New Job

I started a new job on March 16th. I should really say I started a new other job since I'm staying with the restaurant (damn this need for health insurance). It's with the same company that I worked for over the summer. Right now it's pretty cool. I'm learning how to navigate around AutoCad and some of what I'm learning there is coinciding with my GIS class. I hate having to drive and hour to an hour and half to work though. Everytime I sit in traffic this high pitched voice in my head starts chanting, "emissions...emissions...emissions..." So I've been keeping a crazy schedule for the last two weeks.

Monday: wake as early as possible which usually means 8 after my alarm has been going off for 2 hours. Go to day job. Leave at 3 so I can start at the restaurant at 4. Get home around 2-2.30am

Tuesday: wake up at 7 go school and work at the computer lab until 12.50pm. Play volleyball for about an hour. Go to class. Get home around 7-7.30pm with every intention of studying for organic (hasn't happened yet).

Wednesday: Wake up at 6 and go to day job. Leave at 5 to get to night class at 6. Get home around 9.45 with every intention of studying for organic (not here either).

Thursday: Wake up at 6 and go to day job. I can stay later now though since my Thursday night class won't meet again until the end of April. No organic this night either.

Friday: Same as the Wednesday schedule except I leave at 4:30 to get to organic.

Saturday: Either work from 12pm to 10pm+ or close the restaurant and work from 5pm to 2.30am

Sunday: Unintentionally but fairly predictably sleep all day until I have to get up to get ready for work. Work from 4-2am.

I'm pretty tired and I notice that I'm getting cranky at the restaurant again. By the end of the month I'll probably be a raving bitch. I hope not. I told my boss that I'm feeling a little burnt out and that I need one weekend any weekend off in the next month or so. We'll see if that happens.

As a result of my recent schedule I've developed a facial tic. No surprise since I spend most of the days staring intently into a computer monitor. Sometimes I look at the screen for hours before I remember that I'm suppose to give my eyes a break at which point I gasp audibly and stand straight up to stretch my legs while I'm at it. This use to startle the two women that I share the office with but I think they've gotten used to it. So now I have regular and frequent spasms on my left eyelid and underneath my left eyebrow. I've got a little over a month of this schedule until the semester ends. Hopefully, the rest of my body won't fall apart before then.

My love affair with the pomelo

I have this fear that I make up memories for myself, that the things I remember are amplified versions of what really happened. I remember my entire family riding on my father's motorcycle. At the time that was my father, my mother, my two older sisters and myself. My father died when I was two years old. I don't remember what he looks like. My mother has pictures of him but in my memories he is a body with no head or a body with surroundings but a hole where his head should be just like the pictures in the albums I use to flip through when I was younger. Some village old wife had cut his head out of all the pictures in order to keep him from haunting us so that there was a hole everywhere his head should be. So in my motorcycle memory all five of us are on this light blue motorcycle with my father at the helm. Behind him sat my mother and behind her were my sisters. I sat on the handle bars but that doesn't even seem possible to me so I must have been on his lap. I remember feeling the vibration and the bumping and I remember laughing. Over the years I convinced myself that I'm wee bit nuts and that I was probably too young to make memories then. I went to the Philippines when I was 20 and I asked around and his brothers and sisters remembered that bike and my mom remembered us all riding on it. I'm glad that memory is true. It's the only one I have of him.

I remember this gigantic fruit that use to fall from a massive tree, the kind they use to make you write essays about in SAT's, near the school-house where my mother taught. I remember that they were so big I could barely pick them up. When I did manage to get them I remember that for a long time I wasn't strong enough peel the rind to get to the sweet pink center because the skin was too tough for me to break. I've described them to people as basketball size grapefruits, only sweeter. About 5 years ago the local super-market started stocking pomelos.

They looked vaguely familiar. Like an oversized grapefruit but certainly no basketball. After I got through the rind and heard the crack as a opened it in half, I knew. This was it or a version of it anyway. This was my chimera, my basketball fruit. When I take the first bite of every pomelo I remember the Philippines. I remember the mugginess when a storm is just a drop of moisture away. I remember catching beetles, tying string to one of their legs, keeping them in match boxes and letting them out to fight somebody else's beetle. I remember that massive fruit tree and having to be careful when standing under it when the fruit was ripe because they'd been known to knock you down if they hit you just right when they fell from their own weight. I remember the motorcycle rides with the man with a hole where his head should be.

