burning your house behind you

so since this blog was mostly about categorizing my misery during what i hope will turn out to be the worst year of my life, and since, god willing, that year is now over, i think i'm going to bring this blog to a close. but that doesn't mean that i've stopped airing my personal tragedies to the world... i've just changed providers. that's right, you can now begin reading my new blog, money city II: escape from money city, on friendster, where i can post pictures! so i´m going to be writing all about my adventures in meso america. so you should read it.
http://moneycityii.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/

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fleeing the US like rats from a sinking ship

blah... so approximatly five minutes after i finished writing that last post, i realized that the nicaraguan presidential elections aren't until 2006. fuck those foreigners and their five year election cycle. you'd think someone might have pointed that out to me in one of the many meetings i had about that project, but no... apparently it slipped their minds too. although, to my credit, a lot of people are calling for early elections in nica, so there may well be presidential elections in november.

i have, nonetheless, bought a ticket to mexico. a one way ticket even (ooohh....). not that i don't have plans for returning, but it gives me the freedom to fly back from managua if i want to, or stay longer if something comes up. i don't really have an established plan, other than flying down on sept. 6th and eventually making my way to managua, but i think it should be cool. I'm an awful tourist, and i mostly hate backpackers, so i will probably be moving off of the beaten path, trying to do some recording for radio programs as i go, visiting grassroots groups in guatemala with my friend Yakira for her work with Seva, hanging out in san cris for a while doing peace house stuff. it should be nice. i'll be there for a minimum of a month, maybe longer. at the very latest, i should be back in the US by next year (and that's only if i hook up with an amazing and compelling project, or nicaragua does call early elections and reforms their constitution).

but first i have to finish up in dc (i work through the second week of august), move all of my stuff to chicago, stopping off on the way to visit with my mom and her parents, and then fly to florida en route to mexico and visit my other grandparents. it will be a terrible and stressfull month.

but i'm glad i'm leaving for a bit. i applied to a really nice job with a radical urban garden project in chicago, and seem to have come really close to getting it, but didn't. and i was liked, i worked a ton of shitty jobs this year and didn't spend money on anything hoping to save enough to be able to take off for a while. i don't just want to move to a new city and start that all over again. i need a little time off to re energize before i can face that schedule again. plus rents are cheap enough in chicago that alex can handle both of our rents while i'm gone (it'll prolly just be about $50 more than what he's spending here).

ooh, also i got my tattoo. you can see a really bloody picture of it taken about 5 minutes after i got it, on my friendster page. it's much lighter and less greasy now. i'm planning on taking a nicer picture of it to put up. all in all, it was a really good experience.

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my throat infection is eating its way to freedom

My boss is out of the office for a couple of days so i've had to learn my old work avoidance habits. it seems strange that i feel so much more guilty about wasting time here than at my job that paid me twice as much money. i guess it makes sense, since i'm working for better people, but i can't say my job is any more interesting. it consists mostly of data entry, web maintenance, and filing. soo much filing. all of which would be fine at a living wage, but at six dollars an hour, it means i also have to waitress to support myself, so i end up working six or seven days a week, which is really exhausting. All i have to say is this better look really fucking awesome on my resume.

but waitressing has been nice. i'm working at the colorado kitchen, which is a great little restaurant in the brightwood park neighborhood in nw dc. Hannah works there, and got me the job, and it's totally quirky and great. the food is awesome, the clientel (for brunch at least) are a mix of church ladies, gay men, and hipsters, and the whole thing has a laid back feel. plus i seem to be doing an ok job, except for accidentily dipping my breasts in a plate of chocolate glazed doughtnuts i was serving to a table of disabled iraq war veterans. on the upside, i did get to eat said donuts after trying to clean the chocolate off of my shirt, and explaining to the cooks why i needed some replacement doughnuts.

i went back to cleveland last weekend to visit my mom. the visit was nice, if really strange. it's the first time i stayed with her since she moved into a new apartment, which left me feeling a little off balance. it's like the minute i get back to cleveland, i start feeling overwhelmingly sentimental, and non specificly nostalgic. i ran into my friend peter, who's graduating from art school, and i was just floored by this sensation of how much time had passed since we had known each other well. it's not like he's drastically different, it's just this sudden realization that we used to be best friends, and i knew him really intimately, but that was five years ago. who knows who we are now?

all of my Cleveland Institute of Art friends were back for graduation, so it was cool to see them. I ran into Frank at a party, and we ended up talking for like a half an hour at 3am about death and growing up and Andrew. When i went home, there was a picture on my mom's refrigerator that i had never seen before. It was an arty, vaguely homo erotic black and white photo of a man's torso with his head cropped out. i couldn't figure out why she would have it stuck to the fridge, until i realized that it was a photo of andrew. not only that, but i can be pretty sure that it was taken while we were dating, because he was wearing a necklace and bracelet in the picture that he wore all of the time then. his mom must have sent it to my mom--they've been writing. Somehow seeing a picture of him that i had never seen before, and so unexpectedly, really shook me up. i couldn't ask her to move it or take it down without raising a whole bunch of weired issues. i never talk to her about his death. i know it hurt her a lot too, they were close, but i feel like i'm only capable of dealing with my own pain around his death, and thinking about hers is too hard. i still can't believe how much this affects me almost 9 months later.

