employed

i have a job!! teaching 10th grade government and 11th grade us history. i'm not going to be living in a box on the street corner.

the world is a much happier place now.

my friends are too smart

after reading the recent feminism debate on neil's blog, i have decided:

we were all at gcc for too long.

new revelations

jess informed me, in reference to the previous post, that i am a nerd. i would like to point out that this is the same person who gets really excited about clarinet sheet music. and not only participated in marching band for eight years, but was the announcer for a marching band. enough said.

unfortunately, though, she is right. my television choices have since progressed to marathons of miami ink (so in love with that hot tattoo artist), mid-90s law and order reruns, and bad movies on the hallmark channel. i even sat through the afi lifetime achievement award ceremony for sean connery and vh1's top 40 worst dirty songs ever. i. need. to. find. a. job. and stay away from late night television. but! to my credit, i have not yet ventured into the wild world of the lifetime movie network. (is it a rule that every movie shown on that channel has to involve domestic abuse and/or a wife murdering her husband?)

speaking of the job thing, i may have one! i'm pretty sure i'm going to get offered a job at the high school, probably teaching 11th grade US history. i find out for sure next thursday.

on wednesday i went to asheville with my aunt and cousin. my cousin, isaac, is three and the most adorable little kid alive. (sorry, kristin :P) i went shopping and bought clothes i didn't need, including a t-shirt of my most favorite rock band of all time - the electric mayhem. (if any of you don't know who that is, look it up right now, or i may have to disown you as friends. i may do it anyway for not knowing in the first place.) this shopping trip brought me to several revelations:

* i have come to the point in my life where i must abandon the junior's section in favor of adult clothes. sigh. i couldn't find a single thing that wasn't too tight, too short, or just plain too ugly. along with this abandonment of the juniors sections goes abandonment of all teenage themed stores. i will miss the $5 shirt racks.
* once you start buying expensive dress clothes, you can never go back. actual comment i made in the dressing room: "how the hell does someone fit their ass in this?" i think it's a combination of the cheap, thin material and bad designs. who in their right mind makes dress pants out of stretch fabric?
* the statement "endless opportunities for career advancement" on the help wanted sign at claire's seems a little misleading. and amusing. where are you going to go?
* abercrombie is a scary place. there are basically no lights on inside, there's weird music, you have to go through this strange tunnel of signs and walls to get in, and you can't actually see inside the store because all the windows are covered with gigantic posters of naked people. maybe it's to keep you so intimidated/distracted that you won't look at the price tags before you purchase anything, and you're so blinded by light when you exit that you can't check your receipt.

anyway, it was a productive trip. yesterday was my interview. it went very well, and i did a fine job of embellishing and making myself sound way more amazing than i actually am. today i went to the pool for the first time in two years. i was there with my aunt, therefore by default i was with mothers of preschool and elementary school age children. i didn't realize anybody talked about childbirth quite that much. there was a lot of, "i didn't need to know that" going through my mind. i had a good time though.

i'm just adopting all my children from orphanages in russia.


and keeping with my ending from my last post, here is another of life's great questions:

80's basketball shorts. what were they thinking?

i've reached a new low

i have reached a new low in my long history of wasting time and utter boredom:

i spent all day yesterday watching a battlestar gallactica marathon on the sci-fi channel.


yes, that immortal late-70s show which featured ben cartwright leading a rag-tag group of humans sporting farah fawcett hair and king tut flight helmets through the outer reaches of the galaxy. shag haircuts on the space warriors. bell-bottom space suits. the whole thing screams of the disco age. it's amazing and i love it.

it also brought forth one of life's great questions:

who would you rather date, apollo or starbuck?

real life is annoying

so as it turns out, they didn't work things out with my job (no room in the fellowship program - silly, because there is no one in the fellowship program). it's annoying. i'm still going to go in for a few days to finish scanning the scrapbooks, for the sole reason that i want copies of it. i wish i could still work, but i'm actually ok with it, because it allows me to be in north carolina right now doing more job interview stuff, i can go to the beach in a week, and i can move down here earlier than i thought. plus, i really, really hate commuting.

