I went to bed at 7:30 rather than face the task I'm dealing with now - submitting a resume via fax for a position within the Census.

In my first week of work, I applied to be the administrative assistant to all the managers. Apparently I was "less qualified" than someone else in my office. I take that to mean he or she was already kind of selected for that position and was filling some of the responsibilities before I came along. No hard feelings, right? I mean, it's kind of a blow to be "less qualified" to be a fucking secretary, but more power to whoever it is because I know I interview well and I even thought I heard the two people who did my interview discussing how well I did right afterward, but maybe that's injured vanity.

So I was told that I wasn't selected on Tuesday, "just in case" I wanted to apply for another position that's closing this week. What makes this funny is that only supervisory positions are posted this week.

That's right, I'm underqualified to be administrative assistant to all the managers in the office, but I was tactically encouraged to apply for a management position instead.

WTF?

So I didn't get everything together Tuesday night because I was busy with a lot of other things and here I am, not yet packed for my Christmas vacation, wrangling my resume to apply for a job that would put me *over* the position I was just turned down for. You might say I'm ambivalent. You might be right.

People love buffets because people love choices. There's nothing wrong with that.

Until you try to apply it to something like a country.

I don't have a problem with people who criticize America. As much as I love my country, I know we could do better. However, it starts turning into that joke where Heaven is British humor, Italian cooking and German engineering but Hell is British cooking, Italian engineering and German humor. If you compare our weaknesses to other countries' strong suits, it's like comparing a cheeseburger to a buffet line. The cheeseburger can't accommodate gluten and dairy allergies or vegetarians, yet a buffet can... however if you go on a dish by dish basis, you see that every item has strengths and weaknesses and no one dish can work for all people, all the time.

Spent another hour on the phone with "Wachovia." Actually ACS account servicing for Wachovia. I learned today that not only did they NOT un-fuck last month, but they also haven't cashed the checks electronically delivered to them last week AND they listed both accounts as past due.

Is it supposed to make me feel better that my (clearly Indian) operators take fake American names? It isn't that I mind outsourcing, because honestly? The alternative is talking to a computer which is 10 times more irritating.

Sorry babe, I know that's what pays our bills, but it is seriously irritating.

Anyway, "Charlene" had an accent I could cut with a plastic spork. She wasn't incompetent and she understood me just fine and I understood her. However, it took 15 minutes with her, being disconnected, and another 25 minutes with a supervisor (not including holds) to get an answer.

The answer is that they can't move money from my first account to my second because both are "past due." When they finally bother to cash the checks they ALREADY HAVE, my second account will STILL be past due because, wait for it, they put the check in the wrong account. They CAN'T fix that, banking has to. Banking won't fix that because they already (incorrectly) applied it and there is "no error" in their minds. No, I can't talk to banking. I have a feeling banking doesn't have a language in common with me, which is quasi illegal when it comes to financial transactions and US banking, but whatever.

So the end result is me sending *yet another* check to correct THEIR error. Once again, with a memo that a fucking idiot could understand. "MEMO: APPLY TO PACKET 2!!!"

And after all of this, the supervisor kindly offered to put my account in forbearance to bring it current. Which if you've followed the drama, is EXACTLY WHAT STARTED THIS WHOLE FUCKING MESS. I said no, very strongly, and possibly with extreme prejudice. No, I don't want to put my account in forbearance to correct YOUR ERROR and pay more money to you... when I found out today I currently owe MORE than I borrowed in 2005!

Just got off the phone with Wachovia about another (incorrect) late notice. Paying 2 weeks early via direct bank to back transfer isn't enough because they changed my payment amount after the forbearance in May that I didn't want. (Why would I want to put my account in forbearance to bring it current when I had already paid them 3 weeks before they called?)

Last month I sent a one time payment to bring both accounts "current." They applied both checks to the first account as partial payment for October because they are apparently complete idiots who can't read a memo on the check saying what it is for, or the account notes. I knew that because it took 5 months to find out why my payments were "late" when I was paying early. My October payment is currently 10 days late because I was instructed to wait until they applied the other payment to both accounts, but I already scheduled payment for Friday. However, I got a letter that one of my two accounts is past due since last month because of their error. It will take longer for them to correct that then it will for my payment to post, so it's sure to be fun times again next month.

I made sure my contact information was correct for the tenth time in seven months... and immediately get an e-mail telling me about my options to bring my account current from "over 30 days past due."

memo: Will refinance
memo: Get it right this time
memo: Hooah!
memo: This is why Wells
memo: Fargo bought you out.

