Weird dream number #9,867

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s experienced this, but I have random dreams involving celebrities. Being a hetero female, it’s probably also not surprising that the majority of the celebrities that appear in my dreams are male. From dreaming I’m going to Niagara Falls with Harrison Ford to thinking I’m somehow in Jurassic Park with Sam Neill, I have no idea what triggers it all. So last night I had another celebrity dream, hooray!

This time it was Hugh Jackman. Don’t ask me why.

It was dark out but there was artificial lighting around, like downtown at night. I was in an above-ground plaza with lots of other women who were all waiting. Thinking about it more, I’m not sure if we were all standing or sitting in deck chairs. But there was a stairway in front of us with a metal railing, somewhere in the distance. Suddenly, I think there was a spotlight, and then that’s when Hugh Jackman appeared. He was standing on top of the railing. He then did a Wolverine-like move and then slid (or jumped) down to the bottom of the railing on his feet.

All these women (including me, I suppose) then perked up and waited for him – to choose one of them, obviously in some sort of romantic sense. Somewhat like a sultan in a harem. And of course, considering it’s my dream, he ended up choosing me. There was no sex involved, but he knelt down in front of me and told me how beautiful I was, even though I didn’t believe him. He kept on smiling and stroking my face and my hair, telling me how he couldn’t believe how beautiful – how perfect – I was, and kept on kneeling (supplicating?) in front of me.

I was distinctly aware of how much makeup I was wearing, and how fake it felt – the eyeliner smudging, the foundation blotting, makeup getting all over fingers. And yet he still insisted on how beautiful I was, and I just focused on his smile, and his eyes, and his hairline.

What’s really sad is that my stomach still melts when I think of this image; the kneeling, the smile, the self-doubt, the sense of unconditional and absolute devotion. My stomach melts into love, that is the only way to describe it. The even sadder thing is that this feeling of fake love has been conjured entirely by the nocturnal sonatas of my own brain. Why is it that the melting feeling is so much harder to conjure when Rob is around, when he’s in-reach and when I’m intellectually aware that he cares in a way deeper than almost anyone else?

I can’t sleep, so I might as well bitch about stuff.

Ok, so it’s a quarter past 5 in the morning, I think I’m coming down with a cold, and  tossing and turning in bed did nothing to help the anxiety I always get at this time in the morning. My feet always itch even though there’s no rash, horking things up to clear out my throat produced bloody phlegm that I had to spit out in the bathroom sink, and upon getting up and sitting down to start this entry, I started to hear my mother wailing in her sleep and had to wake her up from a bad dream.

Oh, and let’s not forget that yesterday we learned that at least 1/2 a dozen people from the head office of the company I work for have been let go and we’re getting more duties assigned to us. As if handling new contracts, bringing new clients in and doing compliance work weren’t enough. God!

Upcoming reading

I don’t want to make any bad predictions here, but I anticipate that for the next month, at least, I’ll have no lack of reading material. The question is, can I keep up the pace, or will the following list of books keep me alive? I’m currently about 10% of the way through Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein by Brenda Wineapple. Next up are the following:

• The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It, by Robert J. Shiller – it’ll be interesting to see how accurate this book is, considering it was written before all the bank bailouts and lack of credit financing became serious
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski – heard it’s creepy and a total mindfuck. Highly recommended by others.
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, and translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky – I bet it’ll take me about a month to get through this fucker. When I’m reading this, I’m just planning on giving periodic updates on progress. Trying to review the whole thing at once would be insanity!

January 2009 Book Review Extravaganza

My hopes to write ahead and have several reviews to publish over a period of time weren’t so practical. However, I really would like to comment on the books I read, so today I’m doing mini-reviews of all the books I read during January. Hopefully in the future I can keep to a pace of one book review every 1 – 1 1/2 weeks.

