sooooo Hot!

I want to update you on what's been going on, especially with the abrupt end to my last blog but it's 103 degrees and we have no A/C and I can't even think. I'm just going to lay on the floor and die. I will tell you that when I was updating last week I was suddenly over come and I decided to drop everything I was doing and drive down to medford that minute to spend the weekend with Brian.

Tears for Fears

I'm often torn on the issue if whether or not it's wise to share you're most intimate thoughts on a place so publicly accessible as the Internet. My mother has always warned me against airing my dirty laundry and she has been right on many occasions. I'm not so good at keeping secrets and I've told quite a few to the wrong people, only to have it come back to bite me on the ass. Regardless, there is still something liberating in putting it all out the for the world to see. It's out in the open, for better OR worse, so deal with it.

Last night my husband and I had a fight. As you know we're separated. Not in spirit, we're still married and we've still trying to stay that way but he's in Eagle Point (southern Oregon) and I'm in Portland, which if you don't know is about as far north as you can go in Oregon.

This fight of ours, I know I instigated it. I don't think I meant to consciously but subconsciously I must have known how he'd react. I was complaining again about how I wanted him to leave our apartment in Eagle Point and come here to Portland to be with me. The whole thing is really rather complicated and fuck....I gotta go

The 4th

I think I've started to compartmentalize my life. I'm not really sure if that's a good or bad thing. More on that later.

The 4th of July was a bit of a mess this year. Brian and I had planned to meet in Dallas, Or (just west of Salem). We have some friends that live there and we were all going to go camping in Astoria, OR for the weekend. Sadly, whoever's job it was to book us a campsite failed. Our friends were determined to camp wherever they could and ended up driving up to Washington. We decided we didn't want to drive 4 and a half hours to camp so we ended up staying in Dallas, essentially house sitting for our camping friends. It wasn't so bad really. Brian and I got some nice quite time together.

We decided to Drive up to Portland on Saturday for the fireworks. We parked the car at my sister place in Beaverton and took the Max downtown. It was quite the adventure. We don't often take mass transit. I'm certainly glad we did though as downtown was a nut house.

We found a nice patch of grass on the waterfront and ate subway while we waited for the fireworks. Good times were had by all. After the fireworks we headed back to the max. When we arrived back in Beaverton we realized we'd missed the last bus to my sisters. Lucky for us it was only about a mile and a half away so we could walk. All was going well until we hit a quarter mile stretch of pitch black road with nothing but woods on either side of us. It was a little spooky. And of course right in the middle of it some sort or rat or squirrel jumped out and nearly gave us a heart attack. Brian pulled out his pocket knife so fast I could hardly believe it.

As luck would have it, we made it back safe and sound to my sister. We hopped in the car and headed back to Dallas so we could sleep on a real bed and in the morning we got up and had a fantastic breakfast at a little place called Tatters. After that I left Brian to wait for our friends to return and I headed home to Portland.

Can I interest you in some office supplies?

So I’ve been in Portland for a few weeks now, looking for work. AS you know I’ve been staying with my sister and her boyfriend. They’ve been kind enough to offer up their spare bedroom to me. I’m pretty sure I owe them for life.

Brian and I are stuck in a lease in our apartment in eagle point. Brian has opted to stay there until he can find someone to take over our lease or until the lease is up in November. So once again we are separated.

I’ve been looking for work like a mad woman. I think I mentioned in my last post, I thought for sure this was going to be easy. I have tons of admissions experience and there are tons of schools here. I just knew the first interview I went on would be a done deal. Unfortunately this was not the case.

Last week, out of desperation, I interviewed at a places called Maxis. I had a bad feeling about the place from the get go and I wasn’t surprised to learn that the job was selling office supplies door to door. Like I said, I’m desperate, so I took the job. I had to dress business professional and walk around town from business to business for close to 10 hours a day for commission only. I don’t mind a little exercise but this was ridicules. I'd have bailed the first day but my Trainer was a really awesome guy and I had a lot of fun hanging out with him so I tried to make it work.

Yesterday they told me they wanted to send me to Utah for a week and I’d be leaving Sunday morning. Well, they didn’t really tell me directly, they just mentioned in our morning meeting that they were sending a team to Utah and they rattled off my name on the list of people that were going. At first I sort of thought I’d misunderstood but later that day I asked my trainer if I’m heard correctly and he said, “Yes, aren’t you excited?” Uh, no I’m not excited. I have plans for the weekend and I just started this job. I don’t really want to go to Utah (a place I don’t care much for to begin with) with a bunch of people I don’t know. Especially when so few details have been supplied to me, such as where I’ll be staying, who is paying for this, what I will be doing while I’m there, etc.

To top it all off, the whole place is just a little too cult like for my taste. Every morning we get to the office at 8am and have a little Powwow. We all stand in a circle and one of the team leaders suddenly starts talking and the whole team turns into a bunch of cheerleaders.

