I might have a new job. Wish me luck? =D

I feel so lonely.

Water's receded. Shortest lived flood ever, I guess, for which I'm grateful. A few of the neighbors got a couple of inches of water in their houses, though. I hope they have shop vacs/flood insurance.

OH SHI-

Montgomery is flooding right now. I mean, like, RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. My house is on a hill so we're okay for now, but the lower streets in our neighborhood are all flooded out. My sister tried to run for necessities and saw cars under water in some place, holy shit.

If I have to hit the roof, I'm going to be miserable. :

OH SHIT I HAVEN'T UPDATED IN FOREVER.

Life for me has sucked for the past couple of months. Lost my job at the coffee shop (neither myself nor management were at fault, it was just a random circumstance that put everyone in a bad position). Would have gone job hunting immediately, only I injured my back at the same time and ended up bedridden for a week and a half. I landed practically the first job I applied to, but the catch was that it was a waitress job at the Waffle House.

I am not cut out for waiting tables.

A few of you on my FList probably already know this, but I have both bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Working at the Waffle House was so stressful that by the end of my first week, I was having at least one (if not two or three) panic attacks a day even on my off days, I had fallen behind in class, and I was losing even more sleep than usual. It got to the point where my doctor eventually had to add yet another prescription to my already robust pharmacy and advised me to pull out of school for the rest of the semester and quit the Waffle House.

So, now I'm jobless and out of school. You'd think that it would have cut down on my stress levels, but no. I'm running out of money I earned waitressing, I'm either under- or overqualified for just about every job in the city and since summer's coming up I'll have to compete with high school kids for retail and food service positions, I haven't been able to work on my portfolios at all and I just generally feel like a failure.

God damn it, I was supposed to graduate this semester!

Anyone have any stress management techniques they can share with me? I would greatly appreciate it. (In b4 "DRINK MOAR!")

This is fucking disgusting.

How is it that animals like this are allowed to wear a badge? 22-year-old Oscar Grant was shot in cold blood by a police officer while being handcuffed. The young man was unarmed and restrained at the time; videos captured by onlookers at the train platform (many are available on YouTube; Feministing.com and postbourgie have a couple of them on display) show an officer kneeling on top of Grant while another stepped back and fired his weapon once.

These pigs are a disgrace to the uniform, and they should not only be fired, but prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

So, I just watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the first time. I'm in love with it, yeah, and it's so short. D= I mean, I'm not a fan of shows that extend forever, especially not webshows, but I'm kind of sad that it wasn't a couple of episodes longer. Still, it's just SO COOL.

( I love how Dr. Horrible/Billy's story developed. )

Mmm, I love the feeling of new fandoms. ♥

Finally got my gold chocobo. I had taken to naming them after characters and AIs from Red vs. Blue, so the final product ended up being called "Meta." Y'know, given that she's an amalgamation of the abilities of all the chocobos that went before her. I still have South, Tex, Church, Maine, and Delta (Sheila and Tucker were released after producing a string of blue chocobos, despite being class A). I'm thinking about releasing Maine, though, so that I can go out and catch a piss-poor bird and name him Caboose. ♥

Math final next week. I did really poorly on the first test and a couple of the quizzes, but the second and third tests I did rather well on, so I'm feeling a little more confident. I MIGHT JUST PASS THIS COURSE OMG. If I can scrape a D, I'll be good, but if I am truely made of win and success I might just get a C.

Mmm...thinking about changing my icons again. FFVII, maybe?

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET A FUCKING BLACK CHOCOBO?

Srsly. I just turned the PS2 off after playing about 10 hours straight trying to breed Chocobos so I can get my gold and go to all the materia caves. But my green and blue birds WON'T FUCKING BREED black chocobos like I need them to, which means that I won't have a black chocobo which needs to breed with a "wonderful" class yellow chocobo to produce a gold.

In short, I spent ten hours building up my stable, and still no fucking gold chocobo.

I haven't updated my blog(s) nearly as much as I used to (or should). I've simply been busy--math class, working anywhere between 35 and 45 hours a week, fretting over everything from finances to where the hell my other stocking went...my brain has just overloaded, and...yeah. So, for the sake of getting some of this unnecessary bullshit out of my head, I'm updating now.

1) The thing that's been weighing on me most heavily this year is, or rather, was, the election. I spent a lot of my free time following everything; some of it was dissappointing (McCain's appointment of Palin as his VP candidate in particular made me RAGE, since it was obvious he counted on women being too fickle or too stupid to check her political views and instead simply vote with their vaginas). Some of it was pretty cool (first minority president, woohoo!).

