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Monday, 20 September 2010 (the last you'll know) 8:41am Great turnout at Bad Movie Night for Mega-Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. The crowd was enthusiastic, on our wavelength, and most of my jokes got laughs. It felt good. I needed that, to feel like I'm good at something. I'm not getting it from a lot of other directions lately. Though my supervisor okayed ten extra hours for me this week, I just wrote to say that I'm happy to drop back it back down to my usual twenty, and the budget's no doubt stretched thin what with the new kids starting to trickle in this week. Part of me just wants to leave now. But, no. I'll hold out for the next couple of weeks. 11:33am My supervisor had been in for a while, but hadn't responded to my email. He's busy, I'm not at the top of his priorities, I get that. But the email also included a proposed new schedule for this week which involved me leaving at eleven, and it was about a quarter 'til, so I started to get antsy. (Especially hearing him talking to my replacements on the phone, determining when they'll be coming in today.) I approached him gingerly and said: so, about my email from earlier... Him, through a somewhat forced smile: yeah, i'll get to that. Okay. I went back to my desk. He finally came over around a quarter past eleven and said that I was welcome to keep the extra hours if I wanted to, but it was up to me, and that I should just be sure to keep the office Google calendar updated. Fair enough. Since I'm already here anyway, I've changed my schedule to eight hours today, six hours tomorrow and six hours on Wednesday. Twenty hours this week, then I'm gone for four or five days, then another twenty hours next week, and I'm gone. Unless, of course, in the meantime I'm able to find that elusive new role for myself, and make a convincing argument that I'm worth the twenty hours a week. (It would only be for twenty hours a week, of course—the full-time thing is completely off the table.) On the plus side, since the whole office is in such disarray, at least that means there probably won't be the usual Monday check-in meeting where we break into groups and talk about our weekends. Though it's actually a pretty progressive and team-building concept, I confess to never having been comfortable at them, and they're one of the reasons I stopped working Mondays. 12:03pm Yeah, I was wrong about the meeting. And it was even held outside. At least I got to keep my sunglasses on. On our way outside, a couple of the women in the office (the operations manager and the actual head of my department) said I was looking really cute in my plaid skirt. Sweet of them. 2:07pm I just graciously introduced myself to the kid who's replacing me. Seems very nice. He's on his laptop right now, since there aren't any computers available. Meanwhile, for want of much else to do, I've been cleaning my work computer, taking off all the personal stuff (of which there was comparatively little) and getting it ready for whoever inherits it. I'm considerate like that. 6:04pm Though I went to Damiel's class and did my usual routine this morning, I won't be returning to the gym today. That's part of the problem with working until four in the afternoon—it's pushing five by the time I get to the gym, which is when everyone else starts getting there and my favorite machines are taken and it's just more stress than I care to deal with. Besides, I have stuff to do at home, like rewriting "The Last Snowstorm of the Year" so I can submit it to the "Modern Love" column in The New York Times. Because why not? I also think I'm going to request that Friday, October 1 be my last day. Tuesday, October 5 is the technical end of my thirty days, but I prefer the clean break of the actual end of a week. Coming back in for that one more day seems pointless. Except, you know, the money. Which I should be more concerned about, but I'm not. I've never stopped being on unemployment, I live pretty frugally (and happily so) to begin with, and I absolutely refuse to stress about it. That part will work itself out. | ||
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Sunday, 19 September 2010 (new toxic force) 11:35am Better turnout at the show last night than on Friday, though still not great. Box office poison, I'm tellin' ya. (Both my soon-to-be-former office's operations manager and Raphaela intimated they might be there, but weren't.) Friday night I wore my shiny pants, and last night I wore my plaid skirt. Progress! Went to the gym this morning, and afterward I visited the Stonestown Farmers Market. Probably spent a bit too much money, but it was on locally grown stuff, so that's okay. There were a few people there that I recognized from the gym, including one of my friends from Damiel's class. They were in their real-life clothes, but I was still wearing the same workout clothes they see me in all the time. They're probably wondering if I have an actual outside life at all. | ||
