Tell Me Again That The Education System Is Fine And I’ll Knock Your Teeth Out

Well, if you kids follow me at all on the Twittah or the slightly more character-friendly Facebook, you’ve heard a bit about my recent employment saga and know that I’m kind of irritated.  And majorly disappointed.  And disillusioned.  And plain-old, fucking mad.

It’s official, as of today, that I have been completely passed over for a job that I really wanted.

“How badly did you want it?” you ask?

To put a finer point on it, let’s start by saying that I was happy making $10 an hour whilst performing its duties.  Maybe we’ll add that I religiously checked in on the process twice a week for the entirety of the summer and might have bordered on groveling.  And I’ll follow up by telling you that I don’t think I ever even once THOUGHT about complaining about having to GO.  And for someone who can find something to be snarky about in just about every situation, that’s fucking tops.

Was I underqualified?  No.  OVER qualified?  No.  Did I lack experience?  Absolutely not, considering I’d been doing the job for the second half of the school year last spring.  Did I have a record?  Piss someone off?  Were there people MORE qualified or better suited than me?  Had I not voiced my interest and enthusiasm clearly?  No, no, no and NO.  I met all requirements in spades, had a rapport with all staff members, knew the students and their individual challenges and found excitement in my chest instead of dread when waking up every morning to begin again.

I simply did not have enough SENIORITY.

And so, I was passed over, and not even given a chance to interview in favor of people who were already employed full-time in the district.

I was an unwitting participant in bureaucratic, union BULLSHIT.

I don’t expect to make any friends here for being anti-union, but that is now where I stand.

There were people considered who could not read AT the level of the students they were interviewing to HELP read.  Women I’d heard belittling the kids in the classes they’d be assisting: who vocally HATE their jobs and “the little shits” they “deal” with daily.

How is this possible?  How is it RIGHT?  How is this in the best interest of the kids who are having trouble learning?  Do you want YOUR children being taught by someone who has barely received their GED?  Pushed along by individuals who have no concern for quality of instruction or the job they’re doing past the paycheck?

I can’t wrap my head around it.  As a person who has always believed that there is always ONE MORE THING she can do to become successful or attain a goal or get her point across or simply have a productive day, I CANNOT FATHOM why I wasn’t even afforded an opportunity.  It galls me to have no control over a situation in the first place, let alone to be asked to believe that NOTHING THAT SHOULD HAVE MATTERED, DID.

I had no seniority.  Despite the fact that I’d worked in-district for a year and a half.  Despite my experience.  I was not a full-time staff member, and, as such, not in the union and not accruing ‘seniority’.  And to add insult, I cannot get a full-time position and accrue seniority without being a member of the union in a full-time position.

It just doesn’t add up.

So I will fill in as a substitute until the person hired wants to start (two weeks from now), and when she does, I will be paid $10/hour to train her on the job that I wasn’t considered for.  I will then go wherever the dispatch office sends me the next morning and continue to apply for jobs that I have no chance of getting.

Now tell me, why on earth would I want to spend money getting my Masters in Education?

Down To Zero*

I might just go crazy this week, if I’m not careful.   School is out for spring break and I am homebound by injury.  Three weeks into this cavalcade of crutches and I’m pretty close to despair.  I can’t remember the last time that I went this long without stepping foot into a gym, and I’m slipping slowly into madness as I daily watch all my hard won successes go to seed.

As the days wear on, my ass sinks lower, and the definition in my arms is fading.  I’ve tried very hard to curb my eating, but going from 3200 calories a day to 1200 is no easy feat, and I just don’t have the motivation to keep my hands out of that pretzel sack.  I’m back to averting my eyes from the mirror when I stand before it naked after a shower, and my “thin girl jeans” have been placed back to the bottom of the drawer in exile.

This does not a happy yawp make.

Yesterday, I gimped down to the fitness facility in my complex.  My orthopedist had okayed work on the stationary bike, (with no resistance), so I thought to get some cardio.  No such luck as 10 minutes in, my leg started aching.  I cannot fathom how I’m going to make it another FIVE weeks.

Being fit was inextricably linked to my feelings of self-worth and sex appeal.  Working out was the thing I was good at.  It kept me going.  I ran on running, thrived on plyos, gave thanks for planks.  This girl who had spent the first quarter of her life in abhorrence of herself, who had finally found a measure of pride in the fruits of her efforts, has been forced back into that world of disgust and self-loathing.  Back to square one.

