I bet I get socks for Christmas

This week has been a particularly astounding display of obscenities uttered, both loudly and under breath, by yours truly. Most irritating is the lack of a job in a few weeks time, and current lack of monetary assets, espite having a job. Tonight, I have compiled a list of situations that deserve a good shouting or mumbling of:

"Fuck:"

Craigslist Job postings:

-Requiring "3-5 years experience."
-"Must be in school, CREDIT ONLY" (Esp. when listed in CAPS).
-Unpaid
-Bogus credit checks
-Need for a background in Medical/Science writing (I want to injure any Engligh major this is being asked of who actually meets this).
-Columbia University in general, all of their posts are sand in my swim suit bottoms (I didn't go to Columbia and I can still create a metaphor, tres shocking).

Christmas:

-Everyone secretly hates it, I know it.
-I have no money for presents, thus I will choose gift giving over:
        -Drinks at a bar, eating out (this includes fast food), pleasurable activities like driving, going to the
          movies, ice skating, going to a zoo, museums, train rides, trips to see friends, walking in parks that charge, etc.


       Yesterday I may have had a small seizure that has somehow altered my ability to like the human race in any form or fashion due to a wealthy woman. Why, of course I'll elaborate.
       At approximately 9am, one of the kids (residing temporarily in the shelter for homeless teens that I work at) calls from school claiming vomiting and a need to be picked up. I wrap myself in a thousand layers of the cheap, worn crap I call clothing, and face the cold and quite smelly minivan I drive at work to pick said child up. When I get to the highschool, I am affronted with the same attendant and security guard that I want to physically harm every time I need their assistance. I get crap about not properly placing my "badge," which is a "my name is" sticker that yeilds such earth shattering importance that he needs to yell at me about it, to actually friggin yell. The other woman snaps her gum and says the child is not in the nurse's office. Work calls, the kid decided that he wants to stay in school because if he comes home he will not be able to go out with the other kids later in the evening. I go outside and kick a brick wall for a brief moment. My co-worker says not to come back, but hang around while she reaches my boss to find out the destination of a charity pick up for the house. I walk in the cold, find everything closed, and kick another brick wall just before work calls again and gives me a local. Said local is 30 minutes away. Great. I slightly vomit in my mouth due to syrupy heavy hangover, 2 hours sleeps, and the dizziness that my pent up rage is causing. When I get to the town I need to be in, the directions are wrong, so after circling one particular park for 20 minutes and yelling at the radio, I pull over at an ambulance station thinking that they know where things are because they have to. Nice man tells me where, I nearly hug him but hold back. Pull into golf course like estate thinking it is a suburban loop of homes overlooking the hudson. It is one home, just very large. I pull up to the enormous mansion/northern plantation home, get out of the dirty, dented mini-van wearing hiking boots, a tattered pea coat, and fingerless gloves, and I am greeted by a dog. The dog is small, and something a rich person would choose, but instensely friendly, so I make nice and we're friends. I walk up to the steps to find a 5th Ave bred, tightly wound, would be wrinkle bound older woman forming a smile out of her obvious distaste for me. A man, older, and of some southern american descent, wearing clothes that belong in my closet, silently beams at me, showing an array of gold teeth. He stays this way the whole time, and at first I wonder if he's there to translate her lock jaw WASP into a more "urban" dialect for me. I explain that I'm from "---" and I'm here to pick up the donation. Oh, she says, the owner of the whole damn company that you work for was upset that someone else was asked to pick up those items, so he came and got them, and you should really talk to your supervisor. She says this in that damn tone the wealthy, not rich, always have when they find the person they're speaking to inferior. I know it, I grew up with these people. At this moment, I wish I could show her my liscense address, which is still my parents' house, kick her in the shins, and light a cigarette in her mansion that is bigger than the town I live in. I continue to pet the dog, as I thank her through closed teeth for considering to let me do this pick up and use this fluffy white poof of a dog to distract my annoyance. Nice dog, I say. Oh, she says, he's really stupid. Also, you don't have to back out, this road will take you back. This is code for don't hit my nice cars with your crap-mobile homeless transportation, and don't steal anything on your way out. Then, she seals my hatred for her nice and tight when she says, oh, yes, that dog is stupid, you'll probably hit him on your way out because he'll follow you. Um, okay, I say ligically, then I guess you can hold him while I pull out. Oh, no, just drive slowly, she says. I have no more words. Apparently stupid dog follows me out the door. I consider taking him with me. My hatred for her is hermeticly sealed and my love for him exponentially growing. I say, dog with no name, sit. He sits. I say stay, I back up, walk to my tin skateboard with seven seats, start it, and drive away. He stays the whole time, probably thinking, take me, I can live a little bo-ho. I get a cup of coffee, drive the forty minutes back to work, with neither child nor charitable donations, trying to focus on the nice ambulance man and the poor dog, not all the other jack wagons roaming the planet.