The boss says "are you ready for a morning meeting?"
and everyone responds (about 30 people) in unison - AHHH OHHHH!
and they keep going, making this sound, until he makes a motion with his hands to stop
Then he says, "today’s announcements” and they all say BUM BA DA BUM!

Then we break into groups and run drills, practicing our pitches. It’s great fun….not really. Then we hop in our cars and drive to our territories to pound the pavement until 5:30 where we then drive back to the office and have an end of the day Powwow. This consists of everyone getting back into a circle and whoever made their sales goal for the day, goes out to the middle of the circle and grabs a cow bell that they clank the fuck out of while everyone cheers and they run around the circle giving everyone high fives.

This was all just a little too much, even for me. After about 3 days I was over it. Last night after talking to my mom about my concerns, I did some research online about this company I was working for and others like it and I can’t say I was thrilled with anything anyone had to say about the place. I went to bed pretty sure I wouldn’t be returning.

The ups and downs of being

So I've officially relocated to Portland, Oregon. Well, I'm technically living in Beaverton, but same difference. Brian and I have been living in southern Oregon (Eagle Point to be exact) and I've been driving up to Portland, every other week for interviews. It just started to seem like a waste to drive all that way (It's about a 600 mile round trip)so this past Tuesday I packed up my car with most of my necessities and moved into my sister spare bedroom.

On the up side, I'm just thrilled to be spending time with my sister and her Bo and I love being in the city, seeing friends I haven't seen in ages. Unfortunately I still don't have a job and we're stuck in our lease in Eagle Point, so my husband has decided to stay in the valley to try and find someone to take over the lease on our apartment. Brian and I have done the apart thing before and I can't say I care for it. I miss him a lot already.

I had no idea finding an admissions job was going to be so difficult. I was just sure, with my experience, that the first place I interviewed with would hire me. I still haven't heard back from Healed College, so for all I know I'm still in the running with them. I got a job offer from this hole in the wall, nursing school that just opened but they only wanted to pay me strait commission. I didn't even know that was legal in the world of admissions. In fact I've been told you can only do that if the school isn't accredited (which I'm pretty sure they said they were). I opted to turn that job down. I just didn't feel right about it and I had a bad feeling I was going to end up doing a whole lot of work and not get paid for it.

Last but not least I interviewed at The Western Culinary Institute on Tuesday. I am the most excited about this school thus far. I love cooking and it's so much more artistic than the other schools. It just feels like such a good fit for me. They we're supposed to have called me yesterday and when I didn't hear anything today I called them and left a voice mail. I wish they'd at least let me know what my status was so I don't keeping sitting around, waiting for them to call.

So now I'm sitting in Portland, still trying to find a job and we're running out of money quick. Truth be told, I don't even know how we're going to pay rent next month. I've never been so broke. It's the worst feeling. Up till now I've really just been looking for Admissions work. I think starting Monday I'm just going to have to take whatever I can get.

Dreams are weird

Last night I had this dream that I went to visit Tia in this crazy hippie commune in the middle of the forest somewhere. We were having a great time hanging out but then she had to run some errands or something so she left me to wander the complex alone.

I ended up running into my X-boyfriend Aaron. For the record Aaron is psycho and, when we dated a good 10 years ago, he was a drunk that liked to slap me around to say the least. In the waking world, had I run into Aaron, I would have quickly turned and walked the other way, but you know how dreams are. We just started talking and laughing and I started thinking he's not such a bad guy. Hell, maybe I even missed him.

Time is also a very strange thing in the world of dreams. Over the course of my dream I spent several weeks at the hippie commune. Aaron ends up asking if we can try to work things out and probably because I was high in my dream I agreed to date him. Of course shortly after agreeing to this, I am reminded of why we broke up in the first place. Aside from him being nuts, Aaron is also incredibly jealous which doesn't work well for me as I am a big flirt.

In this dream I run into an old friend, Jason Cannon. Cannon and I have always flirted and nothing has ever really become of it. We've been talking for a while in my dream and he tells me he's tired and going to head back to his bunk and crash. I jokingly ask if he wouldn't rather come back to my place for a night cap and he says, "don't you have a boyfriend?" and I say, "oh well we're hardly committed." (wink, wink) Of coure no sooner have the words left my mouth than I turn around to see Aaron standing there, turning 6 shades of red. This is the moment where I remember how insanely jealous Aaron is and as luck would have it, is also the moment I remembered that I'm married.

So as Aaron starts to blow up at me about how could I do such a thing to him and whatever I raise a hand to quite him and then go off myself. Although things are fuzzy in my dream, I remember wondering why it was I wasn't with my husband. I told Aaron he was an asshole and I was a married woman anyway so I don't know what I was thinking talking to him in the first place and I stormed out.