i made an appointment to get a tattoo next week. i'm going to get a human heart tattood between my shoulder blades, as a way of remembering him. i'm hoping that the experience will be cathartic.

the other thing that happened when i went home is that i finally saw a doctor that wasn't my father. they tested me for strep and mono, and all the tests are back negative, which would be great, if i wasn't feeling like shit, and you couldn't actually see the lymph nodes sticking out of the right side of my neck. so i'm back to square one, and my mom and i are out several hundred dollars. i have to get health insurance before i die.

uggg
rachel

Master Plans

So i was waiting to update my blog about my life until i figured out what exactly was going on in my life. Needless to say that took a while. Which means that this is quite an update.

When i last posted here, i was seriously nursing the idea of giving up on dc. specifically, finishing out my awful temp job, waitressing for like a month, and then heading off to nicaragua, to write about the bronca going on there with the sandinista party and the november elections. i met with some people working on nica issues and put together a pretty good plan involving research and journalism, and was ironing out the details when... i got offered a paid internship from an ngo doing IMF/WB stuff who wanted me to start like, the next day. so i had a quick freakout about my life and what i wanted to be doing and where i was headed and whatnot, and decided that nicaragua was apt to be more interesting in sept-november when the elections were actually happening than it is now, and that my resume could probably use a little work, so here i am. here being working as a glorified librarian in a pretty nice but not revolutionary ngo working on WB/International Debt issues. The job is boring, but not unpleasent. I like the people i work with, and the whole thing would be awesome, were i not making a little less than half as much as i was temping (less than minimum wage after taxes). So tomorrow i start job number two, waitressing with Hannah at the Colorado Kitchen (wish me luck.)

In other news, i had a birthday, which was AWESOME, which you would know if you had come and visited for my party like my friends who actually love me. i made exciting and delicious food and drank too much. well not really too much. my goal was to make it until one am without puking or crying. which i did wonderfully, and i didn't really even drink too much, but the next morning i was totally distroyed, crying next to the toilet like a little girl. I put the blame for this sad turn of events on antibiotics, which i had been on for nearly 20 days at that point.

rachel, you're saying, you really shouldn't be taking antibiotics for that long. what could possibly make you do that to your body? the answer: tonsilitis. specifically, three reacurrences of tonsilitis. or so my dad is guessing, since i don't have health insurance and can't get an appointment at any of the sliding scale clinics until june. the theory right now is that alex is an asymptomatic carrier of tonsilitis, and is infecting me every time i go off antiobiotics. whether or not this is true, if i get horribly sick again after this, round three of my drug treatment (which we are both taking this time), i will kill someone. tonsilitis is horrible. if you have health insurance, get them out. you don't fucking need those suckers. they will just screw you when you least expect it.

but other than my on going battle with my tonsils, things are nice here. The weather is pretty. I'm taking a bike repair class that is totally incredible. It's $15 for 8 classes (that's right, $15 total) and the class consists of me, alex, and tim. The teacher is this awesome dude who builds custom frames, and is basically helping us fix up our bikes for free. plus it's at the crazy georgetown rec center which looks like a fucking country club. i'm also doing some more work with the radio coop. i'll let you know if anything gets aired. and i just knitted some baby booties for a co worker, which are awesome. they are cute and tiny, and it's my first time ever making anything that is not flat and square. now if only yarn wasn't soooo expensive. also, the visiting extravaganza continues, with upcoming visits from Robin Lea, Duncan Metcalf, a repeat visit by Becca, and a trip to cleveland. Yay friends!

so to recap, my life equals: DC until august, at which time Alex moves to Chicago, and i stay in the district until the begining of september. Then to Nicaragua September through Mid November, with a posible side trip to Guate to meet up with some friends from Chiapas, then home to move in with Alex in Chicago, and start looking for paying work. Know where we should live/what i should do in that shining beacon to the north? Let me know

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cash money millionaires

Some friend of my girl Yakira emailed me last week to say he was living in dc and asked me out to drinks. The whole experience was pretty incredibly terrible. he works for public citizen doing CAFTA stuff, so the vibe i got was that it would be pretty much a "networking" whatever thing, but it turned out that everyone he knows in the world was at the restaurant we went to. we ended up being a party of ten, all people i didn't know. (actually that's not true, the one person i knew there was this kid i met at a party a couple of months ago, hit it off with, and then totally alienated by asking him "how gay are you?" when he mentioned dar williams in a conversation, and haven't spoken to since.) anyways, they were all young, up and coming non-profit workers around my age, and from the very beginning it was just this series of horrible conversations.
"why did you come back from mexico?"
"cause i decided that i wanted to work for change in my own country"
"oh, so where were you working on the election?" (these were all move on kids)
"well, actually instead of working on the election i ended up nursing my mother through a series of terrible back surgeries while waitressing to save up money."
"oh...(looking uncomfortable) well what do you do now?"
"well, i've been temping and applying for jobs"
"that sucks, did you just move here?" (they almost all moved here in december and immediately got jobs)
"no, i've been here for six months"
"oh...." (followed by a look of pitty and a quick move away from my stink of failure.)

