Damn, you know it’s a bad life when. . .

[imood mood at time of entry: depressed]

Today was supposed to be a complete day of job searches. With an impending eviction looming overhead, I wanted to get out in force¹ and apply for a few jobs. I have made various verbal plans with my Mom to receive a ride from her to different places I wanted to apply at, but every time that we’re set to go, she’s blows me off for something else. To add insult to injury, she then turns around and throws it in my face that I haven’t applied for numerous positions already. What. The. Fuck.

I don’t know where she thinks that she has room to bitch at me, when she knows for a fact that I have no current way to get to the jobs openings I find out about. And when she does do me the great honor of giving me a lift to perhaps one place at any given time, she spends the whole time sniping and bitching at me about how I need to hurry up and repeatedly asks me how long I am going to take.

It doesn’t take anymore than fifteen minutes to fill out an application. Fifteen fucking minutes out of her day; when she usually devotes endless hours to the Temple of Aunt Precious’ house. Yes, I understand that she has things that she needs to do, but she is so willing to help everyone else, that she doesn’t have a spare minute to help those that really need it.

Most days, I don’t know whether I am going to wake up to a house powered with electricity or not. I don’t know if I’ll be able to cook my ever-dwindling stash of Ramen or not with water that we get from other people’s house and the mall, because ours was shut off. Hell, I don’t know if Bob Matcha, our landlord, is going to one day show up at our house with the police and demand that I get out.

I’ve been considering selling my home computer and my brother’s PS2, but I know that I wouldn’t make very much from it. I doubt that we’d barely be able to cover one month’s rent or not, since my computer is so old and I am sure that a pawnshop wouldn’t give us very much for a PlayStation, even if it is the second version. Pawnshops tend to be bastards like that. They know you need the money, so they take your most expensive possessions that you paid hundreds of dollars for and give you almost nothing in return.

Yep, nothing helps to burn away the remnants of one’s pride like shamefully accepting what you can get from those damned crooks. Well, maybe hitting up a food pantry and the like. *shrugs*

So that’s been bothering me for the longest time now. It’s been almost a whole a year since I’ve last worked in a formal job setting, family, home-based odd jobs aside. Even still, I couldn’t use them as a reference.

So. . . I wanted to apply to any job possible today. Well, the ones that I wrote down from the job-listing page I read over the weekend. I had four jobs picked out. Two were automatically out. One was out because I needed to have my own car and a home phone. I have neither of those. The other was a set up for a government job in joke that is Homeland Security. I couldn’t go for that one, because you have to pay them just to get the information. $69 to be exact.

Sure, the information agent with the British accent that I reached by way of a 1-800 number said that I would get the money back if I didn’t end up getting the job, but I still shouldn’t haven’t to pay just to get job information. That’s fucking ridiculous. He sited the potential wages of $12 – 48 per hour, along with the included benefits and such that were listed in the job listing advertisement. I quickly found the politest way possible to get off the phone and moved on down my list.

Which led me to the phone answering gig that required the car and home phone. Yeah, next.

Before I checked on either of these positions, I checked in with my local Pappas BBQ. The ad simply said that area Pappas restaurants were hiring, but didn’t identify any of the exact locations. There were multiple ads in the same section, which would lead a jobseeker, such as myself, to believe that people were needed in a hurry to fill a lot of empty postings. Common sense to draw that conclusion, right?

Wrong. So, so very wrong. Silly me.

It turned out that only a couple of area Pappas restaurants needed people. This was according to the manager that didn’t bother introducing himself to me, who I spoke to briefly at the Pappas BBQ. Yeah, great.

So now I am down to a couple more places that I want to look into. One of the jobs is Downtown and the other is in the Museum District. Either way I go, I would be happy with either neighborhood. I have been trying to get a job in the Museum District for the longest time! I love it there, and it would be wonderful if I could find work there. Not only would I be in one of the best parts of my city, I’d also be able to go to the free museum nights if I got off work early. It’s perfect! I could take in the wonderful art, soak in the too-cold air conditioning, and spend a couple of hours writing in my journal. That’s a fun night to me. Well, one of my versions of a fun night. Hee.

There’s also the nearby park, pond, outdoor theater, hiking trails, and, if I lose my damned mind, the overpriced zoo to visit. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have found something there?! I guess that because it’s such a desirable area of town, plenty of people put in applications there.

The museum area job would be in a café. The Downtown job would be in a restaurant. A bar and restaurant split, I think. Meh. I’d still be Downtown, which isn’t the worst place to work.

In other news, the actual news I sat down to write this entry for, it rained like hell for the past two days. I meant to simply touch on my would-be job searching efforts to lead into how they were ruined, but entries (and stories) tend to run away from me like that, especially when something this heavy has been hanging over me, weighing on my heart at every turn.

I mean, I expected it to rain yesterday (Sunday, October 15, 2006), because that was in the forecast. Heck, it rained all last Sunday (October 9, 2006), so I wasn’t really worried, as nothing much is open on that day. My plans to get out “in force” today started to look less and less like an option when it was still raining at two and three this the morning. This is after it had rained all frickin’ day on Sunday, mind you.

And, as usual, people pursued The Stupid Route today. Many, many people were stranded in the high water when they decided to try and go through it in their small, low to the ground cars. They were all on the news throwing their hands up in frustration about their idiotic decision and “plain bad luck.” All the while, more small, low to the ground cars attempted to slowly drive through the high water in the background of the news shots.