I'm downright depressed over the passage of Prop. 8 and several other anti-gay bills, as I see it as a severe lack of separation between church and state that harms an already marginalized portion of the population.

I am, however, thrilled that many anti-choice ballot initiatives failed. While I don't see myself needing an abortion ever, at least I have enough sense not to go around telling other women they can't have one, either. Fortunately, it seems that a great majority of U.S. citizens feel the same way.

2) The dreaded MATH. This will be my...third time, I think, taking Finite. I completely bombed my first test, and we just took our second last week and haven't gotten our grades back yet. I'm estimating that, if I got all the problems that I was able to work correct, then my max grade is an 88. Not too shabby, but if I made any lower then I'm going to have to pull straight 100s on the third and final exams in order to pass the course. I've been going to tutoring, but...we'll see.

3) Work is, for lack of a better work, unnerving. With people freaking out over the financial crisis--a recession that would have been minor and temporary if people had just kept their heads on their shoulders and carried about life as normally as they could--has left the coffee shop in a bit of a slump. Tips are pretty good, because those customers who still come in see how dead we are and I guess they feel sorry for us, but we're down to anywhere between $200 and $400 profit per day, a significant decrease from the $600+ we used to pull in. This has left us with a five person staff, and we're hoping we can even keep that.

On top of that, I keep getting these crazy bastards when I close alone at night. One guy hung around for a couple of months; he had serious anger management issues and focused a lot of that hate on women. He flipped out on me more than once, which put me in a bad situation because if he had done anything worse than yell at me, what could I do? I might not get to the panic button in time, and I'm not allowed to do anything else on shift. Not to mention that, even if I did hit the panic button, if I didn't fight back I'd either have been assaulted or worse long before the cops showed up.

And then there's the everyday crazies, like the guy who yelled at me because it's store policy not to give out change for paper (even though I'd given him change already) because, apparently, the paper boxes out front mean that I personally am enticing him to buy papers. Even though I'm not the owner of the shop, nor does the boss own this building or the paper boxes, and the real estate company we rent from is responsible for their placement in front of our store. I don't know how or why all these assholes keep finding me, but it's gotta stop.

4) Everyday shit. I've been trying to maintain something similar to a social life and pay attention to myself every once in a while. I finally got that second set of lobe piercings I wanted done even though I probably should have spent that money on something else =D. I had let my hair grow out quite a bit from the super-short pixie I got about five months ago, but it was starting to bother me a bit. I've been fascinated by 1920s fashion, so I went out and got a bob a la Louise Brooks. It's pretty cute, too, which is great because it kinda-sorta distracts people from how awful the condition of my skin is right now.

Oh, yeah, the medicine I take for my...er, disorder? One of the side effects is increased skin sensitivity. I can't use normal soap or facial cleansers on my face, nor can I use astringent, toner, or moisturizer. So, my horrible combination skin stays broken out; the only thing I've been able to use to control it is antibacterial hand soap (which just dries my skin out horribly and makes it itch, leading to other problems) and witch hazel. I don't even want to know how bad it would be if I had to stop using those, too. Mmm...I've been using Bath and Body Works shampoo, but it's starting to cause problems for my scalp now, so I'm going out in a little bit to grab some Burt's Bees shampoo, since organic shit seems to be the only stuff I can use without breaking out in acne, hives, or some combination of the two. I can't use deodorant, and have instead taken to using baby powder. I have to stop and reapply it if I get too active and sweat during the day, but it's better than being stinky and certainly better than sporting a constant rash. D=

Been replaying FFVII when I'm not working or studying lately, too. There's a lot that I've forgotten about the game in terms of equipment and materia combinations, so I'm having to experiment and relearn all my old tricks. At least I got Cloud chosen by the Don? =D

My car is dying a slow and painful death. I'm kind of...trying to coerce it to hang on, both because I can't afford a new car and because, quite frankly, I love Fish and don't want to see him go. It's very sad. My PSOne and my other laptop (the one I recieved for Christmas about two years ago in lieu of the usual assortment of gift cards from my family) died recently, too, which makes me glad I have this old 2003 clunker left alive. I need to get a new laptop, since this one's age makes me fear for its continued existence daily.

Other than that...nothing much has been going on. It doesn't look like a lot on paper, but having it all in my face at once has been pretty overwhelming.

I VOTED!

So, how about you guys, FList? Have you cast your ballots yet? =D

72 hours sans sleep. Insomnia sucks. Contemplating finishing off the wine from July 4th celebration in order to pass out.

