The Long-Dater, with whom I've gone out on several more dates over the past couple of months, gave me a gift when we met up last Friday: A chocolate bar with bacon bits inside. It was delicious; salty and sweet mixed together perfectly. My only complaint is that there wasn't enough bacon. Perhaps I should try chocolate-covered bacon. Anyone with a fondue pot want to come over and try some experiments?
While standing in line at the bank, I heard one guy tell his friend that "he didn't believe in banks." This is a statement that I would expect out of a grizzled old man with a dip of chaw in his lip and his 'coon-hunting rifle in his grip, not from a twenty-something prep-punk that follows his buddy to the bank. Though, with the way financial institutions in America have been going under like so many unsupervised kids at the public pool, I don't begrudge anyone not trusting in banks anymore.
If you had one wish, what would you wish for? World peace? An end to poverty? A perfect Utopian society?
Not me. I'd wish that French Toast Crunch had never been discontinued.
During my first couple of months here, I was applying for jobs in the city pretty haphazardly (whatever seemed interesting on Craigslist or CareerBuilder) and getting at least one reply a week. If the reply wasn't to invite me to an interview, it was sometimes to ask me to clarify or expound upon something in my cover letter or resume. At the very least, I was getting responses back to say that the position had already been filled or that they didn't think I was qualified. Then, almost two months ago, the replies stopped.
About the time that I started applying not only to jobs that seemed interesting but also to just about any job I thought I could do for a while and that payed enough for me to get by -- about that time, I stopped hearing back from the people I was sending my resume to. At first, I thought it was just a dry spell, but, nearly two months later, it's seeming more like a drought.
I'm not sure if the problem is with what I'm applying for, who I'm applying to, or something on my resume. But I'm beyond discouraged. I had thought that by now I would have had a job for a month or two, be looking for an apartment, and saving up for one more month or so before I moved out of Happy Time and Stellar's place. But here I am: surviving only by the grace of friends and no closer to finding employment or living quarters in the city than I was at the beginning of the summer.
Moving from Kansas City seems pretty long ago. More and more it feels like it was a mistake. What opportunities did I think were here for me? What did I dislike so much about Kansas City? I don't even remember anymore. And I literally can't go back; I don't have the means or any better of a shot finding a job back there anyway.
The transplant is complete, and I'm sewn inside this new city. I am a mismatched organ, and Chicago is rejecting me wholesale.
At work the other day, a man came through my line with a paper bag from the bakery. These bags are usually used for doughnuts, so I asked him, "How many doughnuts do you have?"
He replied, "They aren't doughnuts."
Sometimes people put rolls or buns from the bakery in these bags instead, so I inquired what was in the bag.
"They're long johns."
Usually when immense stupidity happens upon me while I'm at work, I do my best to ignore it. My face goes slack, my eyes glaze over, and I feel a little bit of my soul sucked out of me and vanish into the ether. For some reason, though, this time I decided to try to educate this poor, misinformed man. "Long johns are a kind of doughnut," I explained.
"No," he replied, "long johns are long." Then, in case I didn't understand the point he was attempting to make, he added "Long johns."
I thought a second, collected his change from the till, and returned, "The thing that makes them all doughnuts is the dough." I handed him his receipt, "Doughnuts."
He didn't say anything in reply, but, then, he didn't have to. After all, he was free roam the earth, probably gainfully employed and with a happy family waiting for him at home, horribly misinformed about doughnuts and uneducated in the basics of rhetoric, while I was stuck working for the minimum wage allowed by law at a place not-ironically named for a wiggling piglet.
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