Tag Archives: job-hunting

The Rage Part III

The Rage is here. We haven’t talked about The Rage for a while.

Many things trigger the rage. The alarm not going off. The dog eating my shoe making me angry three days later. Something messing up at work. Realizing I need to find a new job soon.

The Rage hates finding new jobs. The rage would rather punch walls and leave me with a purple welt for a middle right knuckle. Which it has.

So I’ve tried to define Job as FMOPTB which is an acronym for a Fulfilling Means of Paying the Bills. I need to find a new Fulfilling Means of Paying the Bills. Soon.

Trouble is, my mind is blank. The Rage is making me want to ram the car into a too-tight double-parking space. Throw things around the office. Go home and do naughty things with something sharp. The Rage is reminding me of all the people I’ve met who make me mad when I think about them. All the sordid bits of a life.

The Rage makes me want to punch metal walls until my knuckles fall off. Throw paper clippings at the sky. Scream maniacally into the street and not eat lunch.

The Rage does not like that I got an overdraft fee of $35. Equivelant to one doctor’s visit. One physical therapy appointment. A trip to the grocery store to buy a few “things”. Lunch for four days. A new shirt. Shoes. Books. Anything but paying the bank for the honor of transferring funds from my saving into my checking account.

The Rage makes me hostile towards my coworkers. Makes my skin crawl with a thousand sour pin pricks. Makes me twitch and glower. Makes me probably look like a Neanderthal. But the Rage is here again, and there is not a whole lot I can do about it. The Rage wants me crushed like a damaged car into a thin sheet of metal. The Rage wants my fists bloody. Wants my eyes torn out. Wants me to give up on the whole FMOPTB thing. The Rage gives up. The Rage has no hope. The Rage, of course, is like a blood clot. Black and red and full of some type of goo that just looks, well, slimy. And you don’t want to touch it. The Rage needs to go on a vacation. Become the demon on someone else’s shoulder. Because the Rage has no foresight. The Rage has no sense of serendipity or resolution. The Rage wants to hurt things and people, leave me an empty snail shell for someone else to crawl into. The Rage hates me, and I hate the Rage, but we are symbiotic somehow, and it is hard to curtail the Rage’s exploitations on my being.

The Rage is BEGGING me to go do something INSANE. NOW! The Rage is telling me, damn it, you just can’t SIT there and type – go DO something! And do it wildly! LOSE YOUR SHIT YOU LITTLE PERSON.

The Rage likes to yell.

The Rage obviously has a temper and needs to be sedated. I will give the rage a yellow pill and hope it slows down, just a smidgen. Because the Rage has no hope, only malice. The Rage needs to be imbibed with a Thorazine shuffle and dressed in a robe and pink slippers. I could give the Rage a cocktail glass filled with sparkling water and a lime, maybe a cigar to hold in it’s fat lips. The Rage can sit and chill for a while in a padded room.

Trouble is, the Rage is synergistic, encompassing my whole person. Creeping up and pouncing like a wild ocelot. The Rage thrives on lack of sleep and not eating. The Rage likes things bloody and blind.

The Rage is going to have to take a chill pill. We’ll see how it likes that.

Bonafied Berkeleyite?

My computer has been down for a while again (monitor gave out, waiting for new one to come.) and everything I own (books, cd’s, dvd’s, clothes, who knows what else) is in boxes. Then there’s this family funeral thing, starting two new jobs (and maybe another internship, I still don’t know) and I am completely lacking in the cool topics on my blog department.

I reminisce to the month of November when I was so bored at my job that I could come up with some new and engaging rant on a daily basis – whether it was eating bananas in front of my coworkers to sippin syrup. As I don’t have the old job or health care for that matter, neither of those topics are relishing at this point.

In other news, Berkeley is a trip. You just don’t know until you’ve lived here. There are so many overgrown yards, gray-haired activists, crazy bike riders, Obama posters as big as cars and extremely overpriced grocery stores I just can’t keep up.

Every other week there are people protesting in trees, with the police building barricades around the trees for the sake of who? The people in the trees? The people outside of the trees? Is everyone in Berzerkeley just up in the trees? Egads. I don’t know.

