My Twenty-Something Quasi-Soap

Do not adjust your television set. Yes, the blog looks different. I'm not sure if I like it yet, but I'm trying it out. It may change again soon. But it's still me, and this is still my blog. Have no fear. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming... "Say what? Quiet? You know this year has been anything but quiet!" That's probably what you were saying when you read the title of today's blog. Yes, there was a lot of stuff that went down in 2010. I just didn't talk about it. Think about it. Look at the side bar. This makes post #11 for the entire year. The whole year! That's a far cry from the light years of '03 and '04. Maybe there hasn't been a lot that's happened this year. Maybe I just didn't feel like talking. I know that years from know, I'm going to look back on the 2010 posts and think, "God, what a depressing year!" I spent a lot of time talking about failure. Hell, the first post of the ye...

Don't know why I decided to get on here and type something...there's nothing new or good to report. Winter is finally settling in with its dark and cold, but the tree is lit up here in the house. May the tree remain upright this year. (Long story if you haven't been following along the past few years.) My birthday is in a little more than a month. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, as it just seems to be a reminder of Everything That I Should Have Accomplished By Now, Yet Have Failed To Do So. (Yes, the obnoxious Milne-esque capitalization was done on purpose.) I think I'll stop telling people how old I really am...it's easier to let them think I'm anywhere from 5-10 years younger than I really am. So...yeah...2010. Kind of a crap year, when all is said and done, despite my resolution to just be happy. But then again, things looked a lot different at the beginning of this year than they do at the end. Ugh, I'm just getting more depressed writing...

I hate the feeling that, at nearly 28 years old, I have accomplished little when I have, in fact, accomplished a lot. I hate the fact that accomplished is indeed spelled correctly, when it looks so wrong. I hate that people think that I am successful when I am so blatantly failing. I hate that I am holding myself to a standard that was perfectly understood and expected 30 years ago, but is nearly unattainable now. I hate the fact that I can't allow myself to be happy with my job and that I am so convinced that I will fail, even thought I am truly doing the best that I can with the few tools that I have been given. I hate that I am never happy about my appearance. I'm too skinny, or I look fat. My hair never looks right. I don't work hard enough at taking care of myself, especially that it's more important now than it ever was before. I hate that I feel so overburdened when, at the end of the day, I have so little to worry about. I hate the fact that I'm great at giv...

So where's my t-shirt, dammit? Here I am at 10:30 pm on Labor Day, fully exhausted from an amazing holiday weekend. I mean, I embarked on a 12 destination bar crawl of Asbury Park last night, then spent this afternoon on the beach. It was a great weekend. As I was enjoying the ocean breeze and sunshine today, I realized something: summer is over, and I'm still here. I survived this summer! While there are still things that I'm working out on my own with regards to the breakup with BBE, I didn't spend the summer crying over it. The new job has been nothing short of exhausting, but I'm learning every day and powering through epic interviewing sessions. (I once did 14 interviews in four hours...holy crap) I bar crawled in Asbury Park, saw a show in Atlantic City, partied in the Village, spent some time in Philadelphia, went to a drum corps show up in North Jersey, helped paint a kitchen down in South Jersey, took a half day field trip to downtown Newark, went outlet sh...

So, you know how I was talking about waiting for the other shoe to drop? Wondering what the next big monkey wrench was going to be? BBE and I broke up just about a week after my last post. ::audience gasps in shock:: Yes, it's true. And to be perfectly honest, I don't feel like saying much more about it. My main focus over these past six weeks has been moving on from the whole situation, and not dwelling on the particulars or rehashing everything for the sake of the blog helps me move on. Ok, you say, so BBE is out of the picture. What about PharmaWin? PharmaWin? More like PharmaBore. Booooooooooring. Digging through old files, finding things that pre-date the moon landing (I'm not even kidding), filing files, pulling files, copying files...files, files, files. Dude, it was so gosh-awful boring that I thought I was going to lose my mind! In the midst of my two week "omgwtf-I just broke up with BBE-I hate my new job-my life is a hot mess-and I don't know how to fix ...

Well, it's 8:10 on a Thursday night, which is an unusually strange time for me to blog. I'm usually catching up on my Hulu queue or watching tv or something on Netflix. Or I'm usually catching up on my ever-expanding list of time-sucking websites. Right now, I'm stalling because I need to make another attempt at cleaning my room. Hence, I blog. For once, I have good news! The temp gig that I've been at since February ends tomorrow. No, really - that's good news. I landed a long term contract job (fancy term for "temp gig") at a huge pharmaceutical company. Provided that it doesn't entirely suck (and I doubt that it would suck), I'll have gone from PharmaFail to PharmaWin in 6 months! (btdubs, the new company will be know as PharmaWin going forward unless it warrants a new code name on its own.) So I'll be doing HR file stuff at PharmaWin. BBE will start a new job on Monday too. We had to take a bit of a break from the apartment hunt, but we...

