Holy (frozen) balls, it's so goddamn cold.

It's two degrees right now.

I went outside earlier and walked to the bank. I had a check for thirteen dollars and ten cents and that's how much I need money. Of course, the ATM vestibule was closed and I had to deposit my check at the drive-up ATM. I waited in line behind a red Buick that too foreeevvveeerrr. Then I walked six blocks home. I felt like I had Botox injections because my face would not move.

Friday Morning Wrap-Up.

Man, it's been a rough week for work. I came in late four of the five days. That wasn't a good move, but considering morale, motivation, and uhh, I can't think of another thing but it doesn't matter because no one cares and I usually get here at like, 7:30, so a week of coming in at 8:10 isn't going to kill anyone. (Plus, I've been staying until five and getting paid not-overtime, which is just like overtime (since I've technically working more than I'm supposed to - which is thirty-five hours - and have to get permission to do so) except that I don't get paid extra for it. I LOVE MY JOB.) Also, the office is crazy right now because it's Wear Your Bears Jersey Day, and also because about five or six people are moving to another building, which means all week I've been listening to a few coworkers bitch about boxing up their stuff and reminiscing about all of the good times here in our building. I'm not really too torn up about losing people; it'll be really quiet in my part of the office, which will be weird. But to fill the void of our precious co-workers, we're getting free pizza for lunch. And I've already had two Krispy Kreme doughnuts with blue and orange sprinkles.

On Wednesday night I went out with Kristin to dinner at Sopo, where we had our usual waitress who hates us. I used to feel sorry for her because we'd only go on Monday nights because they'd have two- dollar burgers and three-dollar pints, so we'd get sufficiently fed and tipsy for about twelve dollars. The waitress was always pretty bitchy, and I always felt guilty and gave her a bigger tip than usual. On Wednesday she was typically bitchy, and she even brought us our check really early, saying, "Hey, do you guys mind closing out? I'm really hungover and just ready to go home THANKS." I hope she wasn't surprised when Kristin gave her $3.78 tip on our thirty-three dollar check.

After Sopo we went to see Inland Empire at the Music Box. Now, Kristin had never seen a David Lynch movie, and I was surprised that she agreed to see this one with me. When I brought it up, she told me she saw the trailer for it and it looked really good. I didn't mention that she did the same thing with Blue Velvet and only watched twenty minutes of it. I was nice enough to mention that Inland Empire is three hours long, but she was up for it. And she was a good sport about it, and I don't think she completely hated it. But let me tell you this: it's pretty nutz. Like, ten times more nutz than any other Lynch movie I've ever seen. But I liked it a lot, especially now that I've had a few days to think about it and have gotten "Sinnerman" out of my head. (I'm not going to give any details about the movie, because that'd take about eight blog posts and I just don't feel like it.)

For Sunday's festivities, I'm going to see a play at Steppenwolf with Christina and then going to Steve and Lisa's to "watch the Super Bowl," which really means "watch the Puppy Bowl." I know I live in Chicago and everyone's supposed to give two shits about the Bears, but I don't. Now, I will gladly brave the cold on Sunday if they win, since I'm sure everyone is going to go absolutely crazy on the streets, and that'd be pretty entertaining.

Finally, I'd like to wish everyone a happy Groundhog Day. And it's also Nicole's birthday! I wish I shared my birthday with this classy lady; I got Oliver Stone, instead.

I'm still an idiot.

I posted my resume on Monster without any expectations other than to receive calls from mumbled "HR representatives" in strange area codes (603 is a popular one) offering me positions selling insurance. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got an email from an HR rep from a large Chicago company requesting I put in an application for an administrative assistant position. (It was legit - it's a real company and the HR lady didn't have a Yahoo mail address.) So I did, and I immediately got an email from the woman requesting a phone interview. It also mentioned that I would have to take a short prescreening assessment test online, and that it had to be completed before my interview.

No sweat!

When I came back from lunch and had about two minutes before I really had to get back to work, I opened the test. When I read "assessment," I was expecting the test with questions like, "How well do you work in a group?" Or: "Do you set deadlines for yourself?" You know, the type of questions that do have a correct answer and encourage you to lie. "Why, yes! I work very well under pressure!"

Then I start the test and realize I have to know math. Like, percentages. What? What? Fuck. Shit. Analogies? Okay, that's not so bad. Put this sentence in order and determine if it's a true statement? I can do that! FRACTIONS?! WHAT?! FUCK.

