It's either feast or famine.

I don't know why it always seems that there's either nothing happening or too much happening at once, but as far back as I can remember things have been that way. Of course, it's great when the times of too many choices roll around, but it sucks ass when there's nothing. Lol, that's pretty obvious, and I'm being vague. The point is that in the space of two days I got two really good job offers after months and months of a mostly fruitless search that landed me in what is, in my opinion, the worst of all means of employment: fast food.

Now, there's nothing wrong with food service, especially when one is 24 years old with no degree as yet. (I swear, I have the credits FOR said degree, just no money to pay off the schools to prove it in order to ascertain a transcript). However, I do have good computer, typing, communication and grammar skills, as well as years of experience in both customer service and data entry. I'm one of those geeks who wants an office job if I can't be writing, some mindless mundane paperwork and typing job. For years I've thought that being a legal secretary would be awesome. I could work all day at a job I enjoy and am good at, then come home and write all night. Seems good enough for me, until I can get paid to write or get my PhD and become a professor at Notre Dame. Either way, I'm good. So the whole food service thing isn't really my ideal gig.

Months ago (more accurately: November) I applied at a temp agency. They had a lot of positions available...but as luck would have it, they were either a shift I couldn't work or were too far for me to get to on the bus. So, I waited around, and finally came to the conclusion that I should give up on that place after a great opportunity got away because the damn bus doesn't go by my house 15 minutes earlier. So you can imagine how surprised I was to get a call Friday morning about an opening in an escalator company downtown. It's a mailroom position, which means I'll be on my feet all day. 8 bucks an hour to start, and it's temp to hire, so if I do well on this probationary period I can get on full time and start to move up in the company...which, by the time I graduate, could mean a sizable salary. Best of all, it's an 8-5 thing right on the river, easy to get to. I'm pumped, mostly because it sounds fairly easy and I'll basically be getting paid to exercise all day. Since I'm trying to lose weight anyway, score! I go in Monday for an "interview," which the temp-agency lady said is nothing big, so as long as I look nice and speak decently I'm in. About damn time, too. Making roast beef sandwiches and pumping cheese on them was getting incredibly tedious.

Then yesterday I happened to go across the street to the thrift shop, and lo and behold, they're looking for part-time help. Since the great majority of my wardrobe comes from that very store, I'm in there fairly often, and am known to all the cashiers. When I mentioned I wanted to fill out an application, the girl just smiled at me and told me to come in Monday at 10 to talk to her. So yay. I don't know how it'll work out with the mailroom job, but it's not gonna hurt me to go to the interview.

So yeah, I'm happy about that. The feast-or-famine thing seems to hold true in my writing too...in the past two hours I've typed five pages of an update to You, as well as three new poems. I haven't been writing too much poetry lately, and I really like the ones I wrote today, so I'm pretty excited. I do love my fanfic and I've really surprised myself by how well I'm doing with it, in terms of both motivation and story development, but poetry's my first literary love. A lot of the time, when I read back over poems I've written I have no idea where they came from. It's hard to explain, but I don't really sit down and think about them before I write, they're just sort of...there. I guess that means I'm a poet at heart, although the fiction isn't half as difficult for me to compose as I thought it was was going to be. Still, I really have to work for the story. I can't just sit there and have it come to me...the only piece of fiction I've ever been able to do that with has been Valediction. I went back and read that one, and I'm honestly floored by it because I don't remember thinking it though. Like a lot of my poems, it was just kind of there, and I adore it. I'm not trying to sound self-gratifying here, but I truly see that story as being the most important piece of fiction writing I ever do. I don't think I could ever get that close to raw emotion and description if I tried, and it still surprises me how good it actually is. Before you accuse me of being egotistical, I didn't write it. Anything beautiful I happen to type out isn't mine, it doesn't come from me. I don't know if anyone who hasn't been there can understand that, but it's true. And I think I should end this before I confuse people more than I already have, lol.