My supervillain name: The Polish Predator

If anything, at least this blog has given me a way to occupy my time at work. This is proving to be ever more important as the days count down until my last day here. Just today I passed on 2 of the biggest tasks of my job to a couple of successors. Which leaves me with basically nothing but empty time on my hands. I started cleaning out my desks today, though. Which is a huge step towards high-tailing it out of here.

It's sad that I am ending things here with one of my employees on such a bad note. Well, maybe it's not sad, because it was really only a matter of time before her unendingly difficult personality pushed me over the edge. (Yet another reason why I am not suited for management.) We have hardly spoke a sentence to each other this week. It's getting kind of tense. Luckily she spends most of her time on a different floor of the building... but I'm beginning to think that she is spending more time down there than usual.

Well, I can't say I'm too upset about it. She did, in so many words, call me an under-qualified racist last week. That was an awkward conversation, let me tell you. It was funny that she was sitting there yelling at me and accusing me of treating her unfairly when I know that she never would raise her voice or make such accusations in the first place with someone older than me. So, naturally, it's been hard to go back to normal ever since then. I can't not take it personally. So maybe I am under-qualified.

Um, in other news, I saw 'The Dark Knight' last night. As expected, it was phenomenal. Batman movies make me feel like a super losery 12 year old boy, but I'm totally fine with that. The first time that badass bat cycle flew out of the front of the bat mobile after it was all wrecked, I almost peed a little and I'm pretty sure I squealed out loud.

I really think they need to bring a female villain in the to mix for the next installment. I'm talking a seriously psychotic, creepy female villain. Catwoman was obviously awesome, but she was more the sexy villain, what with her full body bondage suit, whip, and Michelle Pfeiffer-ness. The Batman movies of the '90s generally sucked - read: Poison Ivy. Who wants a villain whose main concern is environmental affairs? No. Not cool. I don't know much about the comics, but there has GOT to be a badass lady villain in there somewhere. But probably not - I can't imagine there has ever been much room for powerful lady villains (who DON'T end up falling in love with Batman) in the comics.

Sigh. I could do some serious damage as a crazy Batman villain. I'm just a couple of shitty days away from losing it anyway - might as well find a shtick and run with it.

"Are you sure you're moving to Portland?"

Asked the incredulous psychic I got a reading from on Friday evening.

"Uh, yeah, I bought my one way plane ticket..."

Yeah, it was really reassuring. She told me that Portland will be better than Ann Arbor for me, but that there is another city that I will move to not long after I move to Portland that will be a much better match - somewhere in Southern California. She also told me that I should go back to school to be a librarian. Which my current boss was very happy to hear.

I also am supposedly going to meet a broad-chested, lean, light-haired man with facial hair who will I will have a deep spiritual connection with. This is slated to happen in December. But this was difficult for her to see, because of the clog on one my love chakra. This purple-colored clog is apparently that of addiction. Coincidentally, this purple-colored clog also came for a spontaneous visit on Friday evening, which ended up lasting until Sunday morning. It left me feeling, well, clogged. Just when you think a door is closed, a gale-force wind blows in from the center of the state and leaves that door swinging on it's hinges. So I just have to keep my head on straight. Which is easier now than it ever has been - and that's a welcomed change. But certain words never lose their appeal, and it's hard to be unaffected.

But, no more on that! Because I'll write myself in to a tizzy and before we all know it a 17-year-old version of me will be gushing and bursting at the seams with pure sap.

The countdown begins. It's just about 4:30 now, meaning that I have 9 days of work left. Wow - single digits! Unreal.

'It is always late summer here.'

Something I will miss dearly about Ann Arbor is the lovely blend of coffee that you see to the left of this paragraph. This coffee has gotten me through many a morning, particularly this year. Aside from this particular coffee, Espresso Royale is the best coffee shop ever. They have $2 lattes on Wednesdays, and when they pair up with Ann Arbor's awesome local radio station for 'Martin Bandyke's Caffeinated Comfort Zone' and the cheesiest/most rad local DJ goes and sits at various Espresso Royale locations in town and broadcasts... well, it's fantastic.

Sadly, they didn't have my favorite coffee or my favorite little pre-wrapped vegan granola bar thingees today. So already my morning kind of sucks.

