, and yet, I understood a bit of what was taking so long. In the end I did not get that position. I was extremely disappointed and still don't quite understand why it took more than two weeks to tell me I didn't get the job. That was Friday.

So I resolved to find something else, borrowed a friend's computer over the weekend and began the search yet again. Or continued it depending on how you want to look at it. Friday was also a hellish day at my current job, but that's a story I'd like to forget and for that reason will not be posting about it here on the blog. Yesterday was a hard day. I woke up in the morning after having a terrible nightmare, and went into work resolved to be productive even though it was the last place on earth I wanted to be. Turns out my unspoken wish came true. My boss (of about a month and a half) pulled me into his office one hour before quitting time to tell me that I'd been fired. He gave me some bullshit about low productivity and evaluating the department to see if anything could be scaled back. I had never in the time I've been talking with him and meeting with him gotten one ounce of negative feedback, I've been hitting my performance goals, and this was certainly a shock. I (halfheartedly) tried to convince him that he was being unreasonable and that I should be able to keep my job, but to no avail. So - it's off to the unemployment office for me. All this on a day that I should have been celebrating my southpaw-ness: http://www.lefthandersday.com/.

The time since then has been a roller coaster of three basic emotions (with a couple variations, which I won't go into). 1 - The pain of being fired, or at it's core, the pain of rejection so obvious and forceful within the span of four days. 2 - Anger at the messed up people I was working for. 3 - Relief that I never have to work another minute for the little shits. I hope that the roller coaster reaches it's end in the not to distant future, and, I hope I can use some of this anger and relief energy to find an amazing job that I can love, be productive at, and last at for more than 10 months.

Here's to another round of dying, and the feeling of loss. I really hope that I get to the bottom of this pit soon - this falling, falling and oh yeah, some more falling is absolutely excrutiating and exhausting.

Nightmare!

Last night I had a really disturbing nightmare. I'm still surprised I got back to sleep after I woke up and I'm a bit disappointed that I can still remember it - I would like to forget.

I've always been curious about my dreams. I think that they tell me things, sometimes things that happen in my dreams happen in real life. I feel a bit crazy even admitting this, and, it's my reality. Now I'm wondering what this terrifying, and yet plausible dream means.

I didn't have time to research in my dream books this morning - maybe I'll be able to find something online.

Not the News I Wanted

Well the phone call is over - and it was NOT what I wanted to hear. Damn. It's amazing how much hope of the possibility of change affects me. Now I feel stuck again - awesome.

Remember That Phone Call?

It's going to happen tomorrow (Friday) morning! I'm nervous and excited all at the same time. I promise sometime I'll be less vague about this and at that point you'll probably wish you never asked! Until then feel free to make your own guesses about what may be happening.

A Book Non-Review

I'm in the middle of reading this book - The Question of God - and so far I am loving it. I haven't loved a book in quite a while, so it feels pretty good.

One of the things that bothers me the most is when people answer my questions by saying "that's the way we've always done it" or "that's the way it's always been done." There's got to be a reason that the first person who did it that way chose. A good example is Sheralee's story of the woman who cut of both ends of a roast before she put it in the pan to cook it. When asked why she answered that it was the way her mother did it. Someone asked the woman's mother why she did it that way and she said that was the way her mother did it. Someone asked the woman's grandmother why she did it that way and she said that the pan she had was too small to fit a full roast and she couldn't afford a new pan so she cut off the ends. The woman had a large pan, but still cut of the ends of the roast without thinking about it.

I haven't posted much about my inner journey lately - it's been busy and intense and I've been questioning most everything I've believed to this day in my life. I am loving this book because it attempts to lay out why two revered historical figures believed the things they did. Both men seem to have chosen paths that were understandable and thoughtful. It's like reading a discussion that had it really happened would have been monumental. Truly interesting if you ask me.

Bewildered

I don't fit in at the company I work for. Most of the time I think it's okay - it makes sense to me that I don't have a lot in common with the people I work for/with, and I'm more than fine keeping things on a professional and not a personal level. However the other two women on the team I work with are best buddies - they are always going out together, talk about personal stuff over the cubicle wall, and in turn end up working on a lot of projects together. Today (and a lot of days quite honestly) this is putting me into a crazy anger. It's not that I want to be buddies with them, I don't. Rather, it's that I'm tired of being the outsider. Every time they whisper, or walk outside to have a chat, or start talking about something personal I want to scream.

