I made plans to go to a Monday meeting, with the intent of “running into” Just-In-Case. Partly because when I actually ran into him a few weeks ago, he told me I should. In anticipation of this (and also, just because I felt like it) I fixed my hair and dressed all nice. I wore this shirt, because Keithers described the color (Fantasia Blue) as “I want to have sex with that.” I recieved several compliments.

Just-In-Case, was of course, not there this Monday. Typical. At least my hair still looks pretty today.

The days are dragging this week. I feel like Toni Collette in Clockwatchers, which is a wonderful and very underrated little film. The movie was made in 1997, so while the internet existed (we had it at my house. My family had internet before Al Gore, probably) it certainly hadn’t infiltrated every aspect of the workplace like it does today. There’s one line in it

Sometimes it hits you how quickly the present fades into the past, and you question everything around you. You wonder if anything you’d ever do would matter.

Which pretty much sums up what I feel some days. I was driving to work this morning and it’s already almost March. 2009 was the year of Just Surviving. Last March, I said that I knew it was going to be hard, that “this year” was going to be really, really, really hard but that I would get through it. And now I have, and it’s like “ok, what next?” and while I clearly have some ideas of what I want for “what’s next,” the present is speeding away as I try to make the future happen.

This is quickly veering towards angsty-existential crises territory, where it seems to go a lot these days. I think back on when I was temping, at this time, five years ago. Sure I’m older and wiser, but I am so jealous of my 22 year old self sometimes. And then I remember what it was like trying to get a job just out of college, practically having to beg someone to give me a chance, and well no, I’m not jealous of that, but then again, is it really that different from what I’m doing now? That I’m offering to answer phones and make copies for an abysmal salary just so I can finally work somewhere that I feel relevant?

That was a major run on sentence.

I guess part of it is that deep down there is still this fear, that maybe This Is It. That all I am ever going to be is a glorified secretary. And while that’s not the worst of fates (or pays) it’s certainly not what I ever wanted or imagined for myself. Maybe I just Don’t Have What It Takes. To do what, exactly, I’m not sure, but for now I use the sentiment broadly. It seems entirely possible that it isn’t going to matter how many carefully crafted cover letters I send out or how smart I am, or how capable I am of doing any of these jobs; I might never get one because of all that is still missing from my resume. And maybe, it’s missing from my resume, not because I choose wrong or differently, but because I am just not the type of person who saw those chances, or opportunities in the first place. David is always pointed out that every ponderance of “what would have been if I had taken another path” requires you to question whether you, being the type of person you are, could have done anything different anyway.

This started out as a lighthearted post. I swear.

It’s funny how doubt hides itself. It follows behind you. It waits in every corner. You never see it coming. But you feel it, on the inside. Maybe it was just that office. Or maybe it was bigger than that, it was all around. A million eyes. Watching. Judging. The whole wide world even. You feel so small.

-Clockwatchers

I’m running on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, for no good reason. I could join the Facebook group “I’m Always Tired Because I Stay Up Too Late for No Reason.” I click mindlessly around the internet and have been known to hit “reload” on my email, even at 1:30 in the morning.

I drink a cup of coffee, and then pick up another on my way to a therapy appointment, even though that’s all I have to do today. Half of a large iced coffee remains on the table next to me. My hands are a little shaky from too much caffeine and not enough to eat. Pause to eat half a sandwich. Better now.

My neck and shoulders are cramped and sore from too many hours hunched over at a desk or laptop. I am grateful for the relief of the weekend (I spent nine hours on Friday formatting contracts) but impatient with the way it interrupts the job search – there are no new job postings on the weekend.

My therapist gently bridged the subject that eventually, I’m going to have to date again. I brushed that off, saying I’m not interested in dating now, and what’s the point of it, given that I’m trying to move to DC sooner rather than later.

His point, of course, was that I’m not going to meet any boys spending my time as I’ve been spending it. Abstractly, he’s right. Day to day, I’m not interested in doing that, not now. My desire to go on polite dates is in the range of zero to negative 10.

I have an application to craft, for THE organization I want to work for. The chances of me getting so much as an email rejection are practically non-existent. But, as with every application I submit, even to the less than perfect jobs, I can’t help the wishful thinking. I can’t help but start to do the mental financial planning on how I would survive in DC on about half of what I’m making right now.

So it’s been a really long time since I’ve been on a date (or even done some making out. There is a definite lack of making out in my life) and I don’t see that changing in the near future. And I’ve only been at the search for a career change for a few weeks, really. It’s far too early to get frustrated because I haven’t submitted enough applications to be a contender in the number games.

Besides, all my personal experience shows that job offers, like boys you want to make out with, come along when you are least expecting it, when you’re at the rock bottom of frustrations and shattered expectations, and when you can’t picture how things are ever going to go right.