Wrecker drivers were interviewed and they laughed it up and said that they didn’t care for the weather, but they loved the all of the business that it brought in. In fact, they went so far as to clue the driving public in on the reality that wrecker drivers knew where all of the worst flooding would occur, and would go there and wait for some idiot to ease on into a stall-out. I can’t say that I can blame them for yucking it up. I would do the same if I was in their place.

Now, not everything has been a wonderful poke at the intellectually-challenge masses, as only arrogant know-it-alls can do, there were deaths. Four, to be exact. That the news program I watched knew about.

One woman in her fifties was killed in a car accident resulting from all of the rain. One person drowned in the high water that they, presumably, drove into willingly. However, the last two people couldn’t actually see what they were driving into. Granted common sense should have told them that the concave road they were going to attempt to drive on that ran underneath an overpass would be flooded, but I am guessing that that thought hadn’t occurred to them at the time.

From what was said in the report, the mother and daughter were out driving early this morning in the dark to get to an unknown location. Before they could do very much to save themselves, they drowned in their SUV. Their remains were only found after the section had been cordoned off by police cruisers and the water had receded some. The wrecker driver on the news that found the pair said that he was sent in to retrieve the vehicle. That’s when he looked in and saw the bodies. He also said that he could tell that they tried to escape out the back of the car, but they simply weren’t able to.

So I sit here and think about all of that and part of me still feels as though I should find some way to be happy and peppy and rah-rah gung-ho about life and fandom and everything. I just can’t. It’s not so much those people dying, but my own sad situation that there seems to contain no method of escape. Will I inevitably end up like that mother and daughter, trying to find a way out of my own fated doom, only to fail miserably?

Sure, it sounds morbid, but I’ve always been so. Can’t help it when you sent your childhood was spent so close to death itself. And to speak of which makes me think of how I spent Sunday; altering between plotting my suicide and trying to mentally calm myself down. All I could think about was what my last words would be to my wretched family in my suicide note that I would helpfully place on my person along with my identification card. After all, there’s no reason to be a difficult corpse that can’t be IDed to save my life. Ha.

All I could think of were words of anger and hatred and bitterness. Words tinged in not-so-hidden disappointment that this life has not turned out to be much of anything for me. I’ve had plenty of happy times, I’ll not lie and say that I haven’t, but it’s all been so fruitless. Nothing has come of it all, and all of me is so lost as to what I should do to try and change this.

It’s so hard without money, without a way to get money, without a way to pay my bills and any tuition I would like to owe to an accredited school that will give me a degree, that will get me more money, and so forth. It just goes around endlessly until I am so stuck in my entirety, that it only causes me to freeze up all the more.

I mean, to be perfectly honestly, I’ve thought about becoming a hooker or selling drugs or killing people for a living or robbing a store/people/bank. Just anything to get by. There just the not-so-small problem of me not really having the clothes and oodles of experience to be a prime hooker. There’s the issue of me not having the faintest clue how to break into the drug world, because I stayed well away from that in my teens. There’s also the fact that I could neither successfully disguise myself to not be recognized or find a suitable weapon if I decided that Professional Assassin was the career path for me. I mean, come on. Who’s ever heard of an assassin that kills with a rusty machete, or a Coke bottle, or any other relatively-harmless trinket I have lying around? No one, that’s who. It’s so absurd, that it makes me laugh to think about it.

As for the final option, there again lies the weapon and disguising problem. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want to go to jail, even though I’d be getting more sex than I’ve had in my life and I would be guaranteed a place to stay and food to eat. I don’t know if I am that desperate yet, but I somehow suspect that I am not. Part me is still holding on to my all-important ability to pass a background check. I might not have a college degree on-hand and I might not have credit yet and I might not be the world’s smartest person, but I still haven’t committed any felonies. And, to me, that’s a lot. At least I think that it’s should be considered to be a big deal, seeing as how most major cities have ridiculous crime rates and all.

So what do I do? Continue to wallow and try to find a way to fake the funk? Or try and find some way out of this spider’s web not entirely of my own creation? I keep looking back over my life and my successes in academia and my passion for learning and everything that could have been. I keep thinking, “Damn, I could have been something great with this inclination I had or that inclination I had, if only I had been born to a better family with money.” But I wasn’t, and it sucks that I have ended up the way that I have to due this; due to my own inability to figure out how to move past my (originally) lower-middle class beginnings that spiraled into the land of Poor and About-To-Be-Homeless.

I keep trying to think of the shelters and where I could go. I don’t know of any shelters, because I’ve never needed them before. But I think that it would be prudent if I found a phone book, wrote down a few, and contacted as many of them as I can manage. It’s either that or I pick out an overpass the jump from. And to tell the truth, right now, I am mentally choosing both.

Danielle

¹ – Taken from, and a play on, the phrase that is currently being over-used in local news broadcasts. The reporters all say this when featuring some story or another about cops upping their patrol routes and such. It usually goes something like this:

[A cop car is shown slowly driving by. Shots of local, usually not very well-groomed, Black people are shown standing around doing absolutely nothing in the middle of the day on a corner. A reporter’s voice is heard via a voiceover.]

Report #1:

Police officers are out in force this evening in local neighborhoods that are overrun by shoddy circumstances rising crime rates that are threatening the safety of our communities.

[More shots are shown of crumbling neighborhood houses and local citizens, before the reporter goes on to interview the most illiterate-sounding Black people they can find.]

Yep, it’s pretty much always like that. And some people are idiotic enough to say that racism doesn’t exist “these days.” Of course they’re right, what was I thinkin’? Guh-huck!

Note: The comments are off, because I don’t want any.