And the PHONE was ringing (no one ever calls me!) and I couldn't pause and I wasted a good minute and a half on someone from the phone center asking about a transcript when I could have been doing long division and SHIT it was scary. I wasn't prepared! I couldn't believe it! I finished it with twenty seconds to spare, but still! I just took an SAT pre-test that determines if I really get an interview.

When I closed the window for the Scary Test, my GMail account was open and I saw that the email from the testing site had the following instructions:

Please allow approximately 15 minutes to complete the assessment process. Once the test begins, you cannot return to complete it at a later time. Before beginning the assessment process, make sure that you are by yourself in a quiet environment that will allow you to focus on each question.
Have scratch paper and a pencil handy.

I am so. Stupid. I'm going to go stress-eat an entire bag of cinnamon hearts now.



UPDATE: Nevermind. I got the phone interview.

Dear Internet: I need your help.

Okay, let's get for reals here.

I need a new job and we all know it. Even my boss knows it, and has even told me about jobs here that I'm completely unqualified for.

It's not that the job sucks (as most of you have been well aware of for nearly a year now). I mean, most administrative or clerical jobs suck. And that's fine. The problem is that I'm not making any money. And when I say that I'm not like, "Oh, I was an English major and I'm not making any money." I mean it in the sense that my position doesn't even require a college degree. It's kind of like I'm stocking merchandise, but instead of boxes of cereal, I'm stocking ACT scores.

So, since I had some moderate success when I called upon you all to tell me who you were (meaning, I got, like, four responses from people who weren't trying to insult me), I figured I'd try my luck with my blog. Because, honestly, I'm not going to pay CareerBuilder to send out my resume (even though it's been viewed a whopping zero times), and I'm tired of getting MULTIPLE offers to open bank accounts in my name so that I can cash money orders sent to me by MULTIPLE British men in Nigeria (who ALL live in Nigeria with their wives, two children, and three dogs and ALL inherited their uncle's textile business and ALL conveniently found my resume on Craigslist and PROMISE that their offer is in NO WAY A SCAM).

All I want is a job, preferably administrative or clerical in nature (I don't want to call people to sell them stuff they have no intention of buying), that pays me closer to the average entry-level salary for English majors, which is around thirty-two thousand dollars. (Seriously? I'd kill for thirty-thousand dollars a year. My expectations aren't that high.) I'm very smart and I can learn how to do just about anything, I promise.

If any of you out there happen to be professionals of some sort (preferably professional Chicagoans with connections to powerful and kind HR representatives) and would like to help me - even just some ADVICE, since no one will tell me what to do - I'd love you forever.

Also, I'm on my lunch break right now, because WORK COMES FIRST. Blogging is totally second, dude.

I can't take them anywhere.

Imagine you're a young woman out on a Saturday night in the city. You're in your mid-twenties, blond, good-looking, and you're enjoying your evening like everyone else in the bar: by watching a short gay man break it down (by himself, by the way) to "No Scrubs". And you're like, "Hey, it's Lakeview, we all love each other here. I'd love to explain it to you if I could."


Ha! It's funny you should say that! Just picture what happens next, when you're approached by these girls:

Imagine your surprise when one of them (the one who may not be wearing pants because she was in the back dancing and figured, "Hey, I have long johns on under my jeans - why don't I take them off?") yells, "Clarissa!" She hands you two napkins and the other says, "Can we have your autograph?"

Dear Girl Who Was Definitely Not Melissa Joan Hart,

I'm sorry my friends were drunk.

Love,

Tyler.

And now I take on religion. Sort of.

I watched half of Jesus Camp last night (until it was time for Ugly Betty and Nicole took the TV away, which was fine because I finally got to finish The Tin Drum, which took me a week and a half to watch and not enjoy). I did enjoy what I saw of Jesus Camp, though I have some issues with it.

I think since moving to Chicago I've become slightly (just slightly, people, so don't get your panties in a twist) more conservative. This is probably because being a raging liberal isn't as fun here as it was in Virginia. And when I say that I'm slightly more conservative, I actually mean that I'm more apathetic about most causes (abortion, prayer in schools, Iraq - you know, the really important ones that cause people to constantly lose their shit whilst arguing with others whose opinions are the polar opposite. (These are the type of issues about which people will not change their minds.)), although I still care very much about certain issues, albeit quietly. This is exactly why I don't turn my blog into a political one, and it's also why I don't read political blogs (although a few certain ones are so goddamn hysterical (read: nuts) I can't help myself sometimes). And really, the only conservative stance I take on an issue is global warming, but LEAVE ME ALONE it's my opinion and I wrote papers on it and that's where I base said opinion (and, sure, when we're all wearing space suits when we walk outside because the temperature will be three-hundred degrees just like they promised it would back in elementary school, I will gladly concede that yes, global warming is completely and totally real and it's all my fault for using Right Guard spray for two years).

