5.31.2001
back to the *#)$@(*@)#(*$ drawing board
you guessed it. Yet again they picked the other candidate before me. "It was such a hard decision," says the CEO. "It almost came down to flipping a coin, practically. In the end, we picked the candidate that had a bit more analyst experience than you (he had slipped earlier on and it was clear she used to work for Seybold, which IS an analyst organization...I knew when that was the case that my chances were slim). But you are world class and I think you could have offered some great things for our organization...I wish we could hire both of you..."
Yah right.
1:46 PM | link | up| archives |
5.30.2001
milestones
This week and next are filled with little markers of my life and lives around me. I haven't posted much because I've fallen back into the funk that the waiting game does to me. Still waiting for word on this job and it seems more bleak as time goes on. They are deciding between myself and another candidate. They checked my references two weeks ago....they are still checking references on the other candidate. "It's a very close situation," the CEO tells me. Grrrr. On June 1, I am coming up on the start of my fifth month of unemployment. I freeze up when stuck in this position, paralyzed until I know one way or another. I'm very pessimistic about this one...this is exactly the scenario 1.5 months ago and they went with the other candidate.
My little nephew Cameron's second birthday is today. I'm sending him a kids Sit and Spin. I remember that my best friend Stephanie, had one as a child. We were always so jealous.I hope he likes it.
June 1 marks the start of a nine month anniversary for me...a happy anniversary that will precede the bit more dour anniversary of my birth on the fifth. I'll be 30 this year. Yep, that's right. Thirty, jobless, covered in Romeo kitty fur (I spend so much time with him these days) and feeling very apprehensive about my future. Still, they say that the thirties are your best years...I just wish that the start of them seemed brighter than they do now.
2:30 PM | link | up| archives |
5.18.2001
eating like a king
hehe, no pun intended. My kitty sure ate like a king last night, yet not a proud king, mind you, as he proved by diligently begging at the table with his paws on my leg asking for little bits of lobster.
I've never had lobster made at home before....and probably only had it once at a restaraunt, last summer with a friend who is, very sadly, no longer speaking to me (long story, entirely my fault, I tried to make amends and they were ignored so I have to lay in the bed that I made, sigh). Even then, the lobster was pretty well prepared for me, mostly stuffed and pulled apart so that the eating was only a small ordeal. Strange coming from a gal who has lived on a coastline for the last eight years.
When I came home there were two lobsters in my fridge, barely moving except when touched. I wasn't too sure about how I was going to handle two creatures being killed before my very eyes, dropped into the pot of boiling water headfirst. I was surprised. There was no squealing, no jumping around, just a silent settling into the pot. In a few short minutes the insectlike creature had been deposited onto my plate.
I have to admit I just sort of sat there and stared at it. Less than fifteen minutes prior it was wiggling around in my sink and now it was just lying there, pink and dead and hot on my plate. What on earth was I supposed to do with it? I wasn't sure...I had great trepidation. I have a hard time dealing with messy things (one of the reasons that I hate doing dishes...the wet, sticky, smushy food makes me cringe in disgust) and I knew that this thing would be MESSY.
I had help, of course, but the help just sat there and laughed at me half the time, highly amused at how inept I was at handling pulling apart my dinner. Pull here, he told me, twist that out...dig with your fork, use your knife, you HAVE to eat the green stuff, he says. The green stuff (or tamale as he said it was) was supposed to be good. The sight of the green goo oozing out of the pit of this creature made me queasy, to be honest. Still, I persevered and tackled the claws instead. They were apparently atypical of normal lobster claws in that they were chock full of meat (I had little mini lobster steaks on my plate after the digging). The meat was wonderful, buttery and smooth. We had a garlic butter to dip them in and that made them all the better. I had a lot of trouble with the tail and eventually passed the gauntlet to my highly talented cook who cleared the meat of the shell for me. I felt like a child that needed to be babysat. I suppose, when it came to the eating of a whole lobster though, I was like a child. I was baffled by it, shocked at the fact that I was going to, and in the end, delighted that I had.