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Saturday, 18 September 2010 (terminal) 10:51am Roommates From Hell was fun last night, even if the turnout was disappointingly low. (I'm box-office poison.) All I wanted after leaving work was just to go home and not deal with the world, maybe remain hidden until having to leave again for Bad Movie Night on Sunday, but that was simply not an option. The show must go on, and all that. If nothing else, I knew that I could count on the adrenaline kicking in and carrying me through the evening, as it always does, especially when I'm hosting. And this is far from the first time that I've had to do a show when I've been in a yucky place emotionally. The audience doesn't know it, however. They're there to be entertained, and it's a job I take seriously. It did help that I had Marta there with me during the show, and beforehand, we had diner at Mission Chinese Food, across and down the street from The Dark Room in the old Lung Shan location. Actually, it's more like a Vectrex overlay to Lung Shan. But I've never cared for Lung Shan, and the food we ordered off the actual Mission Chinese Food menu was fantastic. Perhaps not coincidentally, it reminded me of Spices!, which is never a bad thing. After the show, we came to the Black Light District and crashed. I'm hosting Roommates From Hell again tonight, which is surely a good thing. Hiding would not be healthy for me. | ||
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Friday, 17 September 2010 (atonal) 9:17am Back to Damiel's class this morning. There's been some talk about an additional Bootcamp on Friday as well as Wednesday—I was even asked to sign a petition for it on Wednesday morning, because I guess that's how things are done at the Y—and if it happens, I'll be there, as much as I love working with Damiel. I'll still go to his class on Monday mornings, of course, but damnit, I need this extra boost. 10:14am The site's been fixed. I still don't fully understand what went wrong, except that the whole system's backend (which was setup before I got here by someone who's inaccessible to me) is so weird and convoluted that one wrong move can have a serious ripple effect. And the net result is that it makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. My new supervisor has some meetings this morning with the guy who did actually set it all up, as well as with my former supervisor. I have not been invited. 1:02pm It's Moving Day. The whole office is being rearranged, except for me, which is nice. But it's been very noisy. Someone decided that there needed to be "moving music," and as a result, ginormous speakers were set up about five feet away and pointing right towards me, the one person not involved in the moving process. The person who set them up turned them on very loud. The operations manager took mercy on me and turned them down, then other person turned them back up, and the manager turned them back down, and so forth. And now, I'm the only person who's even near the speakers, as everyone else has gathered for pizza, which I politely declined. (Not eating pizza these days. It doesn't even sound very good.) 1:43pm Yeah. My supervisor just informed me that although he's been happy with the work I've done these last couple weeks and that I've shown my dedication to learning new stuff and growing in my job, and in spite of being at the top of the list, they went ahead and hired someone new, a kid right out of high school. (Being replaced by a younger, sexier model. Ain't that always the way?) I still get these next two weeks to demonstrate what my "new role" would be though, by his own admission, he has no idea what that might be—except that the kid's title would be involve the word "Senior" and mine would be "Junior." So I'm pretty much boned. I tried, y'know? I tried and I failed. I still have until October 5 to prove that I'm needed, and I'm going to ride it out as long as I can because I need to make as much money as I can (and I intend to beef up my skills as much as I can for whatever my next job), but I have no illusions about my future here. If they really wanted me, they'd find a way to keep me. They don't. I wish it had worked out, but it didn't, and I'll soon move on with my life. That's one thing I'm good at. Probably my most valuable skill of all. 9:44pm Even when I've had a bad day, I can still host the hell out of a show, like I did tonight at Roommates From Hell at The Dark Room. I'm a professional, I am. | ||
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Thursday, 16 September 2010 (bad again) 8:33am Though my supervisor approved me to work longer hours this week (I don't normally come in on Thursdays at all), I'm leaving comparatively early today so I can get to Lyon-Martin to meet my doctor's substitute so she'll give me the certification necessary to get a passport. Still a little annoyed at having to do so, but I'm sure it'll go fine. And I'm bringing along some important bits of my medical history, specifically stuff from when I started my transititon well over ten years ago, just in case. 1:41pm Oh, hell. I just broke the site, and I'm not even sure how. Nor can I figure out how to fix it. It's not the live site, thankfully, but this is not going to reflect well on me at all. 5:12pm Things went well with the doctor, at least. As soon as she sat down, she assured me that this just a formality, and that she was going to write me the letter, no problem. Whew. As usual, a nurse did a brief checkup first, including weighing me. According to their scale, fully clothed I weigh 208, down from 229 in April and the still-horrifying 240 in March. Getting there. According to my old medical records, in December of 2002 I weighed 176. Even taking the whole "muscle weighs more than fat" thing in to account, I'm choosing to be inspired by that number. What's the point of a goal if it's realistic? That said, a more realistic metric is the clothing I wore back then, like my strappy bondage pants, which, if this diary can be believed, haven't fit properly in six years. I still have them, and I will wear them again, I will. | ||