Ok, I get it. Americans have gotten fatter, and that's why the clothes are bigger. Supply and demand, and all that crap. And in order to clothe all of those ever increasing waistlines and bustlines, you have to make the clothes bigger. Well, stop it. NOW. You know why? You are sizing out tiny people like me who truly want to buy your clothes, but can't. I can't buy clothes because the rest of the world is getting bigger, and I'm not. Actually, if we went by my size tags alone in the past ten years, I've been shrinking. Shrinking! And everyone says, "Oh, it must be so nice to be so skinny! You can wear whatever you want to wear and always look fantastic in it!" Riiiiight. Gee, it's nice to have to pay extra money to have my pants re-hemmed because designers think that the only people who can possibly be wearing a size 0 must be at least 5'7". You know what I just love? Trying on pair after pair after pair of pants and having every. last. one. o...

..I'll hear that BBE and I have landed our apartment. Or maybe we'll hear that we just missed our chance again, after losing the most flipping amazing apartment we had ever seen last weekend. Maybe tomorrow I'll get the full time offer from my temp gig, and the offer will be decent money, and I'll have a permanent job with benefits again after nearly 5 months of being in limbo. Or maybe I'll get a call to reschedule the interview that was canceled last week. (The job I mentioned in my last post did not materialize. Eff you, huge investment bank. Eff you and your stupid big shot VP who played with his Blackberry the whole time. It's not my fault that your more important candidate ended up in Chile instead of Peru, and if it was really all that critical, then you should have just rescheduled.) Or maybe nothing will change on that front. It's just so frustrating to be so close to having things right again, but it's still out of reach. We're really so cl...

...and the more things change, the more they stay the same. We've been blessed with beautiful weather this week as a prelude for the season to come. We'll have rain off and on this week, but no one cares because it's not effing snow. Or a torrential nor'easter that destroyed every umbrella in NYC (I saw the carnage...the streets were littered with them the day after the storm). But enough about boring stuff like weather. As the weather has transitioned, so has the potential for very good things. I could possibly (but most likely not) have a new and better job lined up by this time next week. BBE has defected back to Jersey from the hostile environs of Central Harlem (yay!) and we're starting (or not starting) our apartment hunt today. My satellite radio has crapped out on me and must be shipped away for repair/replacement. The cd player in The Ramenmobile almost ate my Maroon 5 disc, resulting in my nearly having a panic attack in a Wendy's drive-thru because I ...

It has been one year and a week since the day that I was laid off from my job at the neighborhood bookstore. I almost just typed, "the day that my life fell apart," but I know that that is hyperbole in its purest form. While at many times over the past year and one week I truly felt that everything had completely unraveled, I know that such is not the case. Yes, my savings accounts are completely wiped out (one is even in the red, thanks to monthly maintenance charges). I do indeed have about $500 worth of unpaid medical bills, courtesy of my brief bout with pneumonia and a few grueling months of dental work. My credit card debt is so disastrous that there is only one other person on the planet besides myself and the credit card companies that know how far in the hole I am, and I hope to keep it that way. My health insurance coverage expired at midnight. Tomorrow I'm wearing pants to work that have been stapled at the hem and expertly colored over with a Sharpie marker. A...

...yeah, that was a pretty lame title. But today's post relates to one of America's favorite pastimes, ranked up there with IRS audits and root canals: air travel. Where to start, where to start... Ok, let's first rewind about a year and revisit the now famous Flight 1549 aka The Miracle on the Hudson, which I briefly reported on here . Nearly a year later, people can not get off of Captain Sully's jock. Seriously. Dude was Grand Marshall of the Tournament of Roses Parade, and TLC is airing an hour-long documentary tomorrow night about the flight. An hour-long documentary - about a 6 minute flight. Seriously. I can sum it all up in like, 45 seconds: Plane takes off from LaGuardia. Two minutes in, geese hit engines. Loud banging noises commence, then engines fall silent. Capt. Sully (to first officer): I got this, dude. My aircraft. Skiles: No prob, dude. Go for it. Capt. Sully (to control tower): Tower, we have a problem. We need to land this sucker immediately. Tower: ...