...Nah. Probably not any healthier that way than staying up. Maybe I'll get to pass out soon.

I start back to work tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it; I also start school back next Monday, and I'm not looking forward to that. Fucking math, it's the only thing keeping me from my God damn diploma.

In the next couple of weeks, I'm getting a few more holes in my head--a second set of lobe piercings and an industrial. I've wanted a second lobe piercing since I got my first set of holes at age eight, and even had my left ear done in high school while on vacation out of state (in Florida, apparently the minimum age to get piercings done without parental consent was like...16, or something; too bad the facilities were nasty and I ended up constantly getting infections, I ended up having to just take the earring out and let it heal over). But, I just wasn't able to do it before. I know I shouldn't be spending money on something most people would find useless, but for me, body modification brings me closer to turning my own body into the work of art that I feel it should be.

I am holding off on that tattoo, though. Not until after graduation, when I'll have a steadier paycheck and schedule and can afford three to five consecutive sessions.

Not much has been going on lately. Been having some trouble with financial aid (getting fixed, no worries), been hating my job--you know, the usual. Stopped in for coffee at my old place of employment, since I'm sick of Waffle House coffee at 3 a.m. when I really shouldn't be drinking that swill, and came across some...well, depressing news. The same manager that drove me to quit set up one of her friends at the other store as a manager, and together they've created a revolving door wherein they lose employees almost as fast as they hire them. D got fired and banned after the bitch picked a fight with him then went tattling to the big boss; S, H, and A are both just sick of the two manager's shit and turned in their notices. One guy got hired, then quit before his shift was over his first day of work. The health score on the shop I used to work at dropped three points to a 95. Now, that doesn't seem so bad, but when I worked there with the old staff and no manager, we kept the place spotless, and the score never dipped below 98 and only went that low because the concrete floor looked like shit. It was clean, it just didn't look it because of the awful paint job.

The absolute icing on the cake is what Shit Manager #1 pulled over on the Boss; okay, so, they started doing drink deliveries not long after I left, right? Well, a few weeks into that, Shit Manager #1 started going on a lot of drink runs, but mysteriously there wasn't a lot of money coming back into the store. As it turns out, she was going out and advertising for the cooking store that's just opened up next door, setting herself up for a new job while on the clock at the coffee shop. That's just a fucking bitch move right there. The boss eventually found out, but I can't remember if it was after she'd quit or if he fired her before she could put in a notice, but regardless...bitch move.

About the only good news I got was that J is coming back.

I liked that job until that last manager was hired. I liked most of the regulars, I liked all but one of my coworkers, I even liked my boss in spite of the fact that I don't think he liked me. The fact that everything has gotten so bad there bugs the hell out of me. I hate this fucking telemarketing job anyway, so I'm thinking of asking for my old job back for at least the amount of time it would take to clean up the store, train a new staff, and get the remaining bad manager to realize she needs to back off and chill out. If the big boss doesn't want me around after that, I'll go elsewhere, but something needs to be done. =/

Almost done with the semester. Almost. Almost. My film journal needs to be finished and e-mailed in by midnight tomorrow.

I should be finishing it up right now. But I'm not. I'm a procrastinator of the worst sort. Someone kick me in the ass so I can get up and do what I need to do.

I want to paint something so bad, but I don't know what to paint. I'm probably going to spend half the summer just trying to figure out what to apply to any of the twelve or so spare canvases lying around the house. Which...I don't really mind, I haven't been able to get anything out for a long time. Maybe I can work out this awful block and do something...I dunno, meaningful?

I have a rather healthy VHS collection from back in the day when I didn't have to pay for my own gas, food, and other expenses, but for the past couple of years I wasn't able to watch them because I didn't have a working VHS player. In fact, for about a year after the DVD side of my old dual deck what I've been able to watch has been limited to what I could actually play in my PS2, which I got used and had a ridiculously high parental setting. I like Sorcerer Hunters, but there's really only so many times I could watch it in a row before it became stale. Anyway, my sister bought a dual deck this week, and I am loving it. I was able to watch Paradise Kiss last night, which wouldn't play in my PS2; I'm watching a VHS of the old DiC dub of Sailor Moon right now. It's great fun, and really...the DiC dub isn't bad, as far as dubs from that era go. Usagi/Serena's voice is actually appropriately annoying, in fact.

Anyway, fun times with electronics. I'll probably watch Dracula or something after this.