Look Me In The Eye: My Life with Asperger’s – John Elder Robison

This was the first book I finished this year, and I have to admit that while the read is extremely enjoyable, I don’t get enough of a sense from the author of how difficult it is to live with Asperger’s or any of the other conditions that fall under the autism spectrum. While John Robison mentions his difficulty socializing with others as a child, his descriptions of his career – his work with KISS, his skill with computers, his auto repair business, etc – belie the struggle he says he consistently undergoes. He takes constant pains in the book to show his mental disconnect from neurotypical people and his slow efforts to understand the flow of “normal” conversation, but knowing that he’s toured with rock stars, travelled around the world, and even ended up in jail in Martinique makes me wonder whether he’s falsely setting himself up as more of a loner than he is. Also, knowing that his brother got famous for his own memoir about dysfunctional childhood, I find it really unusual that Robison glosses over the conflicts  between his parents so much. Maybe I’m the only one noticing these tensions. Overall, while the book is enjoyable (especially the chapters explaining social interaction as an Aspergian) it feels inconsistent.

Success!!

Believe it or not, but this afternoon was mostly spent deciphering the byzantine process of transferring mp3 ring tones to my cell phone. As it turns out, you can’t just text an mp3 to yourself and save the file inside the text message as a ringtone – because that would be too simple, wouldn’t it? So I had to download the right drivers for my phone (Motorola W385), and then download a sketchy program called P2K Commander, and then futz around and wonder why it wasn’t syncing up. Then I had to restart it. Then I had to drag and drop all the files I wanted into the right directory for the phone, then delete OTHER files…oh, and let’s not forget that to even make the songs the right size, I had to trim them using Audacity. So overall, it all took about 3-4 hours to figure this shit out. Jesus! Ringtones are expensive; I was just trying to save a few bucks and use a piece of music that most likely wouldn’t be on sale on a ringtone site. By the time I was done, I felt like that monkey using a bone to crush other bones in 2001 – things so simple and common shouldn’t require such brute force.

Other than that, work still goes on, I did some cooking today, and Rob’s currently out of the house visiting a friend. When he returns I shall blast the ringtones in his ear and display that I am the one in the relationship who has mastered ringtone-fu.

The Honeymoon is Over

News coverage of Obama’s inauguration has been inescapable for over a week. As a Canadian who likes to consider herself somewhat progressive, my hope that he’ll be truly as transformative as he positions himself to be is tempered by my jealousy that:

• Canadian politics is never this riveting – and even when it is, nobody outside of Canada seems to care (see: the nascent coalition and prorogation of Parliament)
• Canadian politicians are still mainly Old White Guys even when new faces are desperately needed to shake things up (see: Ignatieff, Harper, etc)

Anyways, he’s got a heckuva job ahead of him, and people are expecting him to work miracles. It’s a tough gig, and I wouldn’t ever want to be in his place, with the hopes of the world resting on my shoulders like that. Much luck to him, and may everyone else have patience.

Anyways, work progresses, I’ve got publishing tomorrow, and I’m continuing my writing for Green Soultions for Jerez. In the meantime, I’m working my way through Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and mentally preparing my store of book reviews to dole out over the next few weeks, including:

• Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison
• Something from the Oven by Laura Shapiro
• The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts
• The Man Who Forgot How to Read by Howard Engel

More updates soon – I’ve got a lot of questions to ask my prof about the publishing industry, and I hope tomorrow evening goes well.

Intro to 2009

2008 had a grand total of less than a dozen posts, all within January. I fully intend for this year to be better and more consistent; I know that people always promise to get their shit together in January, only to have the promises fade three weeks in, but I feel that I’ve already made some significant headway towards fulfilling the resolutions I set for myself, as outlined in the updated about me page. So let’s talk about them!

The most important day for that recently was Wednesday. One of my new year’s resolutions was to do more writing (thus getting this page off the ground again) and to do more volunteer work. On January 5th, I decided I should go and combine the two and look for a way to do volunteer work and writing work at the same time. I trundled off to a volunteer site online, looked at the postings they had for “communications” opportunities and found a likely-looking candidate called Green Solutions North America asking for an article writer. The bio on the post said that the agency was an “environmental corporate social responsibility organization working with corporations to repurpose and redirect their redundant physical assets away from landfill and into charities locally nationally and abroad.” It sounded promising, so I left work for a few minutes, walked down the hall and called the contact listed on the post to learn more info.