It was a pretty good sized lobster though and I found myself full in no time, so dear Romeo was delighted when I passed down a few slivers for him. Talk about a HIGHLY spoiled kitty.
3:23 PM | link | up| archives |
5.17.2001
waiting game
have a lead in on a job at a small ERP software company in downtown Boston. Startup with just a few people but a really cool product. We'll see. They're making a decision soon and after the four hours that I've met with them it seems good. Then again, after I met with the last company for six hours, they decided on someone else, so I am loathe to get my hopes up. I'm trying not to think too much about it, to worry or be concerned. It's amazing though, how the job market has changed in the last few months. Yesterday's Boston Globe had an interesting article about the current economy, the job market, retail sales and the like. How its not actually getting better at all, sigh.
Seems like there is a new
Angel of Macaroni in town as well. Don't get me started. I lived in Boise ID and was the subject of reverse prejudice for the years that I lived there so I have lots of opinions about it all. I shiver when I see the little missionaries on the T...boy would I give them an earful if they got a hold of me. Won't see me barefoot and pregnant with 12 children so I can populate spirit worlds. And baptizing my dead ancestors into the faith (and you wonder why they are the geneology experts of the world--its not out of curiousity, thats for sure)? Give me a break. Stop it Crystal, stop it. Zip, zip zip it, and so there, I've said my peace. Not arguing religion on my site. Politics maybe. Religion no.
But on the cool end of things, my buddy Jack has a great new product that has been launched from his company Birdhouse Software. Go check it out. It's called SavedMemories.com and you can create your own photo albums to share with family, friends or the world.
11:40 AM | link | up| archives |
5.16.2001
flurry
of posts on my Bush rant if you want to check out the discussion below.
For now, random Crystallyn update:
~~Joanie came over for dinner this last weekend...mmm yum. We had a great time eating garlic and beer soaked mussels and yummy pasta as well as strawberry margs and strawberry wine soup (recipe to come in the summer fruit soup recipe section that I'm working on...if you have a favorite fruit soup recipe, send it on in).
~~Heading in for my second interview with a small startup this afternoon. Cross your fingers.
~~Discovered this nifty site: The Dead Letter Office
~~Been playing far too much Everquest but well...when you have enough time off and you have a good time doing it... Here's a great pic of my character (lvl 42 enchanter) in front of a giant fort right before the giants get ready for battle. I've always been a gamer...PC games, video games, playstation. Started early on when my father brought Zork home on a behemoth dinosaur of a PC back in the very very early 80s. Now the games are so amazing...full worlds with thousands of people playing, their own politics and economies. I'm always amazed at the new developments on the gaming front. I wonder what it will be like when I'm old and grey...no bingo for me...just plug a game into my spinal column and I'll be happy.
1:02 PM | link | up| archives |
5.12.2001
amazed
In this morning's Boston Globe, Bush "showed little interest yesterday in finding a way to lower gasoline prices immediately. At a White House news conference, he said the government's response to the high prices should be to lower taxes overall, so consumers can better afford to foot the bill." He is then quoted as saying: ''The best way to make sure that people are able to deal with high energy prices is to cut taxes, is to give people more of their own money, so they can meet the bills, so they can meet the high energy prices."
Go Bush go! I mean really, who gives a rats ass about the energy crisis? Who cares that the hole in the ozone layer is now three times the size of Australia? Who cares about our children drinking arsenic? California having blackouts? So what?
Our nation's leader certainly could care less. His solution? Lower taxes so we can "afford to pay those bills." YEAH! Lower our taxes instead of fixing the problem. This way big business can still have their due share. I mean, why lower the gas rates? That would be taking money away from Exxon for god's sakes and heaven forbid that we contemplate that...
At least the rest of America is starting to realize what a monkey this man really is. Still, I have to give him some credit for being adept at stating the obvious and refusing to answer questions--when "asked how he would respond to suspicions that his energy policy grew out of his oil industry experience, said: ''I would tell the American people, I'm going to tell the truth when it comes to energy - that we have a serious problem.'' "
But I'll leave you with some of the latest bits of wisdom from our nation's leader, courtesy of Slate.com:
"First, we would not accept a treaty that would not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made sense for the country."—On the Kyoto accord in an interview with the Washington Post, April 24, 2001
"Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—Declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001 (ummm since when was Mexican a language?)