 

 

*The title of this post comes from THIS song.

If Only It Were That Simple….

 

Author Dan Andrews wrote a prompt for the Trust 30 challenge that I don’t find to be much of a prompt at all.  It was kind of a self help book boiled down to a couple of paragraphs.  Regardless, I signed on, and certainly don’t want to cop out.  As such, I took a portion of The Prompt and realized I already had something in the archives that I wanted to say about it.

 

In regards to the kind of person I want to be, I have the following to say:

I want quiet–quiet in my head;

a hush when I close my eyes.

I want to lay my head down and drop to sleep without the agony of the day’s playback on repeat.

I want to feel effortlessly kind, and less a fraud.

I want buoyancy in place of the lead weight in my chest which I think must be my heart.

I want to sigh in contentment at this day’s end, and, instead of rancid ennui, look to the next with optimism and genuine curiosity.

I want pleasing things to feel pleasing, and I want to look at my world with real and unclouded joy.

In Which the Universe Reminds Me Who’s In Charge

I just wrote a pretty fucking good description of neurotic, Jen-style Writer’s Block.  It was the best thing I’d written all week.  And it came out easier.  There were flights of phrase that I was really proud of.  I hadn’t meant to write it.  I was doing my 750 Words and it just kind of evolved into a pretty good piece.  I had started by trying to answer today’s Trust 30 prompt, and quickly realized that I was going to ignore it in favor of sudden inspiration.  I was going to post it.  You were going to love it.  There were going to be scads of comments.  It might have made me famous***.

I once caught a fish *THIS BIG*.

Then, I went to the bathroom.  Upon my return, I entered my ‘security word’.  My fresh words popped up on the screen, and after 1 second, popped off.  I sat there for a moment, puzzled.  I checked my open windows to see if they were just re-loading.  They weren’t.  I pressed clicked on my Edit tab to make sure I hadn’t just done something that needed UNdoing.  Nope.  I refreshed my screen.  Nothing.

GONE.  They were all gone.  All that was there was the first word I’d posted.  I got up.  I swore out loud.  I swore on Twitter and Facebook. I contemplated punching the wall.  I stared in disbelief.  I swore some more.  And some more.  When I remembered to breathe, I attempted to recreate what I’d just written.  Only to find that my red-burning anger and shock had completely erased my memory.  Insert annoying blinking cursor here.

I hadn’t saved because I hadn’t expected to be writing.  In my life, I’ve ‘not saved’ only ONE OTHER TIME.  In college.  A 35 page English paper (something to do with the Restoration) and I’d waited until two days before it was due to start it.  The feeling is roughly the same.  A sucky, sinking, slightly nauseas sensation residing in the stomach and midchest.  It pools there and soaks, reducing to a burning, lamenting refrain and the dull headache follows straight after.

And so I breathe.  Actively, at first.  There’s nothing I can do.  The Universe has a plan.  It sucks, but isn’t earth ending.  There’ll be other days.  And besides, this isn’t wildly different in tone or spirit than what I’d had on the page and lost.  Writing to replace writing as therapy.  It’s a deeper well than originally thought. Wooooo-sssssssaaaahhhhh.

In the interest of closure, my three dreams:

 

1.  That I wrote on a typewriter (with spectacles and khaki jodphurs).

2.  That I was on my second Passport book because the first one had no more room for stamps.

3.  That I had never lost the retainer I received after getting my braces off in high school.

 

***awesomeness of post may be slightly exaggerated for dramatic appeal.

Now Blossoming? Patience and Grace.

I am attempting to start a porch garden. There is something in my head that is insisting on it…telling me that in order to be a complete and accurately functioning success of a human being, I need to be able to cultivate something with my own hands. Something green and thriving, healthy, wholesome, wasteless. Something wrought with simple ingredients and a little bit of love. Something that, like me, acquires its energy from the sun.

Years and years ago, my mother decided to start a garden. I don’t remember the genesis of the idea, only that one day, she’d started, and had uncharacteristcally allowed me to horn in. I carried only one memory of a real garden; my Poppi’s, and I was keen to help create such a wonderland in my own world. An Eden of hot peppers, tomatoes and onions, it was the unspoken ideal, the model, the vision. We weren’t gardeners, she and I, only decendants of a gardener, but there was hope in our striving. A dream.

