night falls

Ah, yes. It's been another long day of nothing. 
The high point of the day was going to a neighborhood friend's house to help her give her cat injections of fluids to treat kidney failure. That was the only time I left the house during the day. I try to avoid going out just because it inevitably involves spending money and I am not working or making money these days, so I try to avoid temptation. However, that also means that I am avoiding stimulation of any kind, mental or physical, and increasing my atrophy. The devil and the deep blue sea. I am very glad to be helpful to her and their very sweet old calico cat. It also teaches me a bit about the whole procedure that so many of my friends have to do for their elderly pets.


A lot of things here have come to a halt this week because of “ClusterFlake 2014” that cause the entire Atlanta area to shut down completely for a couple of days. This is not the week to accomplish much when it comes to work or job hunting. Some people slept in their cars, stranded on the highway in traffic jams caused by everyone rushing to go home at once when snow started falling. Others were iced in at home. My brother spent the night sleeping in a Chick-fil-A after refusing to stay overnight at his office and trying to make it home to Powder Springs from Newnan, Georgia.


I logged onto and registered with a few more job boards as well this week, so now the phone is ringing all day long with telemarketers, an inevitable part of having my information out there on employment sites, trying to sell me classes and other services. Healthcare is quite popular to study these days and that is the first thing all of them try to get me to sign up for classes in. When they hear I am a Graphic Designer with a useless degree in Visual Communications, they try to sell me courses in Beauty and Fashion, which I inform them will not help me to find a job to even pay back the tuition for the classes. I also have not interest in paying for monthly job placement services that they can not guarantee will get me any interviews or employment. If a so-called headhunter wants to collect a commission on jobs they actually find for me and place me in, I'll be glad to pay them for their services, but $100 a month to be listed on their website is ludicrous. Then again, the phone calls do let me talk to another human being during the day and practice my conversational skills. I've kinda started getting chatty with the telemarketers. Hey, let's do lunch some time.

Snow Day

Snow is an uncommon thing here in the Atlanta area. Maybe it will snow here once a year or every two years. It started snowing, as predicted, yesterday afternoon. MonsterMustDie left work around noon and even stopped to pick up coffee, bottled water, beer, etc. on the way home and got in before traffic and ice got very bad here. Today, the city is shut down. All of the snow that fell yesterday refroze to a nice slick sheet of ice on the roads overnight and a lot of people with long commutes home from work had to spend the night in their cars or had to abandon their cars and walk home or to hotels, etc.

Two things I wish I'd done on Monday -
Lacking adequate enthusiasm, I did not opt to stop by the grocery on my way home Monday night to pick up bird seed. I had refilled the feeders just a couple of days ago and now they sit completely empty.
I also wish I had, before leaving the house, pulled out my rope lights and un-twisted them and laid them out in the fun patterns I wanted to have under the snow and ice. Once the snow started falling, it was too cold and thus not enough time to do what I could have with the lights. I still put them out after wondering if I should or not and it looks fun but I know how much more I could have done. Next time, perhaps.

Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein - A Short Film

maybe

I had an interview yesterday morning with Debbie and Burton, two people I used to work for in the '90's who I adore. We ended up talking and going over things until after noon. We still reached no agreement on whether I would work there. The main issue is taxes. The job I had years ago with them was my fun job but I was an independent contractor the entire time. Every year, despite my father the CPA making arrangements for me to pay taxes quarterly, I would have to pay more and more taxes. The last straw working there was when I got stuck with a tax bill of several thousand dollars and I had to get a loan from my father to pay taxes. These days, my father is long gone and I have no accountant or daddy to bail me out so I can never work like that again. The problem is, they don't feel they can afford to take me in as an official employee or pay what I would normally charge for independent contractor work. I phoned one of the temp agencies I sometimes work for and they said they could do payrolling for them on me. That seems like the most agreeable thing to do for all of us, if they accept that. I am hoping we can work something out. 

There are no other job offerings or work coming in this week. With the cold being what it is and me being physically broken this week, I am not too sad about the lack of movie extra work. In better physical conditions, the minimum wage extras work is actually more advantageous than the freelance work offer - I take home a little less pay but all taxes are taken care of and I get my forms all nice and organized at the end of the year, and most sets feed extras three warm meals a day. 

well enough

My mother spent three days in the hospital following her surgery this week. She's home now, with her dogs, feeling much better than before the entire event so maybe the entire experience was worthwhile.
We visited her in the hospital and I've tried to phone her daily to check up on her since she came home.