So this afternoon I got offline to take this beleaguered meat sack I call a "body" for a nap. In the course of just one hour of attempting to nap, I was besieged by the following:

A request for tech support
A talking monkey that makes obscene suggestions (Tony wearing a finger puppet, but stick with me here) and sings a linguistic meme that is still stuck in my head
Gay porn
A telemarketer informing me of all the things I had Already Won! Would I please take a short survey, no purchase required? (Insert random targeting questions and flattery) OBTW would I like to buy magazines at the low low price of $5 per week for the next 60 months? (That's right, $1300.)
My own personal lolcat, Eloise
A call from my mom

You can leave the internet but apparently, in my case, it JUST COMES AFTER YOU. This is what I get for buying an internet enabled cell phone.

So Tony came home Friday night (after the accident) with a point they made in his class about to do lists. Everyone has one, it is seemingly endless and we only get a fraction done.

But 10% of 30 items and 10% of 300 items is a completely different picture of life. The bigger and more impossible the list is, the more you gain from the attempt.

If you had "End Hunger" on your to do list and only got 1% of it done, it would still be meaning enough for a whole life.

So my list is back. And while it's more on the 30 items side than 300 at this time, I'm not going to let that overwhelm me.

I realized the other day that it wouldn't take much money for us to live really. 300k and we would be set for about 15-20 years. (If we knocked out our debts, naturally.) Since either one of us working far exceeds that, this living paycheck to paycheck business means we're screwing up somewhere. This led to a good discussion of investing and priorities.

Seeing as how I refuse to give up on Eloise or wait many months for a life-saving therapy for her (previously very aggressive) cancer, I'm looking for clinics with interest free financing or that take CareCredit that perform radioactive iodine therapy. I've found places in Arlington Heights, IL, Atlanta, GA, Springfield, VA and Baltimore, MD. Who wouldn't mind a 3-10 day guest while my girl gets treated?

So I took Eloise to the vet yesterday for follow-up testing. Everyone agreed that she looked and acted great and that these tests were just a precaution. The same vet who was talking to me about putting her to sleep was all chipper and upbeat.

Regardless, I brought up the name of a veterinary cancer specialist I heard about yesterday. He agreed that she was the best and if Eloise's thyroid still came back high, I should absolutely talk to Dr. Harris who is a joy to work with blah blah blah. Why didn't he mention her before? I don't know. I felt slightly better about my vet after he admitted that he didn't keep up to date on cancer as well as possible because he had so many other general concerns. Admitting that you aren't all knowing is a big step towards me trusting you.

Well the results are back. Her thyroid is still high so its time to see the specialist. I feel pummeled.

The vet called. It is cancer.

Yesterday I ran out of the supplement that helps my liver deal with being overwhelmed by my shoddy digestive tract. This leads to food cravings, some nausea, and a lot of shaking. Oh, and excessive mood swings.

Before you ask, yes, I've been tested for diabetes and I don't even remotely have it.

So today it really hit me while reading an article on Sparkpeople's blog about a man who hurt his back and needs to lose weight in order to get the back surgery. His doctors prescribed weight loss surgery. If successful, he may not need back surgery. The catch? This was an employer's compensation claim and he was 340 pounds before the injury.

You would think that the SparkPeople community, being composed of people who have tried everything and a tricycle to lose weight, would at least have some idea what this guy is going through even if they don't agree with the court ruling upholding his claim.

But you would be wrong.

It turned into a bash fest, aimed at a complete stranger. How *dare* he "demand" surgery for his weight when he was fat before the injury?! WTF is wrong with people and 100 variations thereof. Some people suggested a compromise where he split the cost... hello, he's unable to work? Where is he going to get money for that? But the majority was just character assassination about people and their presumed sense of entitlement.

Well let's see, maybe before the injury his weight wasn't a problem for him. Crazy as it may seem, not every fat person is so desperate to lose weight that they're lining up for debilitating spine injuries in a scheme to bilk money out of their employers.

Eloise is home. Her recovery since yesterday is nothing short of amazing. We will learn sometime this week about the results of the biopsy and the week after that she will have her stitches our and the vet wants to order more blood work to make sure her thyroid is now normal and not still high or too low. Also, something was mentioned about possible calcium issues/malabsorption.

I feel much better for the moment but we are still very deep in the proverbial woods with this.

We won't know the results of the biopsy until late this week, but the vet said I could pick up Eloise this afternoon. She's off the heating blanket and she's able to growl at the vet, but she still is weak and not much interested in food.

Tony encouraged me to buy the Sims3 last night to take my mind off things. (Hey, the budget is kind of in the toilet for the next week anyway, and the price was good.) So this weekend, starting at 3:00pm, will be lots of snuggles and simulation games. Maybe I can get the pharmacy to make Eloise some more fish flavored emulsion without the meds. I think she would eat a lump of coal if it were covered in that stuff and I could keep the other cats from eating it first.

I took Eloise to the vet this morning so she could have the tumor cut out of her thyroid. I was supposed to be able to pick her up this afternoon.