"It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I think it's a mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there and take a look at it, and you can make the determination as to how beautiful that country is."—Press conference, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001
Anyone want to head up to the North Pole with me soon? Great fun will be had by all!!
1:09 PM | link | up| archives |
5.10.2001
monthly disclaimer
I should probably just put this somewhere permanent on my site as people never seem to go back through the archives after I have reposted. The other solution, of course, would be to take down my pictures...but many friends and family visit and it is a great way to have a bit more of me when I'm far away.
And so, here it goes for all you men out there looking at the pictures and making huge assumptions about me (especially you foreign ones who never read the blogs, sigh...but I can hope).
1. I am NOT single.
2. I am NOT looking for a boyfriend.
3. I am NOT looking for a girlfriend.
4. Because I have a pretty face posted on the Net doesn't mean that I want people writing me asking for loveletters and more pictures. Does it say anywhere that I do? No, it does not.
5. I am NOT looking for penpals (it's enough for me to keep up with these blogs and my other email, sorry).
6. I ONLY speak English.
7. I DO NOT speak Portugese.
God I sound like a bitch when I write all this...I feel like a bitch, but you know, sometimes it comes down to that--and I have to be a bitch. Still, my site is always a wonder to me...how people (mostly men) just assume things about me from looking at my picture. I have a pretty face, but I'm no supermodel by any stretch of the imagination. I would wager that more than half of the guys who write me would change their mind if they saw me in person and realized that I am not the size 8 that they pictured matched with my face. In fact, I know this to be so...when I was using an online personals service last fall, most of the men changed their mind after meeting me, and it wasn't because of my lack of sparkling personality. It was because I'm not going to be wearing a bikini with them on the beach in the summers. Pretty damn shallow, but true. Not all men are like that...so don't think that I'm making generalities, but many men are. I've suffered my whole life having to wade through those types, finding the good ones who don't mind a girl with curves and meat on their bones.
The thing is, I've waded through them. I'm done wading and I've found the good guy...the right guy. And that's that. I'm not on the market anymore. I'm not dating anyone. I'm not engaging in any long distance or any local relationships. I have one, you see and I am happy...deliriously happy and content.
12:09 PM | link | up| archives |
5.8.2001
disconnected thoughts
~Seeing men with their hair covered in plastic is always really weird even if it IS outside the minty smelling NECCO plant on Mass Ave, which, I might add, smells MUCH better than their chocolate branch on my street which makes the most foul, sugary, cheap chocolates you can buy.
~Leaving my contacts in overnight is NOT a good idea, especially if I intend to have a crying, woe-is-me-I-am-poor-and-why-won't anyone-just-interview-me-goddammit, meltdown when I wake up. Reasons why I have a headache and my eyes feel sore and tired.
~But on a better note, I lost four pounds this last week. If I can't control the rest of my life, at least I can control that bit of it.
~There are few things more disgusting than seeing a man walk around with his gut hanging over his belt and OUT FROM UNDER his t-shirt. *shiver*
~I wish I could figure out how to make the dotcomments work on my page since blogvoices crapped out on letting me show comment counts. This is where I get frustrated about my sometimes limited HTML skills. I wish I knew how to understand the javascript bits better. Or I wish I knew Flash like Niki does, or at least had the patience to learn.
~That all-over tingly feeling in my legs after a long hard walk along the Charles, in excellent company I might add, is a good feeling to have. Especially when the day itself is so perfect.
~Reminder to self--don't drive down Main Ave from Mass Ave toward Kendall...the construction sucks.
