boba weather, sleep forever
Six months have come and gone since my last entry, but I've been thinking of LJ since the first blush of summer weather. What is it, man? What is it?
So, an update on my life in the past half-year. It is due. Things can be said.
Family
My nephew turned two last week! He's a big-ass two-year-old, dude. Like, big as holy fucking shit. Kindergarten big. Unless he stunts his growth, he could be one of those kids who breaks 6' during puberty. Judging by his (shitlord) father, it's very likely. He isn't fully speaking English yet, but he is communicating and using some words. He's a daring kid, all climb-y and whatnot, and he's been expressing interest in a classic child's fixation: megafauna, as in dinosaurs and elephants and dragons. He also likes space stuff and has his very own bona fide Buzz Lightyear. This kid is a champ. I'm a fan! Still don't want one of my own evveeerrrr but y'know, glad to have him around once in a while. Chunky little beastie.
Uh, there's other family stuff too, but I don't really see or speak to my family much except my dad and my sister. And when my nephew starts talking, I hope I will talk to him, too.
Apartment
Rent is hard, y'all. But we do all right. Getting sleep in this neighborhood is a little hard, especially during that weird two-week period when I shit you not there was a singing hooker outside of my window every night/early morning. I shit you not. Some people wake to bird calls, and we wake up to hooker songs.
And for the record, that sucked because she could not sing, not because she was a hooker.
DJ Stuff
It doesn't look like I've made any mention of it here, surprisingly, but I have had a DJ gig at Que Sera in Long Beach for the past year and a half. I'm one of two resident DJs for Club Lick, a queer-friendly alt-dance night. Sometimes we put on drag shows featuring some of the area's hardest working divas (courtesy of Delta Lambda Phi's Long Beach chapter), and sometimes we put together showcases for local queer/feminist indie/punk bands. Lick was previously arranged for every fourth Monday and is currently on hiatus because the promo team (incredible, so much cooler than I am) is going through grad school stuff. It's had its ups and downs, but our good nights are so damn good! I especially liked our Sunday Night Pride 2015 (when we got written about Telegraph). There really is nothing like playing for a packed house until closing time.
In the meantime, the other Lick DJ and I have secured residency (with a third DJ!) on a new night at Que Sera -- it has been christened BODY MOVIN' and is a '90s/"Y2K" dance party. It looks like we're going for a cross between the now-hot Club 90s LA and the halcyon early-2000s nu-rave days of clubs like Bang! and Beat It. So it's more like 1995-2005, I guess. Our debut is this Friday and I'm nervous as shit. I've never worked a gig (a) on a "non-school-night" or (b) that charged a cover. Promo team is going super hard. I don't want to let anyone down; I'm great at selecting songs and I'm passable at beat-matching but I still have a hard time calling myself a DJ. With a straight face, anyway.
Work
In August I will hit a year at this boring-ass office job. The work is boring, yes, but very fucking easy and I do quite well here. The pay is livable -- not great, not lifting me out of any ruts, but it gets my bills handled if nothing else. The people are nice, albeit bland, and the boss is turning out to be one of the most reasonable people for whom I've ever worked. But still, I don't know if I will make it to August here, to be quite honest. And it's not just the bullshit commute, worsened by the construction of the Metro extension to the Westside. It's not just the lame pay, dull tasks, or lack of peers. It's motherfucking mold illness.
Since I started here, I've begun experiencing bizarre body issues that seem to come and go unprovoked. Among them: respiratory infections; ear infections; markedly increased sweating; occasionally debilitating pain and swelling of random joints/cartilage; overall shitty skin, including the return of my psoriasis (my "Kim Kardashians") and OMFG straight-up teenage acne. I thought I must be getting old, that maybe the pain was the first stirrings of fibromyalgia. While I could stand to treat my body better, I did hear office gossip about how everyone here gets sick really often because -- get thiiiiis -- the front rooms of our building flooded years ago and the carpet STILL hasn't been replaced. So the carpet in this office is teeming with mold and is basically a low-grade biohazard.
My "office" (AKA my desk that sits in a central thoroughfare which is also "the copy room") is Ground Zero for said water damage, and I sit in it all day. Everyone else has offices, and I alone sit squarely in the Chamber of the Mold-Riddled Carpet. So I started to research the effects of prolonged exposure to water-damaged infrastructure and my findings corroborate the gossip I heard and the symptoms I've been experiencing. I even saw symptoms listed that I just thought were me being an unhappy adult -- a foggy brain, depression, anxiety, lethargy. I mean, yeah, I'm neurotic, but I've been feeling uncharacteristically out of sorts since last fall. Can you believe mold can do this to a person? The external symptoms make complete sense, but I was surprised to hear its effects on the brain as well. I thought it was age, or lack of sleep from this early call time, or just depression due to how dull my job is. But shit, maybe it's mold??
I know what you must be thinking. "Time to sue!" Yeah . . . no. I'm not going to get into that with this company. I have neither the financial resources nor the malice in my heart to pursue "due compensation" for this bullshit. Frankly, I feel sorry for this company. Company prez is too cheap to replace this nasty moldy-ass carpet (never mind getting better pay or legal recompense) and everyone here is too tied to their dead-end position to take action. I'd rather find another job, now that I've gotten some certifiable office-hell experience under my belt.
And anyway if your first reaction to any issue is that you need to sue the shit out of something that is doing you wrong, think long and hard about why that is.
So with that said, I am on the job search aaaaagaaaaain. I have one hot lead, plenty of decent references, a greatly improved resume, and a (not literally) sexy new angle to use when writing cover letters. Wish your girl luck in getting that better paper, and in purging this moldy evil from my body. Hopefully removal from exposure will be enough, otherwise I'll have to do oxygen therapy and take medicines and go on these weird mold-cleanse diets. I might waste away to an emaciated 180 pounds . . . *grin*