She is staying *at least* overnight. The surgery went... badly. She bled a lot, probably because it was the biggest tumor the vet had ever cut out of a cat during this type of surgery. She held up her hand and showed me a circle bigger than a silver dollar. Eloise is having trouble recovering and needs fluids, heat, observation and some damn luck.

The vet didn't say its cancer... but she really didn't seem in doubt of what the biopsy will say.

If it is cancer, we begin the long slow road of watching for it to come back and making utilitarian decisions where I can feel like a failure about money, despite the fact that most people wouldn't pay thousands of dollars at a time for something that *might* help their pet live a few more months in misery.

Let's hope it isn't cancer.

If you know me at all, you know that I don't download. I don't even do streaming content that isn't properly licensed in this country, with a one time exception for British television that was on a year long wait to be imported before BBC America decided not to pick it up. (Years ago I did watch perfectly legal fan subs.)

So when I say this is the stupidest shit I've heard in at least the last few hours, please remember that it is not because I'm pro-piracy. I'm pro-utilitarian and pro-logic.

France gets its knickers in a twist, again.

What bothers me the most about this law is the outrageous cost to the French taxpayer that will far exceed the value of the property they are "protecting." Now, I don't have numbers, but I suspect if you tallied up the value of all this downloading, it wouldn't exceed the court costs and processing fees and the cost of jail time for the few people they actually catch and process. That's supposing that digital piracy can be tallied the same way physical property is.

Then again, they also want to boycott Google over the Google Books project... which is a shame, because if we go back a hundred years or more and read French literature and philosophy, we would be able to remember that they were once progressive and reasonable.

So I spent an hour today at Brighton Center in Newport, talking to them about what I could offer the program seeing as how they do job training and placement assistance and I have a MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.

I came in looking forward to hearing how they wanted me to help. The answer is however I damn well please. I've been basically given free reign to do... whatever. I'll be setting up office hours next week where people can come talk to me about anything that's going on with them in the program. I'm going to specifically highlight helping people with motivation.

I'm also going to find a new personality inventory for them to use at intake and in their basic diversity training. I'm thinking short-form online Myers-Briggs, but I may be moved by something else. The "True Colors" inventory they use now is a self-scoring watered-down heavily-hyphenated MB knock-off and Brandon is sick of it. I don't blame him. I'm not sure how much validity is necessary to make a basic point about diversity and conflict resolution (a big issue for participants in past jobs, apparently) but something this simplistic insults their intelligence.

I've looked up state requirements for licensure in Psychology and I'm about to look up more information about guidelines because I don't want to cross the line from providing assistance to acting as a professional psychologist without a license to practice. I'm pretty sure talking to people about motivation isn't going to be an issue. However, it looks like you can be licensed as a psychological associate in Kentucky with a masters, so I'm going to see what that would take as well. $100, 3 letters and an internship is what I see so far.

So one thing I really miss is home made chocolate chip cookies. I know I don't need to eat so many of them, and that's easy because gluten free baking mixes are 2-3 times as expensive as their counterparts and so far, they are all weird.

Betty Crocker's cookies have perfect tasting dough, but there is a rough, sandy quality to the texture of the dough and finished cookies. Also, the cookies dissolve if you handle them wrong. They are pallid for my tastes, probably because they lack brown sugar. Also, a box makes 2 dozen and goes *on sale* for $4.29

Whole Food's brand mix has a taste that's almost right and a texture that's really crispy. I prefer chewy cookies but they are... adequate. But they are just as fussy about handling as the BC plus I have to drive out of my way to get them. Once again, about $4 per 2 dozen okay tasting cookies. And that's just the mix!

I decided to buy gluten free flour mix and make a half batch of the classic Toll House recipe from scratch. I bought Bob's Red Mill gluten free baking mix because it was recommended to me by people who bake a lot of bread. I used Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate chips, organic vanilla, raw sugar, organic brown sugar, European Style organic butter, local free range organic eggs... everything I used was a Cook's Illustrated recommendation or a personal recommendation. In other words, when you take into account the cost of gluten free flour, this was an insanely expensive batch of cookies even by gluten free standards.

The dough looked and handled perfectly, so I snuck a taste.

YUCK.

It tasted like I'd eaten a small dab of hummus mix by accident. Powdered hummus mixed generously with sugar and butter, that is. GROSS. With $6 (or more) and 20 minutes of my time at stake, I gamely added a generous dash of cinnamon and baked a pan. After all, maybe the raw flour tastes different than the flour cooked.

The texture is perfect. The color is perfect. It smells perfect, looks perfect, and handles exactly like my regular cookies used to.

And it still tastes like beany ass. Even with a mouthful of expensive local milk, I can still taste the garbanzo flour.