I can't wait to have a job where I am not in charge of anyone else. I tell you now, I am not cut out for supervision. This is something that I always suspected. I am far too independent (and youthfully selfish) to think of anyone else when making decisions or doing anything, really. So excuse me, lady that I supervise, if I decide that cutting two sizes of scrap paper is completely unnecessary and mind-numbingly inefficient and I therefore decide to cut only one size from now on. I didn't realize that this detail was such a crucial part of your life and that you would get personally offended by my decision. No, you're right, I really needed to run that by you beforehand. Are you kidding me?! Is it any wonder that I want to get out of here? I'm starting to feel that this extra week I decided to work strictly to make money just isn't going to be worth it when compared to the fragment of my soul that will die while I wait for August 8th to roll around. I guess it's not that bad. But that's probably only because the end is in sight and when there are people (one person in particular, actually) squawking at me, it's in one ear and swiftly out the other.

Because in the face of this summer and my near future, it's getting pretty impossible for me to get too upset about anything. To be sure, I have moments of serious doubt. I had one just this morning while I rode the staff elevator up to the third floor and wondered if maybe I should start thinking seriously about a serious full-time job in Portland so that I can possibly save enough money to travel come January. But what kind of job? What, sweet mother of pearl, are my transferable skills, and how will I find a job that won't make me feel like I'm ruining the planet or scamming the general public?

I need to cast off my guilt complex for the next two weeks and start to feel ok about leaving the staff here to figure out what to do when I leave. Of course they will get by - it's a library and it's a library that is about to shut down, at that. They'll figure out how to function without me. I will, of course, take steps to make the transition easy, but I am by no means going to spend too much time worrying about it.

Yesterday, after getting reamed out and accused of being a racist by my cantankerous supervisee, I headed home and got in to my bed (my ultimate defense mechanism and retreat). I scrolled through my phone to find someone, anyone!, to call and coax cheer from. I called a friend in Portland, because I figured there was no time like the present to expose my emotional messiness. We chatted. It helped - a lot, actually. And he read me this poem, which is even more beautiful now that I read it again:

Moment Vanishing

by Elizabeth Spires

Now, in the quietude of evening, the dove comes.
It does not flash its feathers, does not
make a sound, but feeds on what the finches
leave behind. How little it needs.
A few hard seeds. A drop of water.

It is late summer. It is always
late summer here. The air is hot and dry.
Brown leaves lie like hands in the yard.
There is no place to turn. No place to stop.
We are hurried along, pushed farther into our lives.

Moments are vanishing all over the earth
as bombs explode, the victim is hooded,
great populations scatter on endless dust roads.
It is too much. We avert our eyes.
We wait like children for the coming of the dove.

And if I were allowed a question,
one question, of the evening dove
who asks for nothing, whose pleasure
is a few small seeds, whose heart I covet,
I would ask, O what will I become?

Lovely, right? I think I will be in good hands out there. Anyone who has the good sense to read me a poem when I'm sad is someone I can get behind. Brown leaves lie like hands in the yard. Come on! That's beautiful.

On the phone he told me to try not to expect too much from my move. To just come out here, relax, and maybe figure some stuff out about myself. It's hard not to expect that this move will be the decision of my life - and that suddenly everything will make sense once I step off the plane and touch Oregonian soil. But. I suppose that nothing is ever that simple, is it?

I will try to keep my head up today. And if it falls, I will think to the 8th, and then to the 30th, and then I will read that poem again.

From a New York Times article:

In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

Ha! That is fantastic. We all think that we are better looking than we actually are! Not only do we delude ourselves in to thinking we ourselves are hot, we refuse to do the same for others.

So basically, I'm prettier than you.

I left my dignity at a hotel in Cuyahoga Falls and all I got was a lousy hangover

Many sleepless nights lately. If not actually sleepless, then very sleep sparse. Or something. My brain must know the difference between when I'm supposed to be sleeping and when I'm not. And my brain must be somewhat of a night owl. Because I have no problem dozing off for a few minutes after work when I want to be awake watching Jeopardy... but when it comes to falling asleep at bedtime, I have a terribly hard time.

This weekend was fantastic. I went to that wedding in Ohio, and it ended up being really fun. I knew it would be, because our respective dates are 2 ridiculous human beings and probably 2 of the funniest people I have ever met. Our table was right next to the bar, too. The reception was fun, but the after party was better... romping around a really nice hotel and making friends with the absolutely shit-canned bride and thoroughly enjoying the company of my date. He was a negative, hateful bastard - and I mean that in a good way.

We all spent Friday night at his house in Ohio, and it was one of the most incredible houses I have seen in real life. It was a ranch house, which I usually hate for some reason... but this one was all windy and wrapped around the property, and it had a huge deck in the back and this awesome furnished treehouse that they built for his dad because he's an insomniac and needed a place to hang out at night when he can't sleep. (I need one of those.) To get to the treehouse we had to cross over this little bridge that went over a stream and climb up a set of rock steps. It totally blew my mind! And there were trees behind the house and all of this space... it was really beautiful there. Akron, Ohio! Who knew?