In other news, I got my hair cut yesterday. The last person to cut & color my hair was no longer salon I went to so they assigned the new girl to me. I don't think I'll be going back again. She wore latex gloves that pulled hair out every time she grabbed a lock. The intent of the color was to cover up some of the gray coming in now but there still seems to be just as much gray as before and her attempts at making conversation were as painful as the hair pulling to me.

Still, here's the new do:

What I read today.

My favorite quote today came from Amanda Palmer’s blog.

There's something very powerful about taking the hate-knives that are thrown at you, catching them and waving them in the air, like an internet jujitsu master.

This has been a lousy day.

After no phone service yesterday, I have my phone back today, for now. Yesterday, I had no bars of service all day. My service had started to fail Wednesday, dropping calls I was on.

Got an appallingly discouraging letter of rejection from another company insisting my education was not up to their requirements.

Just got a call from my uncle as I was headed home from a job interview in the afternoon. My mother had scheduled eye surgery today and didn't do well coming out of recovery. They could not get her blood oxygen level up without giving her oxygen. She also has serious fluid retention issues. So they're keeping her in the hospital overnight until they see what's going on.
I phoned MonsterMust Die with the news and waited for him to go with me to visit her in the hospital after they got her in a room. Her cell phone battery was dead so I took my extra cable and outlet adaptor to her.
We returned home around 10pm tonight from visiting her in the hospital. My brother and sister-in-law were there as well. I think she was in good spirits as we left. Unless there is an unexpected drug reaction from what they are giving her in the hospital, I believe she will look and feel much better tomorrow.

a new education

Every. Single. Ad. Requires a new Bachelors degree. Even the ones that state "or equivalent experience". And no one wants to give me a loan or grant for that.

Hello Jules, Thank you for your application and interest in this position with our company.  However, this position requires a four-year degree.  You have indicated in your question set that you do not currently meet that requirement, although you do appear to have taking quite a few years of schooling, therefore we cannot progress your application as it stands.  If this is inaccurate, please let us know.  Otherwise, we wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors! Regards, The Human Resources Team Company Documents

dreaming of wizards in a tropical paradise

In the last little nap just before waking, dreamt of a big family gathering at the house I'm living in now. But it was not quite the same. It was a huge sprawling estate and Clark was standing in front, amused, taking photos of neighbors across the street who were pointing rifles. No one was at all concerned about armed neighbors - they were of no consequence because somehow we were easily 10 times more powerful and better armed without guns.

Two children went to a fountain together unsupervised by their father, who was my older dreamed brother, who wouldn't bother to keep up with them. One sent the other on a wild goose chase that included a sort of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in the water. My older brother, their father, freaked out and started chasing down the younger child. I left him to it because I was angry at him for being such a lazy father and thought he needed to go through some trouble to learn a lesson himself. Somehow, I was quite confident the child would be fine.

Then my mind's eye sees Clark again, using a long walking stick on a path with the older mischievous child, talking to him about life in a grandfatherly way like an elder of the tribe. He was a wizard and conjurer of some sort. The path they were on was a short cut to the destination of the child. While other adults might be very angry at the boy, Clark was just talking to him matter-of-factly about life and how things should be, very nonjudgemental and mature. Talking about how life and the world works. He was dressed either barefoot on in sandals, wearing what looked like a deep blue long muslim shirt or dress that had a grass skirt hanging out underneath it, with a wide-brimmed straw hat on.

Meanwhile, his father chased the younger child and local villagers found and picked up the child, putting it in a cart to take back with them.

knowing my limits

It's official. I am chickening out of working in the cold tomorrow. As much as I need work, I don't want to regret anything as much as I am sure I will regret being in a cold warehouse all day, under-dressed, mostly on my feet, for minimum wage.  I worked several days in a row in slightly warmer weather at the same job and my feet, legs, and hips ached for days afterwards. I had a lingering cough from the dust in the place for weeks that's just now easing.

