Yes, well, it’s been a couple of weeks. I have no idea where to begin. Maybe I’ll just tell you a lot of unconnected facts and then you can put an entry together, okay? I mean, you’re smart. You can do it.
I turned twenty-seven on Tuesday When I was a kid and just starting to keep my paper journal, I would write down all the presents I got for birthdays and Christmas. I’m not going to do that here, except perhaps mention that I love getting books for presents, so if you ever feel the need to get me one, you know, you should feel confident there. But that’s not the point. The point is, Rob and Anna came up from beautiful downtown Sunnyvale for the weekend, I had a little birthday party (Carl got me a really good cake), I went to a bellydance show (didn’t perform though) and generally had a good time.
I did a couple of college fairs A few months ago my old job called me and asked if I would do some college fairs representing my alma mater in the Pacfic Northwest. They couldn’t send anyone from the office because they were all busy getting the new class in. For those of you just tuning in, my first job out of college was as an admission counselor for Pitzer College. I used to do interviews and read many many freshman application essays and I gave speeches and visited fancy private schools and not-so-fancy barrio schools, and traveled about ten weeks out of the year, and wore business casual clothes, and so on and so forth. One day I’ll write an entry about why I decided to leave the high -glamour world of college admissions and move to Seattle and into the low-glamour world of social work, but that’s another entry for another time when I haven’t been writing for two weeks. Anyway, with the promise of an all-expenses-paid trip to Portland, OR, I did a couple fairs. The thing where the kids and the parents walk around the big gym or the hotel ballroom or whatever, and they get a lot of bits of shiny paper with college names on them, and they ask what the average GPA of the college is, and are people allowed to double-major, and is there a lacrosse team? The reps answer the same questions over and over again and they’re usually pretty perky and afterwards they all go back to the hotel and get drunk and make out on car hoods in the parking lot. Or sometimes they go to karaoke. I didn’t do any of those things last week (or, truthfully, even when I did it for a living, though I did watch a lot of hotel TV); I just set up the table and answered the same questions over and over…I did immediately get my spiel back…it’s been three years since I worked there and it came right back to me, that studied way of seeming spontaneous yet knowledgeable yet sort of young and sassy and yet very very interested in each person’s college requirements. “So, what are you interested in academically? How about NON-academically?” For some reason it gets them every time.
I spent some time being sad and angry Yeah. Not fun. I don’t know exactly how long you can stay sad about the same issues, and how to make sure your sadness doesn’t erupt into gigantic fireballs of rage and frustration. Or at least, when you begin shooting rays of fury at your loved one, how to keep the aforementioned loved one from getting too scorched. I guess it’s good to talk about it, but it’s not that great to keep feeling sad pretty much all the time, and talking doesn’t necessarily change things all the time. Still, I know it’s going to end soon, this sadness, I hope. Soon it’s going to end.
I went on a couple more job interviews I keep getting various estimates of how much time I have left at this job, hours-wise. Now it looks like four more weeks. Huh. Anyway, I’ve gone to Harborview Medical Center several times in the last few weeks…the social workers there are very nice, and I do need a job, but I don’t think I can work as a medical social worker there, doing discharge planning. Harborview is the only Trauma One hospital for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, and so part of what the social workers have to do is coordinate the helicopter removal of someone back to Montana, oh and by the way they don’t have insurance, and they need an ambulance and home care as well. I am weak. I am not very good under pressure. Why I am in social work becomes daily less clear, but I have the good sense to tell the fine people in the Social Work department that I just can’t do it. I’m a therapist for heaven’s sake! I like to see clients in the comfort of an outpatient office. Did I mention I was weak? Yes. Fine. I went on another interview, this time for another research position, which sounds a little more my speed. Not super exciting work, but who cares. If I can get something and still keep doing therapy, then I’ll be set. Sort of.
I’m going to Orlando in a couple of weeks. Carl has a conference there for his new job, and I’m basically going along because he got a Friends Fly Free ticket, and because my sister lives in Tampa, and because the lovely and talented Ashley, of Key Girl fame, lives there. I’m going to spend some time with Ash and her equally lovely and talented husband, some time with my sister, and then some time with my mom, who is driving up to Miami just to see me, because apparently she loves me a lot. Carl and I are actually going to Disneyworld too…well, Epcot probably. He’s never been to anything remotely Disney-oriented…I’ve told this to a couple of Floridians, and they’re having a hard time believing it. It’s a struggle. When you live in Florida, as I’ve mentioned, you’re pretty much required by law to go to Orlando several times a year for various Disney-franchise-mediated things. Your church youth group goes to Night of Joy to make out on Pirates of the Caribbean and listen to Christian rap; you go your senior year to Grad Night to make out on the Peter Pan ride in your dress-up clothes and smoke furtively and almost not find the bus to take you home; you go for New Year’s Eve your first winter home from college and stop at the outlet stores on the way back to Miami. Apparently they don’t do that in Seattle; Seattle kids are always climbing Mount Rainier or scuba diving in the cold cold Puget Sound or taking a first aid course, something like that. Ashley asked, when I was telling her about this on the phone “You mean he hasn’t even been to DisneyLAND?” Because all Floridians know that the Disneyland in California is but a pale subsitute for The Mouse in Orlando, but surely he must have gone at least one, during six years in Southern California? No. It’s going to be hysterical. Plus, you know, seeing my best friend in her new house, seeing my sister, seeing my mom. All that.
I got a haircut I just want to say here, that I used to have very long and thick and curly hair, to the middle of my back, and it was very nice. Sometime around age twenty I started losing all my hair. It’s now quite thin, or “fine” as the hair ladies like to lie to me. I got a great cut in Miami a couple of months ago, and it was time for another one. It’s pretty layered. It’s pretty short and thin. My braids today are so pathetically tiny. My Hair Lady, who is also the Hair Lady of Carl and His Entire Family, went on and on about how thick Carl’s hair is, and how thick and gorgeous his sister’s hair is, and well, dear, yours is just so fine. Hmm. I did buy some product though, at Target on the way home. I even used it when I went to meeting yesterday, and didn’t recognize myself. Okay, it’s short, it’s thin, but at least it’s curly, okay? Isn’t that what all you girls want, naturally curly hair? See! I have some of that! See! Look, look at all the curls, the fine, short curls! Siiiiiggggghhhhh.
I think that’s it for now. I want to be updating more frequently, and now that I have a solid weekend of Nothing behind me, and am looking forward to another one, I think I might muster up the energy to write a bit more often. I wrote fifteen pages in my paper journal, though, over the weekend. Does that count?