Job??? and: KEMPO!♥
I am starting to worry. By this time tomorrow, it will have been a week since my very promising interview with the video game store. For an interview that ended with "I just need to call the district manager and have him OK the hire," it sure is looking less promising with every passing day. Sure, this is a store where I've worked in the past, and I do remember that the district manager can be a hard man to reach on the phone, but... a week? Really?
I am way too trusting, and tend to believe people when they say things. Maybe the problem is with my ears, and I am hearing encouraging words when they are actually telling me to walk my slouchy unqualified ass out the door and never return.
If I don't hear from them tomorrow I'm going to call and ask to speak to the guy who interviewed me. (I would have done this already, but he was very specific on the point that he would certainly call me, as soon as he was certain, because he certainly needed to hire me. Then again... maybe I didn't read between the corporate lines, and he was actually saying something akin to that ol' insincere standby "don't call us... we'll call you.")
My father, who is also unemployed and just barely able to support himself financially, supported me financially and I was able to pay my rent. I truly could not have cut it much closer. I am extraordinarily thankful, but I am not proud of this. Nor am I proud to recall that my landlady specifically complemented me, once again, on my promptness and reliability, in specific comparison to the pothead reggae guys. Even if I was hired and trained tomorrow, the nature of "pay periods" would ensure that I wouldn't actually be paid until just before Christmas or so, right when my car insurance and rent are due again. (I'm also rapidly running out of the crackers Brian so aggressively yet generously supplied me with a while back after I made an offhand reference to not having eaten in a while. I do have a lot of ramen left, though. And I'd like to take this moment to thank David Nonicknameyet, who has helped to keep me alive and happy with his absurdly generous personal policy regarding diner food and Nintendo.) With the help of the tank of gasoline my father also supplied, I plan to be wallpapering this town in job applications this week in manic desperation.
But in lighter news... I'm in love. Nearing the end of the latest in our increasingly long, bafflingly increasingly wonderful dates, during the warming-up bit of an evening stroll through the Christmas-lit Ventura harbor, I turned to her (while tapping out the repeated RDRLDL pattern at the end of Drop Out on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine) and looked into her eyes and saw with no room for misinterpretation that she, too, felt as I felt. After an intensely snuggly sleeping bag root beer float homemade cookies time travel cartoon sort of wonderful night, I fell asleep next to her wondering when exactly I should speak the words, planning an uncharacteristically romantic grand future gesture to accompany the moment. Characteristically, Kempo saved me from myself with a perfectly timed perfect small gesture by waking me up not long thereafter with the feeling of a felt tip pen on my palm. When I regained full consciousness and my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw that she'd written "I ♥ you." I took the pen, and her hand, and wrote "I love you." Then we said it aloud, then we embraced, then we giggled, then we sighed, and then we joked about our respective penmanship and slept until noon.
Being unemployed does have its advantages.
(Also, while we were being dorky in the checkout line of the grocery store that night, a man approached us, asked if we were artists, told us we had a "unique look" and a "great style," said he was a photographer, offered us his business card, and authorized the use of his phone number for the store discount on the generic root beer we were buying. Hee hee. WIN!)
I am way too trusting, and tend to believe people when they say things. Maybe the problem is with my ears, and I am hearing encouraging words when they are actually telling me to walk my slouchy unqualified ass out the door and never return.
If I don't hear from them tomorrow I'm going to call and ask to speak to the guy who interviewed me. (I would have done this already, but he was very specific on the point that he would certainly call me, as soon as he was certain, because he certainly needed to hire me. Then again... maybe I didn't read between the corporate lines, and he was actually saying something akin to that ol' insincere standby "don't call us... we'll call you.")
My father, who is also unemployed and just barely able to support himself financially, supported me financially and I was able to pay my rent. I truly could not have cut it much closer. I am extraordinarily thankful, but I am not proud of this. Nor am I proud to recall that my landlady specifically complemented me, once again, on my promptness and reliability, in specific comparison to the pothead reggae guys. Even if I was hired and trained tomorrow, the nature of "pay periods" would ensure that I wouldn't actually be paid until just before Christmas or so, right when my car insurance and rent are due again. (I'm also rapidly running out of the crackers Brian so aggressively yet generously supplied me with a while back after I made an offhand reference to not having eaten in a while. I do have a lot of ramen left, though. And I'd like to take this moment to thank David Nonicknameyet, who has helped to keep me alive and happy with his absurdly generous personal policy regarding diner food and Nintendo.) With the help of the tank of gasoline my father also supplied, I plan to be wallpapering this town in job applications this week in manic desperation.
But in lighter news... I'm in love. Nearing the end of the latest in our increasingly long, bafflingly increasingly wonderful dates, during the warming-up bit of an evening stroll through the Christmas-lit Ventura harbor, I turned to her (while tapping out the repeated RDRLDL pattern at the end of Drop Out on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine) and looked into her eyes and saw with no room for misinterpretation that she, too, felt as I felt. After an intensely snuggly sleeping bag root beer float homemade cookies time travel cartoon sort of wonderful night, I fell asleep next to her wondering when exactly I should speak the words, planning an uncharacteristically romantic grand future gesture to accompany the moment. Characteristically, Kempo saved me from myself with a perfectly timed perfect small gesture by waking me up not long thereafter with the feeling of a felt tip pen on my palm. When I regained full consciousness and my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw that she'd written "I ♥ you." I took the pen, and her hand, and wrote "I love you." Then we said it aloud, then we embraced, then we giggled, then we sighed, and then we joked about our respective penmanship and slept until noon.
Being unemployed does have its advantages.
(Also, while we were being dorky in the checkout line of the grocery store that night, a man approached us, asked if we were artists, told us we had a "unique look" and a "great style," said he was a photographer, offered us his business card, and authorized the use of his phone number for the store discount on the generic root beer we were buying. Hee hee. WIN!)