Friday, April 30, 2010

Making It Work

I’m the world’s all-time best ever temp. Every temp assignment I’ve ever had has been extended – once from the initial two days to an eventual seven months, and they were disappointed when I had to leave because I moved out of state. Now here I am temping again, on an assignment that was supposed to be two weeks but has already been four and will be at least one more. I am so proud to have taken my Harvard degree and become a career office temp.

This has become the story of “making it work” (thank you, Tim Gunn). I have debt to pay off and am apparently completely undesirable to all employers other than temp agents, and so I temp. For the devil. I am answering phones in a Philip Morris office. Many of the individual people here have been extremely nice, and the job is rather laid back as far as office gigs go (though the lack of internet for the girl with nothing to do but sit at a desk and wait for a phone to ring is extremely aggravating). There are occasional harmless remarks from executives who don’t realize that the age of workplace paternalism is over, and there was that one woman who got really angry in a meeting and made a comment about how she wanted to kill people and had fortunately just gotten her gun license the day before, but all in all the daily experience isn’t too bad, just excruciatingly boring.

What I can’t get over, though, is that in exchange for a whopping twelve dollars an hour I am facilitating the sale of a product that, when used as directed, causes death. Slow, agonizing, expensive death. But I need income, and this is what was available to me, and so here I am – making it work.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Not So Bad After All

I know there aren't a lot of you reading, so it's unlikely anyone wonders where I've gone when I don't post - I still feel remiss in neglecting my little web-home. I've been temping, I've been sick, I've been writing a musical and learning to garden. I'm still nursing a nasty cold, and the headache is keeping my brain from having much of interest to say. But it does want to say this:

I have some really, really awesome friends, and that is pretty much the best thing in the whole world. Friends and family. As much as I sometimes (often) hate people categorically, there are a whole lot of people that I love individually. And so, life is good.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Spring has truly sprung.

Happy April Fool's Day!

I gave up trying to play practical jokes before I was ten, because my big brother was always a million times better than me and it just didn't seem worth the effort. Fittingly, that same brother's birthday happens to be the first of April. Happy Birthday, big bro!

Instead of failing at pranking people, I spent today enjoying the extraordinarily (for NJ in early April) gorgeous weather. I drove the long way out into farm country and walked in a few different parks and gardens, just enjoying the fresh air and the warm sunshine. The blooming flowers didn't hurt, either.

I sometimes forget during the winter just how much of an outdoor person I am, but one of my favorite things in all of life is feeling the air and the sun on my skin. (Through some kind of SPF-ified lotion, of course, since I go from ghost to lobster in approximately twelve minutes.) Days like today, with its perfect weather, make it crystal clear to me why our religions and myths so frequently include rising-from-the-dead allegories for the return of spring.

Instead of attempting to describe just how glorious today was, I'm just going to show off some of my photos. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out - I think they do a decent job of capturing the day's beauty. Maybe someday I'll even upgrade from my point-and-shoot....