Halfway through the night David, the friend of a friend, asked me why i was so bitter, and i was like "i don't expect to have a wonderful job right off, but i built a small non profit up from the ground in another country last year with virtually no outside support and i've spent the last six months being turned down for receptionist jobs" and then i burst into tears.

It was awesome!

he offered me a full time unpaid internship, and i told him i couldn't afford to work for free at a job which also didn't allow me any time to have paid work as well, and that 40 hour a week unpaid internships might as well have a "no poor kids needed" sign on them. he said that it sucked, and he knew that the system was fucked up, but since there were plenty of people willing to work full time for free it wasn't worth their while to hire people for part time.

Then he had to pay for my drinks because i only had a credit card thinking, silly me, that i would be splitting a bill for two rather than a bill for ten.

needless to say i don't think i'll be hearing back from him again.

on the upside, i got a gig saturday night working as a waitress at a private party thrown by some people Hannah knows. It was insane! a gorgeous four story row house near 19th and Kalorama (easily a $2 million house). They were serving incredible food. a brie the size of a bike tire. home made thin crust pizzas with figs and pruciutto. a variety of rustic crustini. amazing. i worked from 6 to midnight, preparing food, passing stuff around, throwing away empties and restocking the bar. i went home with $170. if only i could do that every weekend, no?

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r

i am clearly a negligent blogger

sorry about the month long gap dudes. at least it was the shortest month of the year.

things have been mostly the same here. more unrealized job hopes. more time killing at pointless jobs. my boss was out of town for the last week and a half. i literally spent my time listening to this american life online and embroidering. i'm actually getting carpal tunnel from playing online puzzle games. no kidding.

i did a little radio piece for free speech radio news with this cool girl darby who lives down the street from me. (in the awesome radical queer co-op the palace which constantly puts double date house to shame.) it's only two minutes long, but it's nice, and you can listen to it online at www.fsrn.org. just go to the news archives and pull up the show from monday the 28th. we're the last three minutes.

hopefully i'll be able to do more stuff like that, but i need project ideas of my own to work on, and a lot more experience.

went to nyc. saw the gates. they were nice but not spectacular. i loved all of the people milling around. there were thousands of people gathered for nothing more than a free aesthetic spectical. even better than fireworks and parades, both things that i firmly believe in.

more disturbing dreams about my dead ex. i've been having them all the time. i wish they would stop. this last one involved living in my dad's old house in cleveland with andrew and his mom. i came home one day to discover that they had moved out while i was gone. the house was a mess and all their stuff was gone. i searched frantically for some way to contact them, find out where they had gone. a mutual friend stopped by the house, and as she was leaving, i asked, "you don't have any idea how i could reach andrew and pam do you?" and she gave me a horrified look, and i remembered that andrew was dead.

you should come and visit me. yes you. unless i don't know you, in which case that might be awkward. but otherwise come on down. this is our nations capitol. you could protest something while you are here. we will cook you good food. you will love it.

also, friendster chat. i'm there all day. and so bored and lonely i could cry

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dancing for pennies

so despite my unbrideled optimism after new years, it appears that this will not, in fact, be the best year ever.

after four interviews for two jobs, i currently have been hired for zero (0) of those positions. Highlights of the process include my third interview for the receptionist job at the national abortion federation, where their ceo kept me waiting for forty five minutes, and then spent the entirety of the interview alternately suggesting that the position was below me, and then asking me how much i wanted it. "no really, do you Love administrative work?"

oh yeah, i also liked the part where despite numerous phone calls and the aformentioned three interviews, they didn't even bother to call me and let me know that i didn't get the job. i guess that's just one of the perks of having hundreds of over educated and underemployed people desperatly competing for one shitty job. you don't have to be bothered with basic human decency.

it's gotten to the point that i've started to avoid talking to new people, cause when they ask me what i do for a living, i tear up and they get uncomfortable.

my other big plan for alternatives to a real job was to try and get a fellowship to go back to nicaragua and continue the research i did for my senior essay, during the lead up to their november presidential elections. i shopped the idea around to a couple of people at wesleyan, and they all kindly pointed out that nobody cares about nicaragua, and certainly wouldn't give me any money to write about it. so i can pretty firmly scratch that off of my list.



i went to the inauguration protests last week, which was nice. we marched from malcom x park near our house down 16th st to mcphereson square. I didn't stay to do the whole parade route thing (it was mindnumbingly boring and assnumbingly cold last time) but the parade was really nice. the sun was out and there were a lot of people, and i did a bunch of nice chanting. i think chanting is pretty underappreciated.

do you ever get disturbed by the ammount of times i use the word nice in these posts? it seems to be my only adjective anymore.

i also made an amazing pillow for our house. it has a robot embroidered on it. i am a pillow making genious.

rachel