The wedding on Saturday was nice. You could tell that the couple was really excited to be getting married, and it was really cute. Of course, I can't walk away from a wedding ceremony without a hearty case of the creeps, but I appreciated the sentiment. And I think it's impossible for a girl my age to go to a wedding without thinking of what her own wedding could possibly be like, and so that's a mindfreak in itself. I found myself thinking about speech acts during the ceremony. How saying the words "I do" really don't mean anything at all. They are just words that we have all collectively decided to give an enormous amount of significance to. When a couple stands before a church full of people they already have their marriage license. So, they are really just standing and getting stared at while they repeat some words that add up to a lot of promises that are most likely impossible to keep.

Instead of thinking nice things about what I was witnessing, I was thinking about linguistics and the improbability of their lives going as they planned in that moment. So, that's pretty telling.

All of that pessimism was out the window, though, when I was on the tail end of the reception after milking the open bar for all it was worth. I was clinging to my date as though I had known him for years (obnoxiously, I'm sure), I was hugging the bride... I was in the best mood. What's that Hemingway quote about a drunk man's words being a sober man's thoughts? I must be thinking sweetly affectionate and warm thoughts and then am only able to bring them out after numerous drinks. Sad, eh? But... what's a girl to do. So I'm a little hardened during the day. At least I'm still a sweet gal after dark.

Anyways. I need to get to work.

It's out in the open now - I've come out of the 'I'm quitting my job' closet. My boss announced it at a staff meeting today. I was expecting negativity from my coworkers about my decision. I was expecting them to scoff at my lack of plans. But they were all genuinely excited for me and very congratulatory. So that, in turn, revved up my own excitement... and I have not done much of anything today. It's just so hard to keep my feet on the ground and my head in the office right now.
In other news, I have the grossest spider bite on my leg. It is incredibly painful, and red, and swollen, and starting to resemble a freaky third nipple. I'm hoping that it's just a spider bite and not bite from some disgusting mutated creature that lives in the filthy pool I jumped in to when I was about 32 sheets to the wind on Saturday. The only reason I know that said pool is disgusting is because I went back the next morning to see if I had left my sweater poolside. The image of that murky water in the daylight has continued to give me the heebie-jeebies all week.

I started applying for jobs this week. I don't know if anything will come of it... but it feels good to at least have my stuff out there somewhere (even if it is just on the web).

The anxiety has kicked in, though. I can't sleep at night. All I can think about is all the things I have to wrap up here before I leave, all of the potential outcomes for my life in Portland, all of the minor details that I need to take care of. Why is it that the little things, like closing my bank account here or scheduling a dentist appointment, seem to stress me out the most?

This time last year I was interviewing for this job. And here I am, gettin' outta Dodge.

What if I made a terrible decision? I have slowly started telling people at work that I'm leaving soon. But there are some that I can't bring myself to tell. How do I explain that no, I don't have a plan or a job lined up, yeah, I'm just sort of going there? It sounds so silly. It sounds like impetuous youth. It sounds like I hopped on the emotions train (that one of my mom's original sayings) and I'm about to ride it all the way across the country.

But seriously. What if I'm steering myself in a direction that I really shouldn't be going? Ah, the unanswerable what-ifs. Always on my mind.

Emancipation Proclamation

I am moments away from putting in my notice. That phrase doesn't actually mean anything, does it? Well, tell that to the flock of butterflies in my stomach. It'll go a little something like this,

"I have made the decision to move. I want my last day to be August 8th. Until that day, you can expect my productivity to drop off sharply because I will merely be phoning it in."

I'll leave that last bit out, I suppose.

Here goes!

I bought my plane ticket to Portland a couple of hours ago. One way, please - seat by the window. It was quite a rush, a powerful exhale after so many months of breathing in and holding it, avoiding any decision.

August 30th. It's still a ways off, about a month and a half. But I have a feeling time will fly and I'll be winging my way to the Pacific Northwest sooner than I realize.

One foot out the door

I am enitrely preoccupied today. Each time I speak to my mom or my best friend out in Portland, the plans to move get more and more concrete and leave me unable to think about anything else. And not only am I thinking about the details of the actual move, I am thinking about huge abstract things like My Future. A few times a year I find myself researching graduate programs in writing and then I consequently find myself getting excited and picturing myself nestled away in a writing workshop under the tutelage of my mentor, Jeffrey Eugenides (at Princeton) or Amy Hempel (at Sarah Lawrence) or Michael Byers (sigh) (at University of Michigan). Naturally, all of my would-be mentors happen to teach at ridiculously fantastic schools. Schools that would require one to have gobs of talent/money/drive. Schools that require three letters of recommendation. See, there are shortcomings both big and small when it comes to the idea of applying to these places.