That’s when you get the phone call. That’s when you realize he’s deliberately sitting closer to you than he needs to.

I don’t mean to go on blogging breaks, but work has been insane, and then, what do I have to say, really? I am still stuck. Oh, and it’s Saturday night, and I have no plans besides picking up some sushi, doing some laundry, and the SVU marathon.

I have basically become ok with the fact that my weekends are like this. I have gotten past judging them as “pathetic” and making self deprecating comments about them. I would just rather be spending my weekends doing nothing in DC (or NYC) and then I would have the option to do something that wasn’t nothing.

I think I might want DC like the way I wanted New York when I got out of college. Back then, I was also craving independence and the opportunity for a social life, to be sure, but I wanted New York because of HWSNBN. I think I want DC, and there’s not even a boy there. I suppose my therapist would say this is progress. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I have just forced myself to not want NYC, because I know that career wise, DC is the only place that makes sense right now. And, given that, there’s no use wanting what you can’t have, or torturing yourself with what cannot be.

HWSNBN still texts me very occasionally. He asked back in September when I’d be in the city next. I said December. He told me to let him know when, but I never did. I didn’t see the point, really, and also all the vain, shallow reasons like I want to be nothing but 100% together if I ever see him again.

So for now, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I have a phone interview on Monday for an organization that pays probably half of what my current job does, and who’s political orientation is possibly opposite of my own. Still, they do some interesting work in the security/foreign policy realm, so I’ll give it a chance to see what happens. Already, in my head I’m making excuses for why this is a terrible idea to even consider, and of course this is mere projection, because the phone interview hasn’t even happened yet.

When I moved to New York, I was actually pretty gutsy. Despite growing up 30 minutes away, I didn’t know the city, and I certainly didn’t know the boroughs. I spent the first half of the summer of 2005 job hunting and apartment hunting in the sweltering heat. I learned the neighborhoods of Brooklyn (where I never wound up living) by google map directions and walking. I learned the subway by following the colored lines on the map with my finger. HWSNBN and I were long over, and I didn’t have any friends in the city. I just did it.

“You have to take a step before you’re ready. Because if you wait to be ready, you’ll never take that step. “

Perhaps I would do well to remember this.

My apologies to Kim, but I got in my car to make my second trip to the Fed-Ex store, and “Tear Drops On My Guitar” came on. I went to change the song (because yes, it’s on a Mix CD that I made) and then pulled my hand back, because it was almost ridiculously appropriate for the news I had just gotten.

I have a friend named Drew, who I will ocacsionally sing the first bars of this song to in order to annoy him (the song, for those not in the Taylor Swift know, is about her friend Drew, who she is in love with, who is in love with another girl. It’s classic high school stuff). But, for a very, very brief period, there was another Drew in my life, except it was spelt “Dru.”

It was a drawn out flirtation carried out via email, IMs and texts. It culminated in finally meeting at the disaster that was Chicago trip in the Summer of 2008.

I didn’t even like him that much, but I liked the idea of him. And at the time, I liked that he paid way more attention to me than O-L-B did. To be honest, I wasn’t attracted to him, but alcohol fixed that temporarily. And since then, he’s really fallen in my estimation. I find many of the things he says ridiculous, if not downright despicable. I was an apologist for him for many, many months after the disaster of Chicago, but there came a point when I realized there was nothing worth defending.  There is literally nothing about him that I find attractive or desirable. The only reason he was ever a big deal is because of the way in which I tricked myself into thinking we had all this potential. In retrospect, it was an obvious means of distracting myself, but at the time, the loss of that potential seemed horrible. It’s funny. You always hear the expression “I don’t know what I ever saw in him” and I’ve always thought that that expression was insincere, the defensive words of a wronged woman.

But really: I don’t know what I ever saw in him. I forced myself to see things there, and then I made him respond to me. It was never that I liked him, it was that I had to make him like me. 

He just announced today that he’s engaged. And for whatever reason, that felt weird, just for a second.

And while I sang along with the song without the least bit of sincerity, I still thought of that Dru, just this one time.

Last night, I was re-reading (okay, lets be honest, reading) some articles that I saved from my National Security Policy class from grad school. I was taking some notes, because my crazy brain has decided that if I brush up on International Relations, I’ll have a better shot at Libertarian Fellowship. Anyway, as I said to Keithers “I’m watching Degrassi and color coding my international relations notes. Now what man would not want a girl who color codes her international relation notes?”

This is why I haven’t had a date in about a year. And the “dates” I had were not really dates, properly speaking. On one hand, this means the disaster with O-L-B last Thanksgiving was almost a year ago, as was the mini-debacle with Peace. Apparently the mini-debacle with Peace was so cringeworthy I never wrote about it, but the CliffNotes is, I got drunk and made out with a (Libertarian) Muslim who had never kissed a girl before, because anything other than holding hands before marriage is against his religion. The fact that I’m Jewish probably made it even more of a sin against God.

