Retreat to the bottom of the sea

In 7 hours I will be done with this job. It is going to be the longest 7 hours of my life, I suspect. I don’t have a new job lined up, but at this point I am so ecstatic to be done with this one that all of my stress and worry is temporarily shelved.

I’ve spent the last week going out every night and barely staying awake during the work day. My old pals Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were here two weekends in a row, and spent 4 days here this week. Lucas’ friend Andre is TMing them right now, too, so Yenie and I pretended not to have day jobs and stayed out every night and had loads of fun. I’ve learned that I am frighteningly unskilled at both pool and Scrabble. My natural tendency to shit-talk during competition has proved to be utterly useless. By this time next year, I will be a pool shark. MARK MY WORDS.

My plans for the future: taking (hopefully) all of next week off, spending as much time as possible sleeping, reading and being in and around the ocean and with my boo. Tomorrow night I’m going to see the National and Sunday my parents are coming through to belatedly celebrate my Maaam’s birthday. Oh, sweet relief. No more wanting to throw myself down a set of stairs between the hours of 9am and 5pm.

Turn and face the strain

These last few weeks have been super busy and nutty. I’ve been going out and being much more social, which has been great, despite the lack of sleep. I’ve been to friends’ art openings and birthday parties, seen movies, walked around neighborhoods I’ve never spent much time in, seen some shows, met a lot of new people, and last night went to a big party my boss threw with an open bar where Julia and I drank a lot of vodka and started giving homeless people all of our money, staged photos in rickshaws, dumped bowls of fortune cookies into our bags and talked a lot of bullshit to total strangers who had to have been scared. Example: I told some dude a list of things Julia liked, which included Lola (her kitten), Marcella, eggs benedict and Target. I’ve spent most of the day working with the lights off.

While that end of things has been a nice change of pace from my usual routine of getting home at 5:30, immediately taking my pants off (sometimes changing into yoga pants, mostly just sitting around in my unders) and reading or watching awful TV until I go to sleep at 11, I am exhausted and defeated by trying to find a new job. I realized I’ve basically been on a job search since June ‘06. I would like it to be fucking over. I tend to get entirely consumed with stress and anxiety about the whole process, and cry and yell at the people I love most when thinking about how I’ll be able to pay my rent next month. It completely rules over my life and I just don’t know how to change that. I’ve had some interviews, but nothing has panned out because they’ve all ended up being part-time positions. My friend’s mom told me recently that I’m 23, have been working for the last 5 years, and need to take a break. I wish I could. She told me it seriously depressed her to know I have 2 weeks of vacation per year. I tend to agree. I am desperate to travel by myself for a year, get out of my comfort zone and go places where I don’t speak the language or know anybody. Unfortunately this takes a large sum of money which, at this rate, I will never have.

Top 5 places I want to go:

1.) India

2.) Nepal

3.) Thailand

4.) Nicaragua (obvs)

5.) Egypt

These are all from the Lonely Planet site, which is the most amazing porn ever.

In the meantime, I’ll be on craigslist looking for jobs in a panic.