My father borrowed a neighbor’s tiller and turned the dirt over for us and we went to work straight away, laboring blindly toward a Beatrix Potter watercolor.

I insisted on furrows. A proper garden must have furrows, else how do you know what it is upon looking? She obliged me and gave me a bit on my own to accomplish my vision. I knelt my bony knees into the dirt, and, ignoring the unpleasant sensation of loam beneath my nails, piled the dirt up into even mounds with pathways in between to walk. We pushed seeds into thumbprint holes and relocated trays of herb starters and tomato saplings. It was quiet work, and hot, and I enjoyed feeling useful to her.

As we stood next to each other, akimbo and brushing the dirt from our sticky skin, we tried to imagine the green grown in. “I think we need more tomato plants, Jennifer.” She looked at me with a question on her face and then answered with action, speaking again over her shoulder as she made for the french doors in the back: “C’mon, let’s go back to the nursery. We’ll have lunch.”

As I sit here now, I couldn’t give many more particulars about that garden. I can’t remember weeding it or watching it grow. I can’t remember what else we planted, or if there was anything that failed to thrive and disappointed us. Did I get lost being a child somewhere, leaving my mother to the hardest part of the tending? Were there roasted eggplant and onion each night for dinner? Did my mother stand by the stove in the warm summer evenings asking me to run out to snip a parcel of chives? Nothing. It’s all lost, gathering dust on a memory shelf in the attic.

There were other attempts as I grew older. Purple passion plants set on a windowsill in a dorm room. A fated attempt to cultivate a Wandering Jew in a dining room turned apartment bedroom. Wildflower seeds scattered against a decrepit and fading blue duplex. Paperwites left moldering in rock filled Tom Collins glasses. All this with varied effects…mostly tragic, gnarled and brown.

The silent truth is not a black thumb, but my ever shortening attention span and embarrassing affinity for laziness. Plants require a consistency that I am ill-equipped to provide. I forget or think “Later” so many times during the day that the idea of Tomorrow might have become a mantra. I avoid and put-off right up until the nanosecond before negative consequences ensue…and sometimes the nanosecond after.  Too often consumed with my present and the often imagined drama with which I surround it, I find myself too harried and frenetic to sustain slow processes.  I’m a tapping foot, a startle response, a springing spring just released….

Here I am now with my hands in the soil, searching in a real way to ground myself; to gain what I believe is offered in this process. Patience.  Grace. Composure.  I don’t want a time-lapse world anymore, morphing swiftly all around me, speeding me toward an end result. Instead, I’m yearning.  Seeking.  Feeling out and lacking for peace and a purpose.

I knew when I planted these seeds, that I would not wake up the next morning to find bright green shoots punching up through the surface. But that next day, and the next and the next, I surely stepped out onto my porch and sat on my haunches, hoping for those very signs to indicate I hadn’t botched the whole thing. I smiled to myself (and broadly) when that first grassy leaf held its arms open to the sun, but despaired over the next 48 hours until more were ready. I held my breath against frost, and shook my fist at the odd cloud.

I’m in it for the haul, this time, each inner fiber in dire need of that calm connect.  I am living for that moment where I can stoop over the fruits of my labor to pluck a fragrant herb from its stem in order to pop it directly into a simmering red sauce.  Each day, as my eyes pour over the teeny plants, I remind myself to enjoy the process, to take gratification in the small success so far attained.  I smile at the beauty that is here in front of me RIGHT NOW, and remember that there is still a long row to hoe.

Pft…Everything’s (not) OK

The Prompt:

What was the best moment that could serve as proof that everything is going to be alright? And how will you incorporate that discovery into the year ahead? (Author: Kate Inglis)

Oh! to be the girl with the forever smile; to rid myself of the deep wrinkles between my eyebrows and greet the world daily with composure and grace….  Everything, you see, is decidedly NOT okay in my world.  My default face is consternation and my stomach? A mass of knots and bile.  I’m the first born, an Aries, weighed down in reality and anchored by responsibility.  For every third person professing that “things will just work out” there is one of me, toiling behind the scenes, knowing that IT WILL NOT! and pulling the strings to avert disaster.

I KNOW, to my very base fiber, that it is best to expect the worst and to be prepared for the next shower of bullets.  I am a naysayer, a doomsday portent, a harbinger of reckoning.  For every small beauty, for every sigh of pleasure and each belly laugh, there are scores of needling sorrows raining down to remind of the natural balance.  I know this empirically, with the certainty of experience.  I have a closet full of the “other shoes” and a face full of contusions from their rapid descent.