I remember when I worked like that in my 30's on a film shoot that I was never paid for. I spoke to someone working on the crew for that day long afterwards and he told me the entire shoot had to be re-done because none of the footage was good enough to be used. Everyone's breath was foggy on a scene where they were supposed to be warm and the background crowd refused to stay in wardrobe and brought in heavy coats & gloves that were at their feet. They shot that day anyway because of their budget not including another day on set. They still had to reshoot regardless on a better day. I suffered for nothing at that job, unappreciated, and the memory is still there. It was not a fun adventure or a necessary step in my career.

burdened

I've been stressing over the obligation for a film extras gig in an extremely cold, very dusty and unhealthy warehouse that I'm up for next week. I do not want to do this job. I still have a cough from all the dust I breathed in a week ago on this same job. It took days for my legs and hips to stop aching from standing up on a hard concrete floor during 15-hour work days. This is the most brutal background extra job I've been in. It is also the furthest I've had to travel - an hour in the predawn darkness there and another hour, exhausted, after dark. I don't want to do this job but I don't want the possibility of working the future. Some jobs really aren't worth it and this is certainly one of them. I console myself sometimes at these low paying gigs with the thought of at least two, usually three, good meals a day of kraft food but this job also only has one very bad hot meal a day.  I am actually hoping for an ice-storm next week just so I can feel better about saying no.

In an effort to cheer me up and protect me as much as possible from the cold, MonsterMustDie took me shopping at REI and bought me film set supplies like hand-warmers, foot-warmer, a blanket, and gloves. I also got a fun winter hat while we were there, just because I liked it. It was a very sweet thing to give me that even though I said many times before relenting and going shopping with him that I am not making enough money at this to justify buying supplies for work. I am not sure, even with 15-hour days, that it justifies the commute I have to make for it, especially now with the possibility of hitting black ice on the way there. This is something I need to just put out of my head for the weekend.

I also need to step away from the computer more for a while. My only dreams are frustrating images of working, or trying to work, at jobs where I have no instructions and can't read or type anything on screen over and over again. There are dreams about trying to get to work, trying to find where work is and getting lost, etc. in a car that is out of control. I need to somehow break away from the damage to my soul that I've sustained.

Dark. Cold. Wet.

So, yesterday, I posted an online status update that perhaps sounded much more woe-be-gone than I meant it to. 
It got me an invitation to lunch with a friend at her house, which I accepted and greatly enjoyed. I found her house for the first time and she had prepared a lovely tossed fresh green salad and home-made vegan lentil stew for us. Over lunch conversation, I learned we have many more ties than I previously thought. Near the end of my visit, I found out another friend of mine actually rents the shed behind her house, which he uses for a studio and shop to craft movie props and furniture. He came in just as I was ready to return home so we invited him in and had more great conversation about art, movie-making, aliens, government, religion, etc. I call it a good afternoon. 

Today has been spent spinning around in circles, mostly. As I write this, MonsterMustDie is home after a very successful treasure hunt in an estate sale. There is hot food on the stovetop, waiting for friends to join us for dinner, while MonsterMustDie's treasures are still sitting on the dining table just so he can show them off. 

I am now drinking hot gluhwein until dinner guests arrive. 

New Year's Day 2014

I baked Earl Grey Tea cookies in the morning. That was all I had time and ingredients for.
Then I spent the rest of the day at a couple of New Year open houses. Most of the afternoon was spent at Mike & Michael's house in Grant Park. Mike had prepared vegan greens and black-eyed peas and put out chips and nuts. Tweenage kids were playing video games in the living room while the adults stood chatting in the kitchen. Met some new people who had children Michael's age. Just when I started edging out to leave, when the conversation was all on parenting and not so much I could relate to, someone new came in or the conversation changed. I ended up spending the entire afternoon in the house of Mike.

At the end of the day, when everyone had left to prepare for an early bedtime and work the next day, I walked down the street with Mike and Andrew to visit the former site of Dottie's one last time before the lot is wiped clean to build a highrise. I can't imagine how the streets around Grant Park or the neighborhood will accommodate the traffic from a high-rise condo & office building there. Surely, streets will have to widened and the remaining old houses replaced with apartments soon. Too many friends of mine who live in the neighborhood are living in houses they no longer own but rent from their banks (bad timing on buying property) and I fear I'll face another mass exodus and relocation of friends. This would be a great time to buy, while prices are low, if anyone had full-time jobs and could budget for that.  Anyway, we said goodbye to Dottie's a final time, exchanged a few stories, and departed.

I ended the evening nearby at the House of Eleanor, where the mistress of the house was playing with static electricity, rubbing balloons and sticking them to guests, children and adults alike. The master of the house was especially cheerful much more loquacious than usual, chatting with other writers and enjoying the festivities. Plenty of food was spread out on the table, including savory pancakes and a cake which, like King cake, was supposed to have a charm of some sort inside it. Eleanor herself is missing two teeth in front but I failed to document it with the camera. Lava lamps lined the mantel under a disco ball.