Information Overload

Well, yesterday was my first day at the new job. At this point I’m cautiously optimistic that it will work out, though I have yet to really get a handle on my coworkers or responsibilities.

In particular, I spent some time after work writing down my first impressions of my coworkers, and I was somewhat surprised by my analysis; one or two of them remain ciphers to me, but one coworker in particular (the one who first interviewed me for this gig) is somewhat intimidating: she’s not mean to me per se, but I find the difference between us in terms of socio-economic trappings/appearance to be unnerving. This person lives in an arguably rich part of the GTA, drives very fast in a  BMW (which had a spotless interior, by the way), and has had multiple cosmetic surgeries – and she’s still under 30. I don’t want to give the impression that she’s intolerably high maintenance – but in general, being near people with such a lifestyle makes me feel shabby and mundanely suburban.

I was really tired when I came home last night – I had probably the soundest, least interrupted sleep last night that I’ve experienced in a few months. There’s more to tell later, but I have to get going soon to catch the commuter train.

Huzzah!!!

Well, after a two-week period that was unexpectedly full of interviews, I can now claim success! I have found a new job!

I got the job offer last night – I only saw the job -offer email about an hour after they sent it – and accepted right off the bat. As soon as I heard, I called Mom, Rob, Sister and all of the people I used as references…I had originally made an appointment for another job interview with a different company on Monday, and I had to call them back as well and cancel it.

Predictably, while Mom was happy with the news, she had to find something wrong: why did I cancel that Monday interview? I could have walked away with a better job! However, in the second interview I had with my new employer (before I got the job, of course), they asked if I would be willing to start on Monday. For all intents and purposes, I said yes, although I qualified my response by stating that before I started, I would have to make different arrangements with the Broadview Centre to continue my computer certification. Considering the job offer letter I recieved requested that I start work on Monday the 28th, I figured that it was best not to go back on my word and say something to the effect of “Oh hey, I’ve got another job interview coming up, can I go to that first before I commit to you?” I figured an approach like that would lead me straight back to No Job City.

Anyways, the job and employer itself: my employer will be an online marketing firm whose largest client (at this location at least) is an online transaction service similar to PayPal. I won’t be doing any tech support stuff – to be honest, I’m still not really sure how the business works and exactly what my employer does to ensure the PayPal-esque company’s smooth flow of operations – but I will be handling the front desk, taking and rerouting calls, talking to customers, and overseeing general office management. In some ways it’s grunt work (letters, ordering supplies, etc), but in some ways it’s grunt work that I have no experience with (eg: making travel arrangements) and need to learn.

The good news is that considering it’s entry level, they’re offering what I feel is a very nice package: competitive starting salary, and two weeks paid vacation. The first 3 months will be on a probationary period, after which I will be evaluated, and if considered successful, be made a permanent employee. Of course, there’s all the rigarmarole to sort out once I start – forms to sign, background checks to undergo, etc. They’ll be checking my references (which is why I called all of them as soon as I heard), my credit history, and my criminal record (which I don’t have – I expect that the police records will come out clean as a whistle).

What’s also really nice is that the commute will be quite reasonable. I live very close to a train station (about 5 minutes away) and thus taking the regional commuter train will be very easy, as the employer itself is located only about 10 minutes away from the station that serves as the hub of the commuter system. The only drawback (and it’s somewhat major) are the working hours: because the company’s head office is in LA, the working hours for the Toronto office have been shifted accordingly, so that instead of it being 9-5, it’s 10-7 (with a 1-hour break for lunch). I suspect that there won’t be much for me to do when I come home in the evenings.