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Wednesday, 15 September 2010 (a brother slips away) 9:35am This morning at the gym, as we were all sweating profusely after the Bootcamp class (she keeps changing the format every week, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, because I like routine), one of other regulars told me that I've lost a lot of weight. Which is exactly the sort of thing I need to hear. I also texted Raphaela before the class, and she responded, the first time she's responded in a long time. We'll probably be hanging out soon. I'd prefer to lose a few more inches first—to at least get back to where I was when I last saw her—but she assures me that it'll be okay. 10:36am Just because a problem isn't your fault doesn't mean it isn't your responsibility, or that it won't be held against you if you can't fix it. 2:54pm I finally resolved the WordPress install issue (or found a decent workaround, anyway), and my supervisor seems impressed. I hope. He was skeptical when I first start using Twitter to talk to the tech support people rather than wait for hours on hold, but by gum, it did the job. 8:37pm Heading out to karaoke at The Cat Club. Ilene will be there this time, thankfully. 11:01pm Much better karaoke night than last week. Unlike last week where I did songs which have some level of emotional meaning for me, I stuck to things that are just plain fun, and more importantly, within my limited-to-nonexistent vocal range. In this case, "The Saga Begins" by "Weird" Al Yankovic, "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar (which does have some emotional resonance, since I think Judas's skepticism about the divinity of Jesus is as relevant as ever), and "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. Ilene and I pretty much dominated the playlist, and we often danced as the other sang. The rest of the meager crowd was, unsurprisingly, a bit too cool do that sort of thing. I think the bartender likes me, though. As soon as I arrived, she said: oh, good! you came back! would you like another orange juice? Because I only drank orange juice last week, see. And she kept it refilling it for me tonight. Makes me feel like I belong, a little. But I didn't stay too long, since even though I'm not going to the gym tomorrow morning (the Bootcamp class pretty much makes further working out unnecessary for the following day or two), I still have to get up earlyish as so to get to work on time and continue to prove my worth. Which I think I'm doing. | ||
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Tuesday, 14 September 2010 (sidney wells) 4:31am Gotta burn more than I consume. It's as simple and as complicated as that. 10:02am Talked with my new supervisor again this morning. To aid in the whole "proving me worthy of keeping my job and maybe even going full-time" thing, I've been approved to come in for some extra hours these next couple of weeks. Which is a good thing, I think. Lots of Spacemen 3 today, I think. 1:41pm Not so good is that I've been unable to proerly install a new WordPress site, and remaining employed is predicated on becoming a WordPress guru. Which I'm not doing a very good job at. I'm fairly certain this isn't my fault—I've installed WordPress successfully before, but our existing webservers and databases are set up in a really convoluted fashion that I've never quite been able to figure out because I've never been given the full access I require, and y'know what? None of that matters. Excuses are irrelevant. Not being able to do something is not being able to do something, and whatever the reason, it's a responsibility that I'm not fulfilling. That's gonna hurt me. | ||
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Monday, 13 September 2010 (stumble on) 7:11pm In spite of Mikl-Em writing about this week's Bad Movie Night on Laughing Squid, which in turn got picked up by MetaFilter (and resulting in my site getting more hits in a day than it does in six months), the turnout was low last night for Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Never can tell, I guess. Gym this morning, and then, lo and behold, writing this afternoon. Made a lot of progress on the story I'm hoping to read at The Dark Room these next two weekends for the Roommates From Hell series. Of course, I'm hosting the show this weekend, so I can fake it easily enough if the story's not ready to go by then, but it should be. I really won't have an excuse. | ||
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Sunday, 12 September 2010 (big sun falling in the river) 4:11pm After going to the gym this morning (and coming home and showering all the usual), I had hoped to get some writing done. Instead, I napped. Hard. Which is how it goes sometimes. Yesterday at Borders, I bought WordPress for Dummies and HTML, XHTML and CSS for Dummies. A little pricey, but necessary investments if I intend to keep my job next month. Which I do. | ||
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Saturday, 11 September 2010 (crimescene) 1:23pm Gods, this has been a really rough week. I feel like I've been judged a lot, and have come up wanting. There have been good things, too, of course—Unthology No. 1 becoming real, for example, and seeing my work in the sample, complete with single-quoted dialogue—and those helped balance out the rough things, as always. Still, it feels like the balance was a bit off. | ||
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