~Check Cashing places are so icky. I had to go pay part of my gas bill at one of them in Central square (the bill is at $982 for the last four months) today to prevent shutoff and the place was just gross. The women behind the bulletproof glass were surly. The carpet is covered in gum stains. The walls were painted a sickly yellow and there was a defunct stand up video game with a weird name like Goblins and Giggles or something like that standing next to a line of bubblegum and candy dispensers. I was the only person in there, thank god. I didn't want to know what other types of people go in there. I hate Central Square in Cambridge. I think it's the most degraded part of the city...it's dirty, full of smelly people and I never feel "safe." It's the only part of the city that I would hate to be in at night, regardless of all the bars in the area. The whole place needs a renovation. For the most part it just creeps me out. I cannot figure out, for the life of me, why it is such a "cool" part of town.
~Even when things are really frustrating for me, I find that the fact that I am loved and supported makes all the difference in the world. There are no words to say thanks.
~How on earth will I pay off my parking tickets before my birthday next month...when my drivers license needs renewed?
~On a very sad note, my aunt passed away this weekend from liver cancer. I didn't know her well at all, but I think she is someone that could have been a kindred spirit. She was an artist, a lover of nature and life and she left behind four boys, all married with children, and a husband--my mother's brother--who was so devoted to her. I had a sense that they were terrific partners. Her passing will be a tremendous blow to him and to my cousins, who I probably last saw when I was maybe 13 or so. She learned that she had the cancer probably 6-8 months ago. Such a terrible devastating disease that cancer is, sigh. No one deserves to have something like that happen to them.
4:29 PM | link | up| archives |
5.7.2001
Anyone know where I can find
a journal from 1000journals project? I would love to get my hands on one of them and contribute where I could. With both a writer and an artist in the house it would be wonderful for us to contribute to the project. And what a GREAT idea! This is one of those ideas that I am just saying to myself, Damn...why didn't I think of it first? With my fascination for the world around me, my voyeuristic side and my love of words and art, it is just the sort of thing I would be so excited to do.
Years ago my dear friend Donnie and I would exchange journals. I would write one for him and he would write one for me. An extended letter to each other, with words, pictures, restaraunt matchbooks posted in, artwork, scraps of places we had been. I love to go look at that little slice of his life, nearly eight years ago and see how he was different then than he is now.
1:23 PM | link | up| archives |
5.4.2001
monkey work
And I'm doing it. Answering phones, scheduling appointments, filing. I haven't done work like this since I was fresh out of college in my first admin job. Sigh. But when times get tough, the tough pick up and so I am temping to supplement the unemployment while I look for full time work. I'm temping two days a week, Thurs and Fri at a local hospital in their outpatient pyschiatry unit. Not the word outpatient...denoting that they don't keep people locked up where I am at, there is no security guard, just a few troubled, depressed patients that come to the doctors here for therapy and medication. Being at a hospital is interesting though. The last time I had work connected to any sort of medical practice was when I worked for a community mental health center a few years back as part of their crisis hotline. But that was still different...it wasn't connected to a hospital at all.
Hospitals are curious places...and I'm talking about the structure of them, not the goings on. They are always so mazelike, so convoluted. Every time they add a new building, they build some freaky sort of connector for you to get from one building into the other. For me to get to the main lobby from where I work, I go down two flights in an elevator, take a left into what looks like a basement corridor practically, then right down a long wheelchair ramped hallway to another seemingly dead end hallway with an elevator that takes me down one floor and deposits me in the main hospital. It's actually rather creepy...there is no one around, so many quiet cubbyholes and me and my paranoid mind imagines some crazy psyhco patient who managed to get a scalpel and hide around a corner for when I showed up. I've seen too many horror movies, I know.
I think that often people in hospitals become cold and jaded. Secretaries especially. One of the patients here, a very talkative man who most would see as annoying, told me about his plans for the weekend. He then commented that I was different than the rest of the people around here...I at least smiled and was interested...or, as he put it, a great actress. If I stayed here would I become cold and impatient? Would I become jaded and uninterested? I would hate to think so.
Hehe...funniest of all about my temp job today at least, is the little old lady who cleans. I can only figure out that they have given her the job to help her out. She has emptied my trash three times today and has been all over the floor cleaning here and there. She seems sort of lost in a way, as though she doesn't have much to do. Short, quiet, wizened...I can't quite tell how old she is. She might be 50 or she could be 70. I have a feeling that she is someone who looks much older than she actually is.
