Busy
Decided to attempt to get a case manager to help me find a career/job, so I've been going to orientations and workshops at a local office. The people I meet are a random assortment of ex-cons, execs experiencing joblessness with 5 years to retirement, shabby folks with obvious mental illnesses, and extremely perky people. I try not to think too much about how I look to others. I think I'm not quite nondescript in appearance, but know I present a variety of confusing options once I speak. I don't have an "elevator speech" for what I'm interested in, for example. How do people do this? Anyway, I'm glad the building's close to me. I can walk there. I'm exhausted from being in close quarters with people. I don't know how I dealt at Borders. I guess the short answer is that I often didn't.
Monday I filled out a bunch more paperwork and took a math and reading comprehension test. As always, the reading test was easy, along with the first 3/4ths of the math. Word problems about the percentage of Mary's gross pay used for her union dues took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out. After that, there were calculations for the height of a roof from a scale diagram and it just got more annoying from there.
Tomorrow: Interview workshop. I'm hoping for a lack of role-play. All interviews I've experienced were conducted by either the person finding the task least enjoyable, making for a craptacular time of it, or by someone who was very thorough, but far too thorough. Few things worse than a 2 hour interview resulting in no job. ::shudder::
Enough of that. It's ongoing, after all.
Sunday was neat, though. I went to the Getty Museum for a couple of hours to meet an online friend. We spent most of our time in the gardens. She's from Colorado and they'd just got 20 inches of snow, so I had no problem with making sure she got lots of sunlight and greenery while she visited. We have quick minds, insane amounts of curiosity, tend to avoid direct eye contact, and think mispronouncing words on purpose can be funny. She's a bit older than I am and has impressive gray curls. I'm glad I went and I'm glad she came to L.A. and wanted to meet me. S'nice. We wandered around taking photos and jabbering away about bees (she keeps 'em), Mormons, water rights, crows, science fiction books, and riot grrls, among things. Ah, fun.
Time to settle down for bed. I usually zone out to something on Netflix. The other night, I watched DMT: The Spirit Molecule. It was scattered, but the interviews with Kat Harrison (ethnobotanist) and Ralph Abraham (mathematician) made me want to see more of that sort of thing and fewer bumpers featuring Joe Rogan. When I don't find the right film from my queue, I watch another episode of either Law and Order: Special Victims Unit or Law and Order: Criminal Intent. The predictability of the format is soothing enough, I guess.