june 13, 2000.

Shitty. I rarely use that word, but it fits my mood perfectly. I'm not having a very good week. I've been reading The Screwtape Letters, partly as distraction, partly as Christian scholarship, partly as an effort to do something. Very restless. Very unsettled. Today I sat down in front of that immortal temptress teevee and sacrificed hours of my time & attention. I knew I should be writing, but I was too sunk in self-pity; too mired in indulgence & anger & sloth.

What's happened? A few bad things. Lots of good things. On Friday I lost my job. I got the call at 6:15, a full half hour into my weekend. If you'll recall, I was rushed into making a decision about this job, because it was 6 months and they needed someone right away. I was given three full days of training & set loose into a position full of pitfalls & errors that were perfectly obvious to my predecessor - so obvious in fact that she never let me know of their existence. I suffered through months of adaptation as a new system crashed, bugged & generally fucked up my numbers - and when there was a problem, my competence was the first target. I worked without efficient lateral support until the arrival of Julie Gloom.

All of which is to say, I was fucking railroaded. I was pushed into the job, pushed around in it & pushed out with no notice. A bunch of my CD's, pictures, books & toys are still there, and I'm not allowed to go in to pick them up. I'm treated like a common criminal, and it's all perfectly legal because I am a temp. I have no rights to prosecute. I knew that going in, but it's one thing to resign yourself to uncertainty and it's another altogether when you're thrown away like a kleenex in the midst of your dedicated service.

Obviously, my weekend sucked. I cried, I raged, I tried to figure out what the "real" reason was for my dismissal, as the reason given - "lowering headcount" - seemed too insane to be true. I knew from my weekend experience that HR couldn't tell its ass from a hole in the ground but this seemed excessive. Had I pissed the wrong person off? Had I been a little too free with the discontinued packages of Spray n' Wash? Were they just tired of hearing me defend myself when things went wrong? I couldn't decide. It was marginally easier to bear when I decided that I had honestly done nothing wrong - or at least I had done nothing that I would not do again. Letting go of me was a mistake. I knew it, and soon they would pay in inconvenience & incompetence. I knew this to be true. But still it galled me.

Anxiety settled over my head like a cloud. I didn't show up to Morgan's pre-moving day get together on Friday night; instead I sulked with the Boy & went to bed early. I would think of my friends with the anxiety in the background, then I would get anxious about them until I realized that nothing had gone wrong with them. I fretted. I sulked. I would think about my Fireball pictures being handled by the people who had cut me loose without a qualm, and I'd start to cry. Eventually, I developed a protective layer of denial. I knew that they weren't going to take it back on Monday, but even this self-conscious delusion helped my mood. Sunday was a lot easier than Saturday. I was a lot nicer to the Boy, which he appreciates.

(Sunday was also helped by our trip to the flea market, looking for wedding bands. We wandered around, looking at cut-rate merchandise until we were tired & hungry - then we ate burgers & milkshakes, cuddled up under my sleeping bag & took a nap. Heaven.

It helps knowing that the biggest, most important things in my life - marriage & career, family & friends - are still intact. On balance, things are going really well for me right now. This is just a minor setback, and I've always known that intellectually - it's just my heart that I have to convince.)

Monday rolled around & my job was not magically restored. Perhaps the reason they gave is true; heaven knows that a HR department that would require me for 3 days a week without having any idea what to do with me on the third day isn't an intellectual threat to most high-school smoking pits. Any way you slice it, this job - the thing that was keeping me out of the pool halls - is over. If I can get the camp job back, it won't be so bad. Even if I remain unemployed for the rest of the summer, I have still saved a significant amount to see me through the first year of teacher's college. When that's done, I'll never consider a low-level temp job to be worthy of my consideration. Huzzah.

"Temp agencies are owned and managed by rabid pimps, and the companies that draw labour from temp agencies are heartless shitheels. Furthermore, in this case I am only slightly hyperbolizing."

- q, commenting on my plight

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It is, of course, cruel fate that would cause my family to have a small surprise wedding shower for me on the most depressed weekend I've had in eons.

It was a very strange affair to tell you the truth. Only a handful of guests were invited - essentially one family and the Boy's mother. I was in a bad mood when I walked in: I had just given my knee a really painful smack and I know that every picture taken of me in that moment will show me at my irritated worst. Everything felt very small & rather uncomfortable at first, and I couldn't help thinking with longing of the child's birthday party we'd just abandoned in favour of this get-together. But I relaxed. The arrival of Little Spider & Morgan raised my spirits exponentially and by the end I was actually enjoying myself.

(It didn't hurt that the loot was first rate. I am now the proud owner of my first Precious Moments statue - I had no idea that marriage would involve such horror.)

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"I just want you to know that we can still be friends."

Sonic Youth/Stereolab concert last night. Very cool (even though we missed most of Stereolab). I've never seen such a casually dressed crowd in my life: half the crowd wore thick glasses & button-down shirts & I felt terribly overdressed in my PVC pants.

(Interesting aside: since I was so depressed during the day, I contemplated wearing my overalls & blue bandana to the concert. I only changed because I was meeting Dirk for Evol Mondays at a little quasi-goth club after the concert. I've tried doing the goth-in-overalls thing & it's not very much fun for anyone. As it turned out, I missed Dirk's entrance by a few minutes anyway, but it's a good thing I was so style-conscious...I discovered a large hole in the rear of the overalls today, which is something you really want to discover in your living room rather than the Warehouse. I think I'm going to use my pathetic housekeeping skills to sew a star patch over the whole - I can be a Star-Bellied Sneech with a poor grasp of anatomy.)

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