“Alright” is a relative term, you see.  It’s Above Ground, Still Breathing, Possessed of All My Fingers and Toes.  To be any other way would be completely foreign.  Foreign, but completely longed for.  I am consistently amazed by people who are able to keep to the sunny side: My brother N, who, while paratrooping his way through Afghanistan can maintain that we are all a part of the fabric of time, that the universe has a plan and that plan is right and purposeful.  My girlfriend M, who, though mucking her way through a divorce and other painful decisions is devoted to her smile with a buoyancy that’s terribly rare.  Even CV, who has recently defriended me, never ceased to amaze me with her ability to remain civil in situations that would have me in jail for assault.

I am simply not that person.  I am wed to the Truth (big T) and prefer cold, hard FACT to wishful thinking.  I know that the winds will change direction if I get too comfortable.  I feel, so heavily, that somehow, my life is a crux on which teeters a scale of good and bad.  To feel differently, or to change my attitude, is to tempt fate and laugh at the Furies.  Because it is so, I feel more acutely the joys of success and the pains of failure.  I am keenly cognizant that good is only so because of its counterpart, bad.

So, you see, I am not acquainted with that sigh of relief,  that notion that, wow, things are finally on an upswing.  I know only to breathe in those winsome moments, and breathe through the terrifying.  All are fleeting, and each makes way for the next.

Travel

The Prompt:

How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year? (Author: Tara Hunt)

Oh reader, your faithful narrator just doesn’t have it in her today to tell you about her year’s travels.  I feel as if I’ve already kicked that dead horse a couple of times too many for our beloved Reverb10.  However, being as yesterday was my BEST DAY YET (!!) for readership, I have a feeling that many of you are new to my corner of the blogosphere.  If “Yes!  I am!” is your response, then I encourage you to look HERE, and HERE (or even HERE if you like pictures) so you’ll know that I really have already answered and am not just copping out to suit my own needs.

That said, fret not.  I shan’t leave you with a metaphorical hard-on or a reader’s equivalent of blue balls.  Instead of re-answering today’s prompt, I shall regale you with a tale of my latest runaround with that Testament to Inefficiency: The United States Postal Service.

The scene opens around about the beginning of November, when I was scouring the interwebz for a dress suitable for a semi-formal Holiday party.  Dancing with a whim, I got it into my mind that what I really wanted was something with LOTS OF SEQUINS.  A couple of days search lead me to the PERFECT DRESS on my favorite website for all things vintage and neat-o: Ebay.  My first clue that this particular buying experience was going to go gloriously awry appeared at the outset.  Upon viewing my Paypal account, I was dismayed to find that I was charged a significant amount more than I’d bid for this item (a beautiful Tory Birch minidress covered in chocolate colored sequins).  It was a split second before I hit “send” on a terse letter to the seller that I realized that the Idiot Award would actually be going to me:  I had not realized that I’d been bidding in British pounds and not my own native currency.  BLAST!  (For the record, pulling the trigger before actually reading the fine print is a classic bit-o-Jen.)

The damage done, I paid my bill and let the seller know that I’d need the item for a Holiday party three and a half weeks into the future.  She assured me that she’d have it out the next day.  ”Right-o”, she said (no, really, she actually typed “Right-O”) and I began my eager wait.  Well, as you may have already guessed, three and a half weeks IS NOT EVEN CLOSE to enough time to allow for the USPS, holiday traffic, the Royal Mail Service and International Customs. The Christmas party came and went (with me relegated, sadly, to a previously worn, assuredly NOT AWESOME and NOT SEQUINED holiday frock) and so did my move to another apartment.

About a week ago, I began an inquiry into its progress.  Now please, follow closely, but don’t expect to understand.  I certainly don’t:

I tracked the package with the USPS, whose representatives told me that they hadn’t received it yet, please contact the seller.  I contacted the seller, who contacted the Royal Mail service whose representative said that the USPS definitely had it, please contact the recipient (that’s me).  I followed up with the USPS who told me that they couldn’t give me any information (on MY package!) until the seller opened an “Official Inquiry”.  I contacted the seller, who had already done that, who recontacted the Royal mail, whose representative then said that the package had been signed for in the States, but they couldn’t say by who for “Security Purposes.”  I recontacted the USPS, who said that yes, the package HAD INDEED arrived, but they couldn’t tell me where, or who signed for it for “Security Purposes”, that the seller would need to open an “Official Inquiry”.  Sound familiar yet?