Tony asked if I could fix the rest of the dough. I asked him if he could make hummus that doesn't taste like chickpeas. Maybe, if I was making pumpernickel, I could somehow completely mask the flavor of Bob's Red Mill flour mix, but for the amount I paid and the effort? Gluten free FAIL.

So I've come to the conclusion that new clothing isn't just for diet bribery anymore. I no longer spend 25% of my income at the mall every month, so it's no longer a cost control technique to use new clothing as a bribe. I don't have a female roommate in a close size to go clothing shopping with every weekend. Tony doesn't like clothing shopping very much (or he hasn't expressed a desire to spend our free time doing it), so I've been picking up odds and ends at Target for ... a few years? Occasionally I hit Macy's for a clearance sale but their plus size selection is all over the place, or Lane Bryant when they have underwear sales. For the most part, however, I had reverted to the way I dressed as a child with a few pounds of adolescent insecurity mixed in.

Hand-me-downs, men's clothing, stuff that I loved but that is stained, no longer fits or both... clothing that would have been resigned to painting smocks when I was in college. Lots of black, gray and blue. Dark and masculine.

Nothing wrong with any of that, but it wasn't how I wanted to dress. For a while I bought the clothing I liked a size too small as "motivation" but that backfired. (Sometimes it only came up to one size too small.) Often I gained weight and ended up with something 2 or 3 sizes too small instead.

Getting new hand-me-downs this summer was a revelation. First of all, women don't have much clue what size they are, or what size other women are. One of the women in my seminar gave me a bunch of "too big" clothing that I would swear *does* fit her because all her clothing that "fits" is straining. Mostly in the chest area because she was considerably blessed there. My gifts are more modest so the clothing that flatters a middle aged, busty school teacher trying to play down her boobs does NOT look good on me, in my opinion.

Second of all, people thought I looked better in her (ill-fitting and not matching my taste) hand-me-downs than I did in my own clothing purchased before this summer.

Ouch?

I realized that in wearing new colors and looser fitting clothing designed for a woman my size (if not to my taste), I looked like I was making an effort again. I think that just looking like you tried has a positive impact on how people see you and how you see yourself. I resent that second part even though I accept the first part for some reason. It is all rather illogical, but it is there none the less.

Anyway, I'm wearing an outfit today of all clothing purchased by me, for me, that fits. My uncooperative hair is back and I'm wearing lip gloss. I'll be damned if I don't already feel more productive.

As I sometimes like to do, I've been turning my brain inside out and examining what makes me tick. My tool du-jour is the Landmark Success Seminar, a 10 session course available from Landmark Education. We've been looking at how we buy in to a definition of success set by our family, culture, religion, the media, and basically everyone around us. Even if you chose to disagree with how society views success, you still have to live with it. Take fat, for example. Even if you decide that you are never going to be thin and that you are okay with that, every day someone will try to force you to change your mind. By the same token, if you decide that you don't want to be fat and are going to do something about it, every day someone will try to undermine you.

There's just no winning in that world. Everything you have, everything you do, someone will think it isn't enough and someone else will think it is too much.

It sounds disheartening and to be honest, I was a little down when we got to that part of the course. I wasn't as surprised as most of my classmates, but then again I've read many of the philosophers whose works underpin the premise of the course.

( So what can we do if we can never *really* succeed in the world as it stands? )

I'm moved to talk about this because I read a Mother-Jones article "exposing the scam" of Landmark. I won't lie. I felt hurt for a minute, and sad. Then I realized that a much worse version of what I feel now is how other people feel when I turn their beliefs upside down for whatever reason.

I'm sorry if I've made any of you feel like I dunked you in cold water for no real reason. The only reason, if any exists, is that sometimes I feel a shapeless anxiety and I give it form by picking intellectual fights.

I want to add that it isn't easy for me to share this article, although there are others with an even harsher tone. I want all of you to think well of me, and here I am sharing a fairly cogent article that picks holes in something that I like and respect. I could dismiss it as more pot-stirring by MJ (last week we were all supposed to feel guilty about our "blue" footprint) but I won't. I will take it as an opportunity to come out of my shell about what's going on in my life and to be honest that I was afraid of what you all would think of me if you learned about it.

I was looking for volunteer opportunities today and ran across a job description that made me *want* to go back to work. I'm really torn. On the one hand, money is nice and there aren't that many jobs out there that match my interests and qualifications. On the other hand, my health continues to be more fragile than I think it should be. Simply going for a walk sent me into a bout of anxiety that lasted most of the morning, off and on. I can identify no other explanation for the crushing feeling that there was something I was forgetting that was critical and needed to be done already.

My neighbor, who suggested the charity, says I should volunteer there and apply later. It's the wisest choice, but I irrationally fear that any opportunity will never be available again.

( Here is the ad. )