Not to mention that I haven't written anything (except for silly pages in my journal and silly entries here) in over a year. It's delusions of grandeur, I'm afraid, thinking that I could even contend with other applicants. But I don't know... I took a couple of writing courses in my undergraduate career, and plenty of people who took themselves very seriously as writers weren't nearly as good as they thought they were. What I wouldn't give for an ounce of their unfounded confidence to replace my self-doubt. Why can't I just be one of the blissfully unaware ignoramuses? Ignorami?

At least it gives me something to do at work while I piss away these last days. I counted earlier - 23 days left. That is hardly any at all. And while thinking of how much I will need to do once I announce that my last day will, in fact, be August 8th is slightly overwhelming... this moment of finally feeling excited about where I'm going is really nice. And maybe the move to Portland will be big enough to shake me out of my terror and really go for this completely unrealistic dream of getting an MFA in writing. Maybe.

Or maybe I should stop wasting time on these daydreams when I know that they will never happen and focus on finding a job in Portland so that I can survive. I have enough money saved up to last for a couple of months out there, but if that money runs out I will be back where I started. And that needs to not happen.

I'm reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris right now. It's about a workplace. In it, there is a brief mention of a character who would get to work early, photocopy every page of a novel, and then sit at his desk and read through 300 pages in a day of what looked like legitimate work documents. That is so brilliant! That would be a much more productive use of my time than what I'm doing today, that's for sure.

My Name is Richard Henry Lee, Virginia is My Home

It's a damn shame that I lost my necklace whose pendant depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There is only one time during the year that it is actually relevant. Every other day of the year it only serves to demonstrate how weird I am. I'm still reeling from the loss of that necklace.

You know what else is a damn shame? That "1776" will only be aired at 11:00 pm tomorrow. On TCM. It used to be played on basic cable, during the prime it's-too-hot-outside-and-the-fireworks-won't-start-for-a-few-hours-anyway movie watching hours of the afternoon. What a great idea for a musical! To depict the events of the days leading up to July 4th, 1776 - all through song and dance! Brilliant. But since I will be with a group of people I don't know this weekend, it would probably be wise to keep my love for this movie under wraps.

I sat down for an impromptu meeting with my new supervisor today. He seems like a good guy, like he knows how to manage people and how to get things done. I did tell him that I will probably be leaving mid-August. I like to temper my own declarations of independence to the higher-ups with a dash of uncertainty. I had been planning to wait a little longer to tell him - the only reason I told him today was because I was trying to avoid answering his "what do you want to do with your life" question. After mumbling "I don't know" quietly and awkwardly a couple of times, he asked me "well what do you know?" and the only thing I could think to say was that I was possibly thinking about maybe moving in August.

He then went on to offer free counseling. Which was odd, because I don't know this man and we have had maybe 4 conversations. He asked me what I would do if I won the lottery, a question that I dread - even more so when near-strangers ask it.

Because something feels wrong to me about naming my ideas about my own life. Nothing I say outloud could do justice to the convictions I hold in my mind and in my heart about the kind of person I want to be. And maybe that's just insecurity, not wanting to really speak up about who I am. I tried to tell him about going to Guatemala and how it made me realize that I want to do something good with my life, something that benefits other people. But of course, I said it in a way that made hardly any sense at all and just sounded dumb. I don't know how to find the words to express all that I feel.

I talked to my mom on the phone last night... and it's getting hard to keep my head up in the face of doubts that have been coming my way. And it's not just her (and she's my mom, of course she's worried for my well-being) but it's many others. Is it so wrong to want to do something different than what everyone else is doing? Do I really have to follow the same path as everyone else in order be considered successful and smart? I think that is really silly. I'm not worried. At all. The only thing that makes me worry is when other people get to thinking about my future and then tell me all about the misfortune they foresee. They plant their little, ugly seeds in my head and I feel that fear creep up on me.

I need to buy a plane ticket. But, I will save that for after the holiday weekend. I will be heading out of town this weekend, for road trip number 2 of 3. It will be a long drive tonight... about 6.5 hours. And I will be visiting the hometown of a friend, which will be great. And if I get to catch even a few minutes of "1776," well then we can call the trip a success.