I want to be the shadow that moves gently through the night

YeeeeHAA! I got a job today working for the same company I interned with over the summer. I don't really know what it is except that I'll be working with some CAD programs. I start tomorrow morning. It's a temporary position so I'll be staying at the restaurant since I get my health insurance through them. Things at work have been getting pretty heavy lately. Ever sice my old GM left the love-fest that was the restaurant has turned into misery.

I called PT Tom this afternoon to tell him that the leg was all better and that I wouldn't be coming back.

It really sucks that I'm on spring break and I'm flat-ass broke. I have exactly $21.78 in my bank account and $32.27 in my pocket until Friday. This week would have been a great time to indulge in some gambling mania. Perhaps it's for the best that I'm so poor. The good thing about the new job is that it should allow me to save up some scratch for my Vegas trip, for Patty's wedding, in August. Me in Vegas. I shudder.

I still haven't done my taxes. It's partly because I'm not sure if my brother-in-law has loaded up Turbo Tax to the computer yet and partly because I'll probably have to pay the IRS this year.

Yikes! I just realized that this is going to be my only day off.

Book Binging: Books for those with vulvas

Yeah it's not as catchy but I don't like chic-lit and I don't understand why women embrace that term. I don't know any guy that goes near dick-lit.

I started this thing back in October to counter my re-occurring insomnia (it requires its own entry) and it works but what with being sick and all recently I stopped taking it and wouldn't you know it but my good friend insomnia is back. So, in the past week I've managed to get some reading done.

In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

Ahhh. Any book about the contentious but underlain with love relationship between sisters I can relate to. Especially if there's a younger sister with a penchant for borrowing without asking. That was me for a long time. It's a weird book. It went really fast. It sucked me in before I knew it and when it was done my only reaction was "oh". The characters and the ending were forced and shallow but it's nice.

Trading Up by Candace Bushnell

O.K. a not too subtle gossipy book about real people. Candace Bushnell is the Jackie Collins of the Upper West Side.

Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner

A much better read than In Her Shoes. It's funny and surprising and the characters are much better developed. The main character has a real bite to her.

Intimacy with my toilet boil

Yick. I hate being sick. I've caught a 24-48 hour bug that my little sister brought into our house last Monday. Her's lasted over 24 hours and when I took her to the doctor she ended up getting two I.V.'s of to get her fluid levels back to normal. My brother-in-law caught it Saturday and was fine by Sunday. My older sister and I both started "showing symptoms"* around 5 a.m. Tuesday. I thought I'd be clever and take some of the anti-nausea medication that the doc prescribed to lil' sis' before the worst of it got me. So there I am laying in bed feeling the mouth-watering awfulness build up, knowing that I just had to keep my stuff down for about 20 minutes before that damn pill dissolved and kicked in. Alas, 10 minutes later I bade it farewell as I gripped the edges of my toilet boil, lest I fall off the earth. There's nothing like a good ol' gastro-intestinal related virus to make you wish you cleaned your bathroom more often.

*read: vomiting our brains out every hour on the hour

Fred

I've started seeing a physical therapist to help me re-strengthen my leg. I hyper-extended my calf muscle a month ago while skiing. Enter physical therapist Tom. PT Tom went easy on me the first couple of times which was good since I had a notion that PT's are really sadists in the guise of care givers. But then I told him that I wanted to make sure that I was ok to start running. That's when he brought out the machines. My last session he strapped me to all sorts of things and really worked out my left calf muscle. At the end of the session he decided to rub my calf muscle and "break it up a bit". When he pushed up the leg to my jogging pants I realized in momentary horror that it is the middle of winter and I a)barely even shave during the summer never mind winter and b) tend to get veeeeeeeery ashy during the winter but then I got over it and only felt a twinge of sympathy?/regret? when he paused and then said, "I'm going to get some lotion."

He put his hand on my leg and immediately demanded, "What IS that?"

Me: That's Fred.
PT Tom: What's Fred?
Me: Fred's the knot in calf. He's been with me a long time.
PT Tom: oh

The Gates

My sisters and I took a quick trip to NYC this weekend to see The Gates in Central Park. I've been mulling it over and I came very close to dismissing it and assigning the "it was ok" response when asked what I thought. And now, I have to admit that it's a little more complicated than that. The concept itself is simple. Take a pretty thing. Repeat pretty thing 7,500 times. Repetion is comforting. It allows us time to adjust and absorb and apreciate. Repetion at consistant intervals provides a sense of continuity and stability.

When I looked at the gates I was mostly awed at the fact that it got done. I imagine the red tape of permitting and the logistics of the people and materials and ultimately felt grateful for the gift from Christo and Jeanne-Claude.