Telemarketing is probably one of the lesser evils when it comes to part-time employment in this city--I could have been working for Starbucks, after all--but some of my coworkers have been assigned a political patch urging people to support a bill that would, essentially, strip U.S. citizens of their basic right to privacy under the guise of fighting terrorism. One version of this bill has already been passed, if what I've been told is correct, that requires a warrant in order to start the wiretap. (Not that it matters, apparently most of the warrants are approved.) The new version being passed lacks that particular clause, which is...troubling, to say the least. Discussing this patch, my friends and I decided that the greatest revenge that a concerned patcher could take without being fired would be to exercise their workplace right to not use their real name when doing this shit.

"Hello, this is Takhisis, Queen of Darkness. I'm calling to inform you of..."
"Hello, this is Lucifer Morningstar, I'd like to talk to you about..."

Of course, if our psuedonyms were too extreme, we'd get fired anyway. So I suppose I should be glad I'm still doing opinion surveys and not politcal patches. =D

I've spent this week in a state of frantic scramble, and so I have no idea what's going on with any of you out there in FList-land. Uhm, hi? =D

What I've been up to this week:

1) School. Same old, same old there.
2) Job hunting. I put in my two week notice at the coffee shop last Friday and hit the pavement. I got a telemarketing job through a temp agency--$8 an hour to annoy people during dinner? Hell yes, I'm doing it! By my calculations, I can earn $224 a week before taxes, which for a part-time job is fat bank.
3) Getting ready for and attending a wedding. I spent just about every last penny in my account buying something to wear, make-up, thigh-highs and a garterbelt, boots (which it turns out I couldn't wear anyway; the leather was too stiff for me to even move my ankles, which will require me to break them in manually over the course of the next couple of weeks), a Target gift card and something nice to stick it in. Really, buying stuff for myself/getting the present was easy, just expensive and time-consuming. Trying to find some make-up for my sister (she is ridiculously hard to color match for, corpse-pale as she is) and engaging on the fruitless search for an alternet pair of shoes for her was a struggle. As it is, she ended up having to go with the black leather-thonged, 2.5" wedge sandles she'd gotten years ago to wear with...shit, something, I dunno.

It paid off, though, when I got to see "C" walk down the aisle. Now, she's a pretty girl in her everyday attire anyway...but that day, she was drop dead gorgeous. Which was good, because it enabled me to focus on her and "A" while their preacher diverged from the topic at hand to sermonize about the inviolable sanctity of Man-Woman Marriage. Is that really an everyday part of Episcopalian weddings, or was that just a recent addition on the pastor's part due to the current political climate? I didn't ask "C", and I won't, because I don't want to nitpick her wedding. Still curious, though.

Oh, and the wedding itself? It was held at the zoo. =D In the conservatory, right by the lion pens. The male lion got pissy at one point and started roaring, I'm guessing because the music at the reception was really loud. Sux 2 b him?

EDIT: Oh, Mela, I finally got FFVII mailed off to you on Friday. I was busy this week, so sorry it took me so long. It should get to you by Monday, Tuesday at the latest. Have fun. =3

I'm supposed to be in math class right now, but I woke up late and decided to just not go rather than end up coming in half an hour late (or coming in only fifteen minutes late having not showered, eww). I know, I'm bad. D=

So, because my film studies class isn't until 1:40 this afternoon, I started clicking around on the web, checking out news sites and hobby forums and whathaveyou, and generally doing a whole lot of nothing. (The mall opened just a few minutes ago, so after this post I'll go put in a few apps at some of the stores I know will be hiring for the summer.) My mind started to wander, and after a while I started thinking about body modification.

Now, let me start off with a disclaimer: I am wandering in on the shallow end of the body mod subculture. I have no tattoos, no facial or body piercings; my ears are pierced, but the second piercing on my left ear kept getting infected (unsanitary piercing palor + decided lack of pure surgical steel earrings as opposed to S.steel plated copper posts = eww oww gross get it out) so I removed it and let it heal over. I have always admired people who mod however, for having the balls to alter their bodies in ways that mainstream society may not always approve of. This is especially true of people who have the good taste necessary to transform themselves into living works of art.

Which brings me to what I was thinking about when I started this post. For the last couple of years, I've been considering getting a tattoo. This would be a rather large back piece featuring clockwork wings, gears and all, stretching from my shoulders down to the bottom of my ribcage and spanning the entire width of that area at the very least. The only thing that has prevented me from going through with this is the expense of such a project and the fact that I don't know any tattoo artists well enough that I could trust them with something like this; how many people ask for archaic mechanical elements in their body art, I wonder? But I should ask myself a few important questions that I haven't really done before now, so...

