A comic(s) day

Big day today.

I got up at 9:45 this morning (I woke up several hours earlier, because my cat Louie was very kindly washing my exposed arm, but I didn’t get up—because I didn’t have to, and I’m enjoying that while I can), ate breakfast, took a shower, and then spent a couple of hours highlighting the Sunday classifieds and looking at job sites online. There are a few promising things that I intend to apply for; I entered the pertinent details in my jobs spreadsheet (yes, I have an Excel spreadsheet for my job search with multiple tabs by category; I don’t see how else one can keep track of all these various applications floating around! Also, I can refer to it if someone calls me back, because I’m afraid otherwise I will forget the company name, the job title/duties, etc., and end up sounding like an idiot when I don’t remember what I applied for).

I haven’t heard anything yet from the nonprofit job I applied for last week, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I am now having retroactive guilt for having taken so long to respond to job applicants at my old job. Sometimes it would take a few weeks, or even a couple of months. My idiot colleague who was in charge of the recruiting process before me would often never notify the applicants who weren’t selected. Why, as I believe I’ve asked here before, don’t companies realize that we would rather just know when a job has been filled? I won’t be angry if I didn’t get it. I’m not going to yell at you. I just want to know, so that if something else comes along, I can take it without wondering if you’re ever going to call me.

Yesterday I gave my sister a ziploc bag of earrings to take home. My old boss made them for me because she loves beading, and they’re all very pretty, but I just can’t wear them right now because they have negative associations. Every time I lift the lid on my jewelry box, there they are, staring at me, whispering away, reminding me that I quit my job and haven’t found another one. I can’t wear them. So I loaned them out. Let them talk to someone else for a while.

I had my family over for Father’s Day dinner yesterday. I spent about five hours cleaning the house (guess when the last time was I really cleaned? that’s right—Mother’s Day!), then showered, mixed up a batch of rolls, and dashed off to the grocery store while they were rising. I only had twenty-five minutes before my family was scheduled to arrive. The grocery store is close to my house, and I had a short but detailed list of what I needed, but I still impressed myself by returning within twenty minutes with two bags of groceries.

It was only when I began unpacking the groceries into the fridge that I realized that I had forgotten: the chicken. Because I was making parmesan chicken for dinner. Without the chicken, it would just be breadcrumbs and cheese on a plate. I had written chicken on my grocery list, and I was carrying my list as I walked around the store toward the chicken, but I veered off at the last minute into the freezer section because I remembered I was out of orange juice, and I took a different route to the produce section and didn’t go by the poultry. So I called my mom and arranged for them to stop and get a package of chicken breasts on their way over to my house. It worked out fine (especially for me, since they wouldn’t let me pay for it…), but still. What the hell is the matter with me?

I also did something crazy/OCD today: I read three-and-a-half weeks’ worth of daily comics. It took me over three hours. Yes, I take the daily newspaper—I know that a lot of people in my generation just get their news online, and that newspapers create a lot of recycling waste, but I really like getting the paper. It makes me feel like a real grownup. I like how, no matter how early or late I wake up, it’s always tucked into the handle of my screen door, waiting for me. I like to read the headlines on the front page and the metro section while I drink my orange juice in the morning. I like to spread out the living section on my dining table during lunch. I like the advice columns because my problems don’t seem so bad, and I like the comics because it’s like reading a paragraph from each of thirty different novels at a time, and I like doing the crossword puzzle and the sudoku and the jumble because they’re fun and good for my brain. (I do not do the word find. I think word finds are boring, and there’s a limit to how much time I can waste in a day. Apparently.)

Occasionally, I don’t get to the living section one day. Either I get up late and have to go somewhere all day, or I am reading an interesting book that I can’t put down, or I just don’t feel like it. So I set it aside for the next day. This may go on for another day or two. I try to stay current, because the more days I have to read, the less I feel like catching up. Somehow, despite being home most of the time these days, I got two weeks behind last month. And then I went to Seattle for the weekend, and before I knew it, I was almost four weeks behind! The stack on my coffee table was beginning to reach Crazy-Old-Person-With-Paths-of-Periodicals proportions. So I decided today was it. Yes, I could have recycled them without reading them and not suffered too grievously. Yes, there were probably better uses of my time (I’m trying not to think about what I could have done with those three hours, even though I probably would have just wasted them a different way). But I just couldn’t seem to let it go. So I sat down in the comfortable spot on the couch with the light on and a fresh glass of water, and Louie on my lap, and got caught up with my friends in Sally Forth, Luann, For Better or Worse, Pearls Before Swine, Mutts, and all the rest.

I really need to get a job.

And a parting note: why do we say we “find” or “lose” a job? It’s not like I misplaced my job. It’s not like my job ran away from home and I’m putting up posters on utility poles. And when I get another job, it won’t be because I discovered it fallen through the bars of a storm drain.