When I got outside I started to try and find my way out of the hippie commune but just then an alarm went off. I wasn't sure what was going on at first until I realized there was a tornado coming. The commune was mostly made up of trailers and old railroad cars all welded together in a giant maze. None of this would hold up against a tornado so I starting looking desperately for any sort of real building (you know like with a foundation) that I could hide in.

I kept running into these elderly people who seemed lost and frightened. I started helping as many of them as I could until it was too late for me to find a hiding place of my own. I remember the tornado touched down and immediately people started getting sucked up into it. I layed down on the ground between two trailers and grabbed ahold of a water spout that was sticking out of the ground. The trailer next to me started to lift off the ground and so did I but a moment later it disbursed and we bother dropped to the ground.

I decided I needed to get out of there so I got up to try and find someone that could give me a ride back into town. I stumbled back into Jason Cannon who now had my friend Kate Lewis with him. They were sitting in the grass giggling. Jason informed they had found some E and we're now pleasantly loaded. They tried to get me to take some and join the party. While I was tempted, I was on a mission to get the heck out of there so I said my goodbyes and turned to leave. Just then, a Van full of super heroes showed up.

Ok they weren't really super heroes but the way they pulled up in their brightly painted van and all jumped out and struck a pose. You could see how one might think they were. Turns out, they were video game developers. The creators of well, I wanna say Ninja Gaiden or something like that but I can't remember. All I remember is them jumping out of the car, landing in ninja poses and everyone being very impressed. As everyone stood there in awe I tried to sneak out the back but one of them saw me and caught me by the arm. "Don't you want to try the demo?" He asked me. He looked a lot like Jacob from the twilight movies.

Before I could respond he was leading me away. Suddenly we were in this big room and there were all these multi colored, cirlces of light on the floor. It's hard to explain exactly what the game was. You know how dreams are. But music started playing and I had to jump from circle to circle as they lit up in front of me, in time with the music. It was a lot like DDR if DDR took up an entire gymnasium and you had to do crazy acrobatics to hit all the marks, which I suddenly found myself able to do. It was pretty awesome really.

It gets pretty fuzzy after that. I vaguely remember Tia showing back up with a Kitten and then I woke up...

Work Sucks

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I haven’t blogged in nearly a month. A lot has happened and I’ve sort of just let myself fall of the radar until I felt better prepared to discuss. The 15th of May was my very last day at that shitty ass Job I’ve been complaining about since the day I started there, back in December. They actually fired me on the morning of the 7th of May, allegedly for posting on Face Book from work. I would have understood it better if I was fucking about on social networking sites all day, everyday or even for an hour or so every day, but I only wandered over to such websites on rare occasions when it was particularly slow. Also, a majority of the staff in on facebook/myspace and I had seen them post a thing or two during work hours so I didn’t really think anything of it.
My captors, I mean employers, were particularly upset over a Status update that I had posted. It read something to the effect of, “7 more minutes and I get to go home.” Underneath, one of my coworkers had immediately replied to my post with, “Shouldn’t you be working instead of posting on Facebook?” My boss says to me, “aren’t you embarrassed to have a co-worker call you out on something like this?” and all I can think is, doesn’t he see the irony? My boss is angry with me for posting on facebook but not at my co-worker who, in order to reply to my comment, would also have to be (you guessed it) posting on facebook. Oh they were also very upset that I would say something about wanting to go home from work. They seemed to think that I should never want to go home, that I should always be excited to be there. I could almost see their point if I was a developer or part of the sales team but I answer the phones for fuck's sake. How fucking excited do you want me to be?
So anyway I go on to tell them that a majority of their staff does the same thing on the internet and they start giving me a bunch of excuses about how their other employees work late and come in on the weekends. Well, I’ve worked late before and I would come in on the weekends if anyone ever asked me but as I pretty much just answer the phone, run errands and do a bunch of bullshit busy work, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for me to be there after hours.
So then they tell me that they don’t want the rest of the staff to know I’m fired as my co-workers love me and they know they will all be very upset at my termination. (Aside from my bosses, Everyone I work with is awesome and I adore them) So they tell me I can stay on and keep working until they find my replacement so long as I promise not to tell anyone I’ve been Fired. They said they’d rather have it appear I’d just left on my own. I’m so appalled by this I can’t even begin to tell you but I needed the money so I agree to their terms.
Less than a week later, they changed their minds. They call me into their office and tell me I’ve been such a good girl this past week that they’d like to un-fire me. Again, I fucking hate this job but I need the money so I agree. 2 days later they change their minds again. This time they decide that I must be looking for work elsewhere because I left early on Thursday and they would be looking for work too if they were in my shoes. They then tell me that the reason they’d never “unfired” anyone before was because you just can’t go back once the trust is broken so they felt it was best if we parted ways.