Well, after the second “Official Inquiry” we were told that the package had arrived in a neighboring city.  Fast forward to today, when I visited the post office in that city to pick up my package.  It took an hour for me to find out the following: Somehow, my package was sent to a very old address in the city we moved from early last spring.  From there, the package was forwarded to a PO box that we’d opened pending finding a place to live.  When the package arrived at the PO box, it was discovered that we no longer had that PO Box and it was forwarded to the address of the place we moved to.  There, the USPS discovered that there were no occupants, so instead of forwarding it to the new (my current) address, they sent it back to the post office where the PO box WAS.  The staff there realized that we had a forwarding address, so they started the forwarding process.

The best part about this?  All of the above is a GUESS.  No one actually KNOWS where my package is at this very moment.  We have to “wait and let the process play out.” (?!?!?!?!?!)

Well, “What about those tracking numbers and scans that the post office does for certified, tracked mail?” you ask.  ”There must be a central database that uploads a package’s location when it’s scanned.”  Yes, that would make sense.  But, NO, THERE ISN’T.  No central database,  no way to contact the carriers, no estimate when there COULD be an answer.  Somewhere, floating around in the Postal Ether, travels a lone sequin minidress crying out for an owner, its arms limply crumpled in a useless ball.  And here I sit, blogging out my frustration, wondering what the cuss a tracking number is for if not for TRACKING A CUSSING PACKAGE.  In the spot-on verbiage of the train wreck that is Amy Winehouse, I’m wondering:  Whaaaaaat kind of fuckery is this????

And, Iceland.  I think I want to travel to Iceland this coming year.

Action

The prompt:

Action When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step? (Author: Scott Belsky)

Ah you see?  This is my kind of prompt.  I’m a DO girl.  Always moving, always trying to find ways around a roadblock, and yes, always procrastinating because I’ve found something more interesting TO be doing.  I’m impatient to the nth degree, and honestly, can’t really remember the last time that I took “No” for an answer.  In my mind, there’s never an excuse for failing to get something done, and there’s ALWAYS a way that it could have gotten done more efficiently.  My husband (to my chagrin and highest level of annoyance) calls me “Princess” sometimes because I like to have my way.  In my mind, I can’t see this as a bad thing.  I like things the way I like them.  And if it’s possible, through a little bit of effort and some outside-the-box thinking to HAVE things my way, then why would I settle for less?

No, it’s not the DOING I have trouble with, it’s the narrowing down of WHAT it is I want done.  You see, EVERYTHING sounds like a great idea to me.  I’m like a kid with ADD that catches something shiny out of the corner of his eye.  Squirrel!  I have trouble narrowing the scope of the possible.  This applies to pretty much all areas of my life and is more than a little bit troublesome.  Vacation ideas?  I’ve got TONS!  So many, that we never get anywhere.  Home crafts projects?  Millions!  (and all of them in various stages of completion).  Life aspirations?  At least four….and I’m currently unemployed.  You see, anything has been possible for me for so long, that I have a glut of ideas and nothing is accomplished.  I’m a product of my culture, through and through.

So, “what’s next?” the prompt asks innocently.  ”Everything!  All at once!” my brain shouts in return.  But no, this process is about revisiting, refreshing and getting rid of the schmutz that doesn’t work.  So, I suppose I’ll quit putting it off and answer the question.

To me, it’s a two-step process.

1.  Finish the things that I’ve started.  This has to be first.  If it’s not, then no one is getting Christmas presents this year, I’ll end up with a room full of wire screening, vintage picture frames and 180 grit sandpaper, there will only be 13-odd posts on this blog, I’ll remain unemployed and my one mascara’d eye will continue to make me look like Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

2.  Make a narrow list of specific things I want to accomplish.  Let’s say 3 major and 10 minor.  I’d make that list now, but I’m already overwhelmed with the list of shit from number one.

I’d use the term “simplify” but I fear a host of “We told you so” reprisal responses from those new-agers who hated my answer yesterday.  Instead, I’m going to revise and edit, so that my life in the coming year can be a string of sanity preserving and ego-boosting successes rather than a list of half-dones and collecting-dust-in the-closets.