It's weird - I don't want to be friends with them. And yet, when they act like friends act I get so angry. Part of what I don't like is this unspoken idea that to work well as a team we have to be friends outside of work. I don't think that's true - and so I don't understand why I have to be friends to be included in the work team. And of course I don't like being disliked. Yes - I'm probably thinking about this too much, and at the same time it's being thrust in my face just by being at my computer working. Gah!

Say Hello to What's His Name

I have a new roommate - a sweet cat with no name as of yet. I don't like the name he had at the Dumb Friends League (Chico) and right now I have narrowed the name choices down to Stanley Stucco and Calvin Cab. Harvey was in the running, but I just don't think he's a Harvey. The middle names have significance because of the traumatic afternoon Sheralee, the cat and I shared yesterday.

We brought him home yesterday afternoon (this one and only picture I have is from in the car) and he of course ran into hiding right away because he's scared. The spot he chose was in my cabinets and I really didn't want him in there. In trying to coax him out I scared him deeper into the cabinet - except that the only place to go was into this tiny 4" space between the back of the cabinet and the wall. And he got stuck. I was freaking out, Sheralee was freaking out, the cat was freaking out. We called everyone we knew in Denver between the two of us, thinking we might have to cut out the back of the cabinet. We even called 911 and they told us to call 311 for animal control. Animal control couldn't come out, for some understandable reasons, so we ended up leaving him alone for a bit to see if he might find his own way out. And he did - what a smart cat. So Stucco for getting stuck and Cab for cabinet.

He did explore the apartment some during the night and even ate some food - so I think he's going to be just fine, it will take a little while though! It took me most of the rest of the afternoon to calm down!

In other news - I have not yet gotten this phone call or email I am so desperately waiting for. I promise when the time is right I'll post everything!

This One's For my Denver Friends

I have blatantly stolen this post from TFG. It describes the way I was raised to a 't' and in my world is hysterically funny. For those of you who don't know me personally or who I've only known after moving out of Michigan - this is a look at the way I grew up. For the rest of you, please laugh a little at your own expense - it's worth it, I promise. (And I can say that because I'm laughing at my own expense.)

You might be a Dutch Calvinist if...
- You finish the food on your plate in a restaurant even though it is burnt or otherwise unsuitable for human consumption.
- You reused plastic margarine containers long before anyone heard of the environmental movement.
- You have a two-volume address book. Volume I: A-U Volume II: V-Z.
- You have never skipped church to watch the Superbowl.
- Your main contribution in increased gender equality was to switch from KING to Wilhelmina brand peppermints.
- Your range of restaurant choice is restricted to the contents of a "Buy One Meal, Get One Free" coupon book that you bought to support missionaries in Sierra Leone.
- You wipe the last of the butter out of the container with your roll.
- Your mother's hairdo is the same at your wedding as it was at hers.
- Your closet is divided into work clothes and Sunday clothes.
- If you have several coupons that are good for "one customer only", you will send all 10 members of your family through different aisles at the grocery store so you can get 10X the bargains.
- Your church attendance record is not interrupted by childbirth.
- Your Sunday routine resembles this: Church, coffee, roast beef, green beans, a nap, and Church.
- You have a front room but never sit in it.
- You make the bed in a hotel room.
- The last tip you left in a restaurant was "Don't wear so much makeup" and "A little quicker with the coffee."
- You have always been to church on New Years Eve.
- You can sing "eere zij God" even though you can't speak Dutch.
- You think that being progressive means discarding the Psalter Hymnal in favor of the Steve Green songs on the overhead.
- Seeing hands in the air during worship causes you to look around for a stickup man.
- You are still trying to justify owning a dishwasher.
- On summer vacation you couldn't swim, only wading up to your knees was allowed.
- At your wedding, everyone was swaying, but no one was dancing.
- You have attended worship services at a campground amphitheater.
- You know what an afghan is.
- You have lace on your windows, but not on your underwear.
- Your two permanent Saturday jobs are to wash the car and make sure you have enough single bills for the offering plate.
- All of your recipes are adapted to fit into a 9X13 pan.
- You can't imagine a funeral reception without ham on buns.
- The Usher never has to ask you where you want to sit.

Nothing Yet

Not a damn thing! And I am running out of patience, hope, and sanity.