I also got yelled at for using my cell phone in the hospital. They say there are signs everywhere but I never saw one until partway through the day when I was in the bowels of the building next door on the way to the mailroom. I suppose it makes sense....don't want the cell waves to interfere with medical equipment. Still they need to put more signs up, methinks.
I can tell you this much though...I would go MAD if I were doing this monkey work more than twice a week. Mad mad mad, I tell you. As it is, its a change of pace from what I was doing before, so at least there is that. I'm out of the house and I'll have an extra $150 a week that I didn't have before.
Funny (or actually not so funny), as a temporary, I make more than most of the workers at Harvard University, despite the university's over a billion dollar endowment.
12:14 PM | link | up| archives |
5.1.2001
Happy May Day!
Encarta describes this spring holiday as: a name popularly given to the first day of May, which for centuries has been celebrated among European peoples. May Day festivals probably stem from the rites practiced in honor of Flora, the Roman goddess of spring. May Day is currently celebrated as a festival for children marking the reappearance of flowers during the spring. It is traditionally greeted with joyous dancing around a garlanded pole, called a maypole, from which hang streamers held by the dancers.
Found at another site about May Day is some peculiar rituals of some Acadians, including the making of dandelion salad and the gathering of morning dew to prevent aging and promise beauty. Those nutty Acadians.
When we were children, the house in which we grew up had a big wooded area that ran in a long strip behind the houses on our street. We called it the greenbelt, which is what it literally was, a long belt of greenery that provided us hours of fun as youngsters. Every spring the greenbelt was filled with bright colors and thousands of wild flowers--buttercups, purple bellflowers, yarrow, mountain bluebells, forget-me-nots, yellowbells, purple chicory flowers, sunny blanketflowers, Douglas's Triteleia, wild onions, larkspur, and butter-and-eggs, a pretty flower that looks like yellow snapdragons. My Grandma Byers had a box full of cards that she had kept over her lifetime that she gave to us. Valentines, gift cards, get well, holiday cards and the like. Some of them were antiques and a paper collector would have died to know that we cut them all up to make our own little cards. It started one May Day, but soon turned into a weekly springtime ritual We would pick bunches of flowers and make a card and then leave them on the neighbor's doorsteps, ring the doorbell and run away. The card was always signed, The Purple Pansy Company, a name that I picked because pansies were my favorite flower as a child. Once a week we would do this...just enough time for the flowers to wilt and be thrown away.
Every year on May Day, my mother sends me a bouquet of flowers from the Purple Pansy Company. Its a sweet gesture, her turn to give something back to her girls who made her so happy with our little tattered bouquets. It always means that we are in the heart of spring when those flowers turn up. I had forgotten about May Day, as I always do, but sure enough, the doorbell rang and the man was holding a wonderful plant arrangement of purple pansies, red begonias and primroses. Thanks mom.
Gorgeous day today. 80 degrees. I'm going to meet up with my dear friend Payman who I haven't seen in an eon or so. I ran into another excoworker today, Keo, during my walk and last week, a designer, Jeff, who was heading to work--we rode together on the T. And Joanie and I had a great time watching the Boston Cubs kick the tar out of the Cambridge Cardinals at a game on Sunday morning. I realize that I have really been cooped up and kept inside...haven't kept touch with friends like I should. I do feel a renewed energy and it is because of the weather, the warmth, the heat, the delirous onset of a new season. The trees are gorgeous and in bloom, the boats sailing on the Charles, and just yesterday I pulled down all my summer clothes and put the majority of my winter clothes away. In doing so I realized that I could clothe an army in now defunct dot.com company t-shirts. I feel the winds of change upon me and I have a new energy that I hope I can sustain.
I start my temp job this week. Just two days a week--Thursday and Friday--enough to enable me to keep my unemployment and have some xtra cash. The kicker is...its at a psych ward of a local hospital. Should be interesting.
3:14 PM | link | up| archives |