My dog loves the neighborhood. So many places to defecate. So many cats to sniff. So many bicycles to be afraid of. So many randomly barking dogs tied to the front steps while their owners are gardening who jump at us only to be choked to death and spun backwards by the leash while their owners hold their jaws closed and go tsk tsk Foo Foo!

We found out the windows in our apartment had been painted shut, along with the beautiful brass hinges from the original doors. Luckily my Father had a trusty pocket knife and his handy screwdriver “Big Bertha”. We were able to open a couple of the windows. Not that we necessarily want them open. Because of all the greenery there are more varieties of mice and spiders than I ever saw in the valley.

If I come back as a spider I am surely in trouble. I have smashed a brown one, a black and red one, some daddy long-legs (oh and please, save me from the pest-rights people who are going to come banging down my door as soon as this goes live) and amply sprayed a very large ugly brown something until it finally backed away from the window. I think it would have helped more if I had an amplifier. “BACK AWAY FROM THE WINDOW SPIDER! I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND I DO NOT APPROVE!”

The former tenant was growing eggplant, edamame, peppers and long japanese cucumber, none of which have survived. There are surrounded on all sides by Milk Thistle and my dog. I could find more use for the Milk Thistle than I could for the defunct rotting vegetables my dog keeps hacking up on the carpet.

We plan on growing stuff – as soon as we obtain a rake and a spade and all that gardening stuff. I want to grow cherry tomatoes and some cool herbs. For cooking. Not for the other stuff those Berkeley people smoke. Na-uh. I’m wack enough as it is.

Aiming in the right direction.

I decided to rest on my laurels today and do absolutely bat poop.

I sunk into the couch, stared at my dog, and read a trashy mystery novel, my second in a row. I wasn’t even feeling sorry for myself so much as completely wiped out.

Then I went to check my email, because I have to these days. I wasn’t expecting much, but I found a gold mine. A solid interview from an internal referral for a publishing (publicity) internship that pays a wage. An email from a local woodworking/welding school about my desire to be an intern in the wood shop in exchange for free classes. Some references for trainers who can help me with my dog who’s lost a couple screws, from a very kind guy in the dog park who witnessed her very scary brawl (stellar moves though) yesterday in the park.

How stoked can I be! I should be dancing around in circles but I’m pretty beat – and I’m planning on going on a hike with the dog tomorrow to wear her out, so I think I’ll sink back into the couch and wait for more things to drop out of the sky.

Not to say I didn’t do the footwork, but sometimes the opposite of what you think is productive is the perfect thing. I strongly believe in aiming one or two strong arrows in the direction I’m headed as opposed to fifty vainly aimed arrows.

And there’s always a full time job opportunity in the city my temp agency is presenting to me. Though, my heart really isn’t in it anymore. I don’t want to be an office manager so much, even if it is at a small law firm working for the benefit of people with disabilities and pays far more than I’ve ever made. I read this in Writing Down the Bones today, it’s an essay called “Living Twice”,

“You’re more interested, finally, in living life again in your writing than in making money. Now, let’s understand – writers like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. This is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step – their time – and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold onto it and aren’t so eager to sell it…Writers, if they are smart, won’t sell too much of it. They know once it’s sold, they might be able to buy a second car, but there will be no place they can go to be still, no place to dream on.”

She couldn’t have captured my intuition about time any better. People are oh so willing to buy my time. They’ll pay outlandish sums for my time. This makes me a bit suspicious. I am 26, going toward internships doing what I love rather than a steady paycheck. And it feels a little unbalanced, a little scary, but it feels right. (I just wrote write instead of right by accident. Freudian much?) Do what you love and the money will follow. My time is my essence, and I can’t get it back once it’s gone. I am tired of struggling with the corporate buck. I don’t want to wake up at thirty in my own personal groundhog’s day, working at yet another dead end job. Going ohmygod. I’m thirty and I should have taken that internship in publishing while I had the chance. I should have pursued woodworking and piano rebuilding. My god, here I am, and now I’m too old to go back. Too many responsibilities.

I will trade a little pain now for a lot of happiness later, because I aimed in the right direction. My direction. The only true shot I can give.