It’s too bad you can spell “Disaster” without “B-O-Y-S.” Anyway, the point is, except for the one time I went out with The Writer in February, the last time I had anything resembling a date was…way too long ago.

If you were taking notes on the four main approaches to U.S. Foreign Policy (neo-isolationism, selective engagement, cooperative security, & primacy) wouldn’t you use four different colored pens too? For example, I used purple for primacy, because purple = royalty, and primacy is basically a desire to be king of the world.

It annoys me that the phrase “king of the world” still reminds me of that cringeworthy scene in Titanic where Leonardo DiCaprio shouts the phrase from the bow (stern?) of the ship. Yes, that movie made me cry (I was 14, but it had nothing to do with Leonardo DiCaprio, who I never found hot) but I always thought that scene was embarrassingly awful.

I’m sure I should do something like laundry today, or figure out how to prepare for my second phone interview, but the former probably won’t happen, and the latter, I really don’t know what I can do.

Had I not gotten an email yesterday evening regarding the phone interview, I would have been able to go for the Trifecta of Ashlee Simpson Lyrics (finishing it off with “by Wednesday, I can’t sleep” to accompany “Monday, I am waiting/Tuesday, I”m fading”)

I have a phone interview scheduled for next Monday. And now I feel positively silly about the whole thing, because it’s just a phone interview. That’s no where near as good as an in-person interview! (They are not doing in-person interviews until AFTER phoner interviews have been completed) I am not worried about the phone interview itself so I can now move on to waiting to hear on whether I will get an in person interview.

I saw Just-in-Case last night. He gave me a ride to the Tuesday meeting. Afterwards, he was driving me home and we were chatting and he brought up the “…girl that I just started dating.”

Typical. But my reaction is mild disappointment, bordering on “oh well.”

This is a rambling, going-nowhere entry about boys

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O-L-B is annoying me from the periphery again. This is why you should never date anyone you meet on a political message board. I haven’t spoken to him in about 10 months (although he will still sometimes respond directly to one of my posts, which, WTF???) and I am definitely over him in the relationship/romantic whatever sense.

I guess I’m just annoyed by his general existence at this point. The things he posts are really patently ridiculous and I don’t agree with much of it but I also recognize that the reason it annoys me so much is because I am shallowly letting my personal feelings/opinion of him creep in. (Or maybe his posts really ARE that stupid)

This guy also posts about the drama of his love life on the message board ALL THE FREAKING TIME. On a message board that he knows a girl he used to date (me) will read.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some people are afraid of heights. Others are afraid of spiders.

I am afraid of talking on the phone.

I am awful at it. Either I lose my train of thought and stutter, or I panic and start talking too fast and don’t make any sense.

Just the anticipation of having to deal with phone calls that I am loathe to deal with makes me sick with anxiety. Sometimes, it even drives me to the verge of tears. I have tried every trick there is to get over it, and nothing has worked.

And then, I sound like a crazy person, because it’s a phone call, grow up, get over it.

I don’t think I’ve always hated the phone. When I was twelve, I was content to spend hours on the phone with N.A; we had mutual crushes on each other, and I cannot tell you what we talked about for all those hours, but I know I thought it was important enough to campaign for my own phone line. My parents said I could, if I brought up my grades in Spanish and Math. Therein lay the dilemma – I couldn’t get my own line and spend unlimited time on the phone until I brought my grades up, but I certainly was in no place to bring my grades up when there was a boy who wanted to talk to me on the phone.

Luckily, he lost interest in me, I got straight As the first marking period of 8th grade, and I got my phone line.

Since then, the phone has been a primary form of communication (in high school, before AIM was the standard, and WAY before texting), a form of connection, (in college, to my friends who were far away) and a form of torture (carrying my cell phone around, willing it to ring when I was hoping that HWSNBN would call me.) But in college, other forms of communication became more important. AIM meant I could talk to several different people at once. Email was more convenient than picking up the phone. Making and recieving phone calls just fell out of practice.

It wasn’t until after college that phones started to make me nervous. I was temping at a company that to this day, I have no idea what they did. My job was simple: answer the phone, direct the calls. That’s it.  Sometimes they let me put labels on files, but as a temp, I wasn’t allowed to do anything real.

Anyway, for whatever reason some of the people at this company (engineers? technicians?) were often recieving Important Phone Calls, and the person on the line would request that I page them. I’ve always hated the sound of my own voice, and having to do this several times a day was cringeworthy. Then there was the time — it was my first day actually – when I mistakenly dialed the number for the head of the company just because the delivery guy had his number on the receipt. Luckily, his assistant picked it up and explained what was what. In my own defense, I was only 21, barely out of college and naive to the fact that if someone’s extention is 01, then they are probably pretty important.