anyway, thursday is my biggest interview so far. it's for a spot at the high school, which i really want. if i don't get it, i think i'll be teaching 7th grade, which i'll be ok with too.

i just wish i could get all of this mess over with and know what's going on next year.

this will have to be brief, because i am at work and i am slightly paranoid that the woman whose desk is directly behind me is looking over my shoulder.

work is going fine. it looks like i'm getting moved into the fellowship program instead of the internship program, because i won't be a full-time student next year. i really don't care. i'll be doing the same things regardless. the whole thing has been quite the fiasco, which combined with the doctor last week telling me there is nothing they can do to solve the sinus hell i've been living in and the whole job-hunting/paying bills/growing up thing, have served to make me a little stressed. several shouting fights with my mother have occured.

i've spent most of my time this week scanning these wicked awesome WWII scrapbooks. 12 big books filled with newspaper articles about Marines, everything from battle reports to little human interest stuff. i'm in heaven. it is a complete history of Marine Corps involvement in WWII. the goal is to get it digitized then sorted and turned into a database by the end of the summer. the sad thing is that i love this stuff, while normal people would find it extremely boring.

i spent yesterday scanning articles at the national library of medicine. $30 worth of printed pages/photocopies is a lot of articles. just for the record. then i had dinner with rachel, the hansasaur, and neil at rachel's new apartment. i had a great time. it really made us all feel grown up and everything. it's nice that there are people i'm good friends with within an hour of me. (i've been in the d.c. metro area too long. an hour to hang out is reasonable.) her apartment would have been a 5 minute trip from NLM had my father not told me to go the wrong direction on rockville pike. during rush hour. one hour, 15 minutes, much honking, and copious amounts of random circling, wandering, and turning around in parking lots later, i found rachel's place. i have this to say: maryland drivers are jackasses.

but...being lost did take me by...drumroll...georgetown preparatory school.

churro, i thought of you.

i don't like being an adult.

specifically, i don't like the money it takes to be an adult. gas to go to job interviews, insurance payments, doctor's bills. i don't like this very much at all. growl. i think the problem at this point is that i have the expenses of an adult, but the paycheck of a college student. at least one of my graduation presents was a bag which screams of adulthood. no sequins, puff-paint, patches, random pins, etc. plain black with silver buckles. i love it, but it makes me visualize all the textbooks and history tests i'm going to be hauling back and forth in it. real life...whimper...AHHHHHH

speaking of which, i spent the last week in north carolina doing job interview junk. i have a few strong leads, but unfortunately i have to haul my butt back down there in a few weeks to do "official" interviews. it looks like the middle school is going to have a 7th grade opening, and the high school should have two openings, one 10th and one 11th. i want the 11th grade spot, because it's american history. also, if i go to the high school, it looks like i'd get AP us government and/or AP comparative governments, too. don't care to much about teaching us gov't, but the comparative class would be fun. i could be like dr. k and just spend the whole time talking about how much communism sucks.

i had a really good trip, though. spent a lot of time with my grandparents. granddaddy is thrilled that i'm coming to live with him, and grammer has informed me that my fall project is going to be helping her put all her pictures in albums. i'm so excited about moving there. it's weird to hear them talk about things that will be going on in the fall and to realize that for once i'll be there for them.

now it's time for the rest of the summer. i'm back with the marines until the middle of august, should be an adventure. i start that tomorrow. i'm also going to do some research for my dad at the national library of medicine at NIH. other than that, i have a large list of assorted projects and assignments that must be completed before i move: finish my quilt, transcribe my grandpa's wwii letters, find a doctor, sort through 22 years of assorted junk to figure out what gets moved and what gets tossed, etc. carol and i might go to the beach with grammer & etc, but we're not sure. i hope we can. i love sunset beach.

anyway, i'm off to run more errands. like jess and anne, i pretty much only have computer access at the library, but due to the lack of friends in the fredericksburg area, i'm here a lot.