       

Mulder, Moody, Jones

I have a new and lasting love for dear Mr. David Duchovny. I'm new to this bandwagon, having never been a fan of the X-Files, and my new found obsession began with his role in Californication. He stole my heart playing the lead role as writer Hank Moody. Heartwarmingly depraved and wonderfully perverse, this bad boy steals every scene with his abrasive expulsion of mystery in a snarky, sardonic demeanor superimposed with wit and unfaltering love. What could possibly be more thrilling and desirable than a hard-shelled man with a soft, gooey (and savory) center? Mr. Duchovny's recent role in The Joneses plays on his quiet, more body-language oriented acting method that leaves the audience holding its breath waiting for a moment of Duchovny thrill that never really arrives. While the idea for the film is almost original, and its commentary on consumerism haunting, it leaves little for its starring cast to work with. Its build up is left expanding with no exhalation, a rich, dry cookie with no milk to accompany it. If better expanded, perhaps with small elements of the dead-pan humor that Duchovny works so well with, it could have been a real gem in the catalogue of film. Alas, the idea remains an unpolished diamond, waiting to be snatched from the coal mine and cut into a park avenue beauty.

Yes, that's how terminal velocity works, but did you want fries with that?

It's nearly five in the morning, and instead of glancing at the clock and blissfully curling back in a sleep induced fetal position, I'm calling a cab company. No, the cab is not to wisk me off to some great destination, but for a homeless teen who needs to get to school in the morning. I'm the overnight at a shelter for homeless and runaway teens, trudging through the night hours along with some nocturnal creatures out in the woods of upstate New York. In between bed checks, laundry, setting up breakfast, doing paperwork, cleaning, spraying, generally sanitizing most surfaces, faxing, and anwering the rare phone call a week I read or knit while watching a movie on my laptop. This week I'm reading Tolstoy and knitting woolly scarves, waiting for the sun to rise or a kid to set something on fire.
Tonight, I slip out onto the fire escape for a brief and cold cigarette to watch the albino skunk, my only companion at this hour. I'm almost certain that this unusually large, undoubtably smelly, friend is blind. I have named him Manfred, after Byron's character, not the wolly mammoth from Ice Age. Manfred consistently bumps into a tree stump, the picinic bench, and a myriad of other obstacles, after which he rights himself.
During this cigarette I contemplate the injustice of the world, the unemployment, or ill employment of my friends and myself, and cringe a little at drab future of no occupational advancement and a lifetime of under appreciated social services, and from the chill breeze from the second floor. I also contemplate the injustice of Manfred's blindness, and gently scold myself for being entertained by antics caused by his helpless hindrance.
When I mention that I work at a shelter for homeless and runaway teens I'm often give the sympathy head-jut-forward-and-tilt, "oh, that's so great" to which I frequently roll my eyes and find a drink to sip. It's not that I don't like my job, because I do, or that I'm not grateful for the employment, because I am, it's just that I feel of so little use. By this I don't mean that social services is of no use, but in terms of my personal life I feel that I'm of little use. All I seem to do is work, eat, sleep, and read with unbelievanly little monetary gain. Living below the poverty line I can afford the essentials, including food and an apartment above a garage. This, of course, almost never includes clothing, traveling, and the general splendor of entertainment. I look at the peep view of my generation through my cohorts and find them all to be enitrely too well educated to work in delicatessens, restaurants, social services, and child care. Perhap we, like most who graduate or come of age in a time of economic recession or depression, will be all the more appreciatively ambitious once given the opportunity, or maybe we'll be another stint of sell-outs, working as corporate whores just to pay the bills and have a little fun from time to time. Corporate whoring has health benefits, right?