In search of health insurance, I did manage to land a full time job. Actually, they didn’t hire me at first. They hired Charice. But poor, unknowing Charice got promoted after two weeks there. As she said once “I sold out. Rachel got hired.” I was still a receptionist, except now I was a receiptionist with health insurance. It wasn’t too bad. Mostly, I just directed people to customer service.

Then I got promoted. It was awesome! It was to a job I actually wanted to do! It was more money! And I wouldn’t be tied to a desk, which to me, was at least 50% of the appeal.

The Friday before I was supposed to start my new position, my supervisor’s boss, without even bothering to pull me aside, told me “oh by the way, we don’t have the money to pay you. So we can’t promote you to that position.”

I was crushed. While it was probably a good thing (it motivated me even more to finish my grad school applications) I felt totally stuck as a receptionist.

By then head of my department liked me. He knew I was smart and felt bad about the whole promotion debacle. He started giving me projects. At first, I was happy at the chance to prove myself and I accepted the admin role in spite of the fact that the new title didn’t come with a bigger paycheck. And the fact that my extension was still 0, I was still tied to a desk, and there were beginning to be mumblings about my phone mannerisms.

It was May, because it was right before my birthday when the suggestion box had a note in it, for probably the first time in its existence. “The receptionist” (it read. not even my name. Just “the receptionist”) is a black hole of despair. would it kill her to fake some charisma ” While this incident is retrosepctively hilarious, I got written up and went on a quest to find out just who the hell cared whether or not I smiled. (the answer: 40 something washed up wannabee opera singer. I got him back though.)

It only got worse from there. Two years later, at the Job-That-Wasn’t, I had to make a lot of phone calls, to people who I could barely understand on the phone, on topics where I had no idea what I was talking about. Additionally, there were times when I was supposed to “pressure” people into getting things done. Mind you, Job That Wasn’t was a tiny company and I was on the phone with Big Important Company that could have cared less about my request, but that did not mean anynoe in my department understood any better why the request was going to take the standard 24 hours.

The last guy I dated refused to call to make plans, instead preferring a barrage of back and forth text messages. That was a little extreme, even for me. But that also didn’t mean my heart didn’t pound wildly whenever I decided to grow a spine, call him, and call him out for being kind of a jerk. (I have regretted most of these phone calls. Don’t keep the phone numbers of people you used to date in your cell phone)

Really, the phone has never done me any good these past few years. All it has done is given me the means to call boys that I shouldn’t call, given me a cell phone that I feel lost when I don’t have, and given various Powers That Be a means to torture me.

When you think about it, texting is kind of like a more advanced form of telegraphing. So clealy Thomas Edison had it right and Alexander Graham Bell ruined everything.

So there’s this friend of a friend that I’ve met a couple times. Let’s call him Scott. I met him through this girl I’m acquainted with. The three of us had dinner together randomly one night. You see where this is going, right? 

I liked him immediately, not in the like-like sense, but just in the ‘he’s good people’ kind of sense. And actually, I have a hard time grasping that his name is Scott. He looks like someone else I know, and I keep thinking of him by that name instead.  Anyway, from dinner out that first night, it was very clear he has a girlfriend. 

But anyway, Scott is nice, and I ran into him on Saturday night, and we have mutual acquintences. So we were all standing around, doing the typical suburban stand around outside and  attempt to make plans, and he’s like “You don’t want to go out do you? You want to go home? ”

And he is right that normally this is my MO, to slink away home, and to get fed up as the girls stand around endlessly debating the next set of plans. 

(and he didn’t say it in a judge-y way; there was one other night when both of us were cranky that no one could seem to make plans and just gave up and went home)

But tonight, the girls weren’t around, it was just Scott and a few other guys, No ulterior motive, just wanted to go out for the sake of going out, because I am anti social as hell. 

Dinner was uneventful, good food at Blue Moon, listening to some other guy preach, and having Scott apologize to me for having to listen to it. On the ride to my house we were just talking about work and I said something about wanting to go to law school, and how it will be a lot of debt, and he said “You never know, with Obama we might all wind up being able to go to school for free.” 

And I said “That’d be nice, but I don’t go for universal education. I’m a Libertarian.” 

And

(Wait for it) 

He said “You are? So am I!” 

Head, meet desk.

The Writer asked me to a poetry reading on Saturday. He emailed saying “it’s cool if you already have plans, but it’d be cool if you want to come along.”

I waited 12+ hours before writing back, saying I’d go, and included a little story about what happened at work the day before regarding an IT thing, since it related to what we had been talking about last time we got together.

He replied “Great! See you Saturday then. P.S. – Your IT guy probably thanks you for being so nice”

No, I don’t think it’s a date, by any means. But definitely not “professional” correct?