Anyways. It’s a job! I’ve got student loans to pay off and stuff I need money to buy! The fact that I’ve “made it” (sort of) with a job that’s got a nice salary, excellent downtown location and such is a cause for cheer. The weekend shall be devoted to de-scruffifying myself, cleaning my room, and getting myself more polished for Monday. Wish me luck!

Well, THAT was unexpected…

At the beginning of the week, I had envisioned Friday as a nice, stable day (fitness assessment + weekend = woot!). Here’s what actually happened:

1. Thursday night: Our guild tries raiding Magtheridon for the first time (and I was also promoted to the rank just below Officer! Now I can use guild money to fund my equipment repairs! Woot!). It becomes a total wipefest. Midway during the raid, I notice that my nose is getting plugged up and my throat is becoming a tad bit touchy where my hard and soft palates meet. From experience, I know this means that a cold is imminent.
2. Monday morning, part 1: I wake up with my cold, and feel sluggish. I resolve not to go to the BC today, and tell mom this. She’s okay with it. I go back to bed for a bit.
3. Monday morning, part 2: I get up again, go downstairs, and figure that now I’m home, I have plenty of time to farm in WoW, and just relax. I had a nice long morning of mote extracting, mineral node farming, and levelling up fishing planned. Maybe a heroic or two in the evening. I go into the kitchen, and boil myself a concoction of lemon, ginger and honey for my throat. I take my concoction downstairs.
4. Monday morning, part 3: I accidentally spill my concoction on the keyboard of my laptop, conveniently on the top right-hand corner where the keys sit directly above some important computer chips. My laptop goes haywire, won’t turn on properly, and is essentially buggered. After trying to remove the keyboard and sopping up the spilt tea, I concede defeat, call Dell and get a tech support agent who wants me to do what I just did (remove the keyboard, in the process dislodging two keys – and those keys are a bitch to reinsert). I cuss the Dell representative out, and agree to send it back to the manufacturer to get it fixed there. Note: I have not made any backups of my important files.
5. Monday morning, part 4: Maybe an hour after that, I get an unexpected call from a nonprofit agency involved in the media. Would I like to come in for an interview for an administrative assistant position? Considering that this call is completely unexpected (I didn’t apply for it; I figured someone at YouthBoost must have done so on my behalf), I try to bluff my way through sounding like I know what I’m talking about. I have an interview arranged for one day a week later, then frantically call the people at Youth Boost for more information.
6. Monday afternoon, part 1: Maybe an hour or two after that, I get another call from a different company. Again, would I like to come in for an interview? For a position that involves being the personal assistant of the CEO of a media company situated in the financial district? Um, sure, okay. Again, I call YouthBoost for more context. At this point, mama has come home and it is time for me to head off to my fitness assessment, to which she drives me.
7. Monday afternoon, part 2: I have the assessment. Considering my sickness today, all that happened today was a discussion of my fitness goals (increase stamina, reduce fatigue, lose weight), how to improve my eating habits, and measuring through calipers what my fat levels were like. No exercise or cardio work took place because this would make me even more fatigued, and because having a cold already elevates your heart rate. After the assessment and booking of another appointment for the exercising tests, I sit in the sauna, leave the centre and rent some movies.
8. Monday afternoon, part 3: I come home to an unexpected, but somehow unsurprising piece of news from mom: a THIRD company called for me while I was out and asked for me to contact them regarding an interview for another administrative position. After calling YouthBoost again, I find out that this time, it’s a real estate agency. Calling the agency, I find out that the position is to replace someone on maternity leave and to work with other assistants in handling a 25-line phone system and doing customer service work. More bluffing, more sounding like I know what I’m talking about, and I land a third interview, this time on the upcoming Tuesday.

After this, the cold kind of took over, and I just napped, hung around, and watched movies. 3:10 to Yuma was much more violent than I remembered, and it took me a while to get to the part of the movie that I liked most – the part in Contention from the hotel-room onwards – but I think in the end it was worth it. In the end, despite the unexpectedness and frustration of all of Friday, I think staying home was worth it.