rejections, job hunting, swabbing and screening
2002-06-19 - 5:05 p.m.
In part because I got a worried msg from Tracy, and in part because I just needed to, I shall now update.
First, and because it's the freshest thing on my mind, I would like to say that I hate MSWord's html conversion. I decided that I was going to put my resume up on the web, just in case I could e-mail the resume to potential employers, but they didn't want to open Word attachments. So I converted the resume and looked at it in the browser, and it was tres crappy. After wrangling with it for a few hours, I finally got it to a passable imitation of the way it looks on paper. And now I know how to program tables in html, so I guess it wasn't a total loss. And I have my web page up and running in a very skeletal sort of way (just the resume, really), but I'm not going to link to it from here.
Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is on the radio. I love that song. Have I ever mentioned what an amazing thing radio is? I mean, there's this constant stream of music just flooding though the air for anyone with the right piece of equipment to capture. When I think about radio in contrast with the internet, somehow the information superhighway seems unspeakably vulgar.
Classes are over and grades have been in for a week. I'm sitting at home scanning classifieds, for the most part. I need a job, and now that I've been rejected by most of the jobs in my field that I applied for, I find that I'm nearly ready to take a hiatus from the academy and theatre for an unknown length of time.
This is, perhaps, not entirely accurate.
What I mean to say is that I'm tired of the institutions surrounding theatre and education. I don't know why I keep having to learn this lesson over and over again. I keep learning all my big lessons over and over again. I just wish I could learn to stop slamming up against things that I've found immobile on all other occasions. I think that I do it because I think that that all of those big, immobile barriers need to be dissolved. Always before I thought that the best way to go about it would be from the inside, but now I'm not so sure. So, I think that what I need to be doing is working at something that really doesn't matter to me and then doing the art on the side--writing and making theatre.
I keep remembering a conversation that I had with a couple of folks from DAH Teatar in the fall of 2000. Maja asked me what I planned to do after I graduated, and I told her that I thought that I wanted to teach theatre at the college level or get a job in a theatre. She said, "But not in a regular theatre. This would not be right for you." DAH's aesthetic is hard to explain. It's collaborative and rigorously physical. You don't really understand physical rigor until you see someone roll down a staircase in slow motion. This doesn't seem like a big deal, because we're used to slo-mo from films. But think of it in real life.
Anyway, we got to talking about teaching, and Maja blew a burst of air from her lips, spread her hands and shrugged. "The university. Well, this is easy. It's safe," she said. Then she squinted at me and shook her head. "This. I don't think this is really what you want."
And she was right. But I feel constrained by debt to look for jobs that pay well in my field. Of course, the simple solution would be to find work that solves the debt issue and then keep the art dangerous, separated from the financial issues. And this is what I'm planning on doing.
I'd really like to find a job up in Omaha. I've got a few prospects, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for those.
Oh, I didn't tell you that I got two rejection letters on Sunday (I was in Omaha on Saturday), and one on Monday. It was great. Especially great was getting the rejection letter from my undergrad that wasn't even signed by the department chair. He used to be my advisor. The least he could do is sign the rejection letter himself, rather than having the secretary do it. I mean, I like Rhonda and all, but she isn't Bruce, and it was his signature block on the bottom of the page. So, I felt insulted. But whatever.
I got to spend some time with my mom on Friday. She was in Lincoln on a shopping expedition. We had a good time, and her timing was great, too. I baked some whole wheat bread that morning to send back with my mom as a Father's Day gift for my dad. But here's the fun part:
We were out at the mall, and we passed by the plagiarist's mother. She had dyed her hair in a rather unflattering way, and had, thankfully, foregone the frighteningly severe lipstick. When I saw her last, it was as if the bitterness in the set of her mouth was the only thing keeping the pigment from running riot across her face. Talk about visual tension.
I didn't recognize the woman at first, what with the bad dye job. I just kept looking at this woman who was approaching and thinking to myself, "What's with her? Why is she having such a bad day?" See, even though the lipstick was absent, she still had the tension in her lips. Poor woman. Finally I recognized her as she passed by. I smacked my mom in the shoulder and whispered, "That was the plagiarist's mother!"
"What? The one who looked so nasty?" my mother said. I love my mom.
"Yes!" I hissed.
"I should go tell her that I don't appreciate the way that she treated my son. That he doesn't need that kind of stress in his life." I would have loved to see the look on the woman's face when she heard her words parrotted back at her like that.
In other news--Mike time:
The weekend before this last one, we were here. Made a trip to the bookstore, but other than that, we stayed at home for the most part. I got a book about the Oberammergau Passion Play, mainly because it had some neat paraphernalia stuck in the pages. It was stuff associated with a trip to Germany in 1970. Also got a book on the Open Theatre entitled, of all things, A Book on the Open Theatre; a collection of Strindberg's Chamber Plays; and a collection of bad reviews compiled by Diana Rigg entitled No Turn Unstoned.
This weekend we were in Omaha, and went to the Renaissance Fair. Oh, the people wandering around in costume, trying to be "in charater," were awful. Just awful. It was pretty obvious why the king was the king. He was the only one who had a consistent and convincing persona and accent. But I did get a bodhran (that Mike helped subsidize...insisted on subsidizing it, in fact). So far I suck at it, but it's still fun.
And now we're really up to this week. On Monday, I got a call from Evilena. She had been fired that day, and wanted to know if I was interested in hanging out. I was, so we went to the used bookstore where I got a copy of Plutarch's Lives. Then we went back to her place and watched some tv until she had to go pick up Prufrock from work. She originally thought that we might be able to get some weed from a girl that works at the bookstore, but when she mentioned it, I told her that there was no way I was smoking it with her, considering how I needed to get a job. She concurred, so she didn't even try to get any.
Now, understand, Evilena's not a pot smoker. She's never even been high. But considering that she got fired from a place that deals with alcohol and drug abuse prevention, I think she thought it would be a good idea to thumb her nose at the whole establishment (she didn't really say that, though). And while I agree with her impulse, I have to say that it would have been bad timing with a job search pending.
So, on Tuesday, we both went down to the Nebraska Workforce Development place. I had to take a data entry test (I was fast enough for the job I was applying for and 100% accurate, thankyouverymuch), and she needed to file for unemployment. Then, because we were done so quickly (only took about 20 minutes all together), I dropped her at home and went to the county health clinic.
Yes, dear readers, I decided that it was time to get screened for STDs and HIV, just in case I picked anything up from my encounter with the dork back in November. I go in for the results on the 27th. And I would like to say that you don't know pain until you've had your urethra swabbed. I imagine that with childbirth the strain is distributed across the entire body, and the actual pain, while localized, is still distributed across a larger area. And, of course, children aren't made of metal. All right, all right. Burn debridement might be right up there. But having a metal swab (tipped with a *very* small amount of cotton) slid up your winky is nobody's idea of a good time.
The funny part about the whole swabbing thing was that the nurse informed me that they usually swab the urethra. Then she asked if there was any place else that they should take a culture. I knew the likely suspects, but I wasn't sure whether there were other places that I perhaps didn't know about. So I asked her where else she meant. She kind of got this deer-in-headlights look and repeated that the urethra was the place that they usually swabbed, and should they swab elsewhere. I just blinked at her and said, "Okay, that's a good question. Uh..." Finally she managed to give the other two options. I told her that they should probably go ahead with a throat culture, too.
And, with that...
fin.
