i can't even be bothered to come up with a cute title

So now officially begins the period of my life where i watch all of the people i know become more successfull and famous than me. it was one thing when the famous/successfull people were aquantainces (for example bex shwartz, vh1 a to z commentator and commedian) or people whose fame took place before i met them (thayer mcclanahan, rushmore reporter) but there's nothing like reading gawker at your terrible temp job and seeing one of your friends from college referred to as a "film-maker/comedian."

jesus. all i want is a permanent job that doesn't make me cry at the end of the day, let alone to be designated by a hiphenated title in a celebrity gossip blog.

ugghh.

i applied for a job at jobs with justice which seems like it wouldn't be horrible, but i won't find out for a couple of weeks whether i even have an interview, and in the meantime i can't seem to muster the energy to apply for anything else. the constant rejection is exhausting. maybe after the new year.

speaking of new years, i'm not desperatly broke for the first time in two months thanks to holiday overtime and chaunuka checks, and i'm planning on blowing the small surplus i have on a new outfit for new years. if i'm going to be dissapointed and horrendously drunk this new years, i might as well be wearing something cute.

forever 21, here i come.

rachel

1-800-SOMETHING-CUTE

So yesterday was saved by complete worthlessness by the intervention of some dc friend alternates. i left work exhausted. why is 9 hours of reception work so much more tiring than 8 hours? at any rate, i was just about ready to go to bed for the night, but i got a call from my friend sara, who i know through uu stuff, and spent the night drinking beer around a fire with some of her (and my) friends.

it's so funny the divide between the groups of people i'm friends with. i sometimes wonder what would happen if i got them all in the same room together. most of my school and cleveland friends are these unrepentant hipsters. i mean, they are generally progressive, and even pretty political, but at the same time they're totally cynical and ironic and caught up in fashion and music and pop culture.

and then i have my uu friends who sit around talking intently about the semiotics of activist terminology (activist vs. organizer, service as in community service vs. service as in a religious calling) and how to be a truly anti oppressive organizer when working outside of your own community, all while listening to rusted root and the cure.

but it was nice to be reminded that i have more than three friends in dc, especially when i'm generally in a fight with at least one of them.

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i wish it was possible to have a subscription to just the readings section of harpers, cause generally that's really all i want to read. plus it's a goldmine for email subjects and blog titles (see today's heading). other runners up for today's blog:
squeeling and snorting while eating
medium underwater fart in bathtub
sharp, squeaky vocal sucking
throwing pebble house collapses
(from a list of audio clips from cartoons)
and also
office life turns out to be soul-deadening, literally or metaphorically

have i mentioned how much i hate my life?

so you know how the first couple of days of a new job you're totally useless. you spend all of your time making humiliating mistakes doing totally simple tasks, mispronouncing peoples names and getting lost on your way to the bathroom. that's my life everyday. because being a temp means you're never anywhere long enough to stop sucking. so your day is filled with small frustrations and pointless embarressments. you're never dressed right and no one's your friend. and when its over, you get to go someplace new and start all over again.

dental plan--lisa needs braces

so i watch a lot of tv now (see previous posts) and one of the things that has been driving me crazy recently is the new crest ads. have you noticed that they refer to the broad array of cleansing and whitening products available as the "Crest Dental Plan"

What the Fuck?

Is this part of the new Bush plan of comprehensive health care? that a couple of whitening strips and an electric toothbrush are passed off as a dental plan. Well thank god as one of the millions of uninsured americans this new form of dental care is within my financial reach. well at least parts of it. i mean i couldn't go out and buy the whole shebang at once. well unless i get a lot of hours next week.



you can file the citi group "live richly" ad campaign under the same category. I can just see the conversation behind those ads. "hey guys, we're one of the most moraly bankrupt financial institutions in the world. maybe we should stop redlining, clearcutting the rainforests, investing in fossil fuels and suggesting to govenments that massacring guerilla movements would be good for their credit ratings. Nah, maybe instead we can just make a wacky, fun loving ad campaign about the true meaning of life."

america's next top model makes me dream of my dead boyfriend

last night i had one of those all night meandering dreams. the ones that you wake up from and think about and then fall back into. it was mostly about andrew. well, sort of. in the dream i was visiting his mother's house with some friends who had never known him. for part of the dream we were lying out on a dock by a river and in the shallow water were pictures torn out from something. they were all pictures of him and me from when we were dating but most of them weren't real. in some of them i had a mohawk or some sort of fierce variation of haircuts i had when i was younger, and in almost all of them i looked much tougher and more beautiful than i ever really did in real life. as i tried half heartedly to save all of these pictures from the water, i realized that the dock was attached to the back porch of a house and his mother had laid out this giant handmade book out of rough brown paper. it was as tall as i was and i struggled to hold it upright as i paged through life sized photos of andrew and i. his mother came up behind me as i looked at a picture of some sort of formal ball and then we were there, standing in this fancy mansion filled will well dressed people dancing and his mother explained that this was the spring dance from his freshman year of college and it was such a big deal and that he had asked this girl who he must have been crazy about because he drove up to columbus to buy her a diamond necklace. his freshman year was when we first had our falling out after we broke up and i remember feeling confused and angry in the dream that he had been so into some blond sorority girl and bought into this kind of shit.

the saddest part of this dream is not that it is about missing my dead ex boyfriend. the saddest part is that it is so transparently a rehashing of obvious and despicable parts of my day that it becomes totally meaningless. the photos are from a pile of photos and prints of him at the foot of my bed that i've been looking at anxiously since thanksgiving and trying to think of what to do with. the mohawk and fierce looks are from america's next top model, which i watched before bed. the ball is from the fancy office christmas party last night that everyone where i'm temping was excited about and i wasn't invited to. and finally the sorority girl was from big man on campus which i will sadly admit to watching 20 minutes of. what a giant collection of shit rolled up in some sad corner of my psyche.


things have been pretty grim here. i'm slowly losing my shit (to use the medical term) in an ever escalating series of public breakdowns, panic attacks and weeping. i'm too broke to even consider making this documentary in march, and what little money i have is going fifty bucks a week to pay for a therapist that i don't have insurance to pay for. the good news is that one of my friends is going to start giving me the paxil he still gets but has stopped taking. this might have seemed like a bad idea at one point but right now i'm too fucked up to care.
the bad news is that i think i've finally alienated jane, thereby cutting me down to two friends in dc. and also my job. that's definitely bad news. every time i take a new temp job i think that it's the lowest of the low, but i really have no clue what low is. this job is at a corporate headhunting office. lets just say that three days into it my temp agency called my house to tell me that they had complained that my dress was not up to snuff for the position, but i didn't find out because my phone had been disconnected. i eventually learned of their complaint three days later when i called to beg for a fifty dollar paycheck that they owed me from three weeks earlier.

if that's not sad, i'm not really sure what is.

rachel