Anyway: Jesus Camp. I read somewhere that someone at sometime (and maybe I'm making this up) voted this to be the scariest movie of the year (after An Inconvenient Truth, of course, which everyone (but me, since I had to cut it off after fifteen minutes once the "So You've Got Global Warming" animated short started playing) agrees is truly terrifying). I think if I was still in high school and still anti-religion (having friends who attended Jerry Falwell's college will do that to you - and, by the way, I apologize now for the parentheses), I would probably have the same reaction. But now I'm older, I'm wiser, and I'm a lot more accepting. I don't really care too much about religious issues anymore; you can have your God, I won't have mine. Is that cool? Can we leave it at that? Good. Problem solved.

Except, it isn't, because the extremists from both the Right and Left keep it dragging on in the bitter fight. And it's all so BORING. I'm so bored, people. You've got the raging conservatives who want to ban gay marriage, take away reproductive rights, keep capital punishment legal, blow up the Middle East (starting with Iraq, of course, and then "Palestine," because They Stand With Israel, even though the Jews killed Jesus), and teach every child that evolution is for Satanists. And then you've got the raging liberals, who stand tall as Christians (they need the Red State voters) but still...uhm, well, honestly, I'm more for these guys, so it's harder for me to come up with the bad things they want. But I do think the constant ridicule of Christianity and Red Staters is pretty obnoxious, because it doesn't do much for the unification of this country. And, frankly, I think constantly portraying Christianity only in the way that Jesus Camp and Borat does is not very fair. Granted, I'm not a Christian, but I do know a couple who are perfectly normal. And while they aren't the holy rollin' types, I'm sure that if one were to examine just why and how people believe these things, you'd learn a lot more than just ridiculing their faith. (Try Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, for example, which is a superb documentary.)

I'm glad I grew up Episcopalian, a denomination that treats religion as more a hobby and a social ritual than a way of life. Also, everyone knows that Episcopalians are the classy Christians.

4eva.

I got the following GChat message from Christina:

Tyler, we are best friends because I'm pretty sure you will understand the following: I don't like a girl that works here in the shop, and the main reason is that she looks like a cartoon sea monster.

It's true. We ARE best friends.

You've got to be kidding me.

Okay. That is officially the best one.

Also, and this is completely unrelated, I was approached by a woman on the California El platform while waiting for the Pink Line. She asked me if I knew how to get kids in commercials, because her daughter is so cute ("She has Chinese eyes.") and "can repeat real well."

I should Google that for her.

I still love my Site Meter.

I really hope they found what they were looking for.

The General Lee.

Today is Robert E. Lee's 200th Birthday, which is news that slipped my knowledge until I received a snarky email from Theo asking if I had anything special planned for the "holiday". In high school, such an event would probably just involve writing another fucking essay about Robert E. Lee and how he may not have actually been racist or something. Maybe if we were really lucky we'd get to go on a "field trip" to Stratford Hall, Lee's birthplace, which was about twelve miles from our school.

One thing I love about growing up where I did (okay, there's a very short list, and right off the top of my head the only other thing is that people don't make fun of the way I say "umbrella") is that I find it symbolic of how awkward and weird it is to grow up in the post-Civil Rights Era South. My county was the birthplace of both George Washington and Robert E. Lee, two important generals who impacted our country's history. There's such a huge stigma, however, in having any pride for Lee and his cohorts, since most Southerners see a fine line between pride and shame. If you're from Richmond, you're especially familiar with Robert E. Lee's polarizing legacy. I remember years of controversy surrounding a portrait of Lee, somewhere on display near the river. I can't remember how it was resolved. (Couch, care to fill us in?)

Until 2001, while the rest of the country celebrated Martin Luther King Day in January, Virginia celebrated Lee-Jackson-King Day. I always felt really gross about this; it was rather strange to remember two Confederate generals on the same day as Dr. King. And I didn't even realize until this year that the practice officially ended six years ago - I feel like I just assumed it still was in effect and people still called the holiday by its former name. (An interesting bit of trivia: I always thought Lee-Jackson-King Day was a response to MLK Day, the main reason I found the holiday to be most disgraceful. It turns out that Lee-Jackson Day preceded MLK Day.)

Had I known about Lee's birthday (I'm a bad ex-Southerner!), I probably would have come up with some way to (sort of) celebrate it. Instead, I think I'm just going to have KFC for lunch and listen to The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". I can't really think of a better way, honestly.