1) Would I even like this type of body art, enough to commit to it for life? As with many things in life, I could never be sure until I tried it, I think. It's not that I'm unsure of wanting a tattoo now, it's that I never know if I'll regret getting one fifty or even twenty years down the road. If you take a piercing out, over time it'll heal or at least be less noticeable, but tattoos stay with you.

2) Do I really want to have needles injecting ink into my skin? I'm a bit of a pussy when it comes to pain. It's true that I've cut myself a few times without noticing and went an entire twenty-four hours without realizing I'd broken my arm back in elementary school, but I yelp whenever the cats scratch me and I've always had an irrational fear of needles anyway. Would I be able to sit still during this proceedure? I suppose I could design a smaller tattoo that would be easy enough to blend in stylisticly with the bigger one in order to test myself; a lower back tattoo would suffice for this, as that's supposed to be the most painful place on your body to get tattoo'd. If I could sit through that, the back piece would be no problem.

3) Why am I getting this done? Actually, this one I have asked myself and answered before, but it does have some bearing upon the other two. The reason for getting a tattoo in the first place is that it gives me just another canvas to work with. While I would be getting another person to actually apply the artwork to my skin, I would be the one designing the original image to be used. As for the design itself, well...I've always been fascinated with the idea of flight as freedom. The ability to go where you want, when you want, with virtually no obstacles to deal with. Another idea I'm interested in is the body as a machine, a complex collection of biological systems performing set tasks at fixed intervals and contributing to the overall function of a larger unit. Mechanical wings would allow me to combine the two concepts in a visually interesting way. As for why I chose old-fashioned clockwork over the more relevant robotic/cybernetic look, I just thought it would look cool. =D

4) The best tattoos not only look aesthetically pleasing, they also tell a story or express something about an individual's personality. What would this tattoo mean to me, and what would someone else interpret it to mean if they saw it? Frankly, I don't give a damn if anyone sees this tattoo or what they would think about it, so the second part of this question is a moot point. The first part was partially answered above, but there's another reason now that I really think about it. I feel trapped here; this place is like a cesspool with an inescapable pull. I'm tied here by work and school, family and friends. It's not just this city, it's the entire state. I don't want to live in Alabama anymore. I want to just...fly away and never come back, but I know that isn't possible right now. That frustration, I think, is also a deciding factor into why I chose wings. If I had real wings of my own, I don't think I'd still be here. The wing tattoo would be...what? Motivation, inspiration, a reminder that I still have the ability to get out of here if only I try hard enough to find a way. It would stay relevant for any future ruts I'd find myself in, too, letting me know that I can always change myself and my situation even if it's only in a small way like changing my appearance.




...I think I could live with a tattoo. I should start looking for reputable artists now, because I think I'm going to save up and treat myself to one when I finally graduate.

I've backed up all my old journal entries and reposted them at my InsaneJournal account. Mostly due to the accumulated disgust with this type of bullshit, but also because having an archive elsewhere is just a good idea. GreatestJournal is slowly choking to death on the post-Strikethrough user explosion, so it didn't seem too reliable to me. I'll probably never touch my GJ again for that reason, aside from checking it to see if anyone on my flist there updates...which, uh, doesn't really happen anymore. =/

So, yeah. I'll still use this journal, primarily to check my flist and browse various comms. Post from the IJ will be x-posted here as well, unless the posts are particularly useless rambling, in which case I probably won't bother to post them more than once.

Speaking of x-posting...( TL;DR rant about work I posted earlier. Contains comma abuse. )

Thinking about going out and getting a haircut to facilitate a more polished appearance. Even if I don't end up getting a new job, I have a wedding to go to at the beginning of April and I want to look nice.

In regards to my last post: I haven't been fired yet, and my talk with the boss indicated that he understood the rapid schedule changes that had been going on for the past couple of weeks made it hard to keep up with things. But the new new manager--the other store manager having been shifted over to the other store--has cut my hours this week, so there's no way of knowing what's going to happen.

Ah, well, c'est la vie.

Next week is spring break. For the past couple of weeks I've had an idea for a painting that I'd like to start work on, but I haven't had the time; I'd also like to take some of my older paintings that I don't really have room for anymore and try to sell them up at Little 5 Points, so I hope to do all of that during my time off. In addition, I was linked this nifty screenprinting tutorial over on one of the ABJD forums I browse, and I want to give it a try. I mean, at the most, I'd be out about $10 if it didn't work, right? It's not like $10 could buy a fifth of a tank of gas.