No-Pants Thursday

I was walking through the woods with no pants on today. In the past three hours I had driven to work for my first session, which was canceled, driven home, and driven back to work for my second session, which was canceled. I wasn't going home with nothing to show for the day, damnit.

It was an unreasonably pleasant seventy degrees out, so I followed an intriguing sign I pass every day that points the way to "Squire Pike," where I got out of my car and found this:

(Except with less green leaves, because it is winter afterall, and I just swiped this photo from someone's online album).

Unfortunately I was wearing a dress, leggings, and nice boots. Fortunately, there is a pair of bright red sneakers in my trunk that I neglect to unpack every time I move. Unfortunately, I had no outfit alternatives and was not going to wear my dress into the muddy forest. So after some deliberation I made the call to just go out in my tank top and leggings. (Fortunately, this isn't too different from how most women dress anyway).

Best decision of my life. Beautiful trees, beautiful waterfalls, beautiful frozen lake, children trying to break the frozen lake with rocks, making me deeply nostalgic for childhood. I stayed until sunset and Doug came and joined me (and "offered" me his sweatshirt, which was basically a dress on me).

Then we went to Applebee's for some ribs, and as I watched the hostess quickly eye me up and down, I was finally able to recognize one of the benefits of not knowing anyone in this state: no risk in going out to dinner in leggings, your boyfriend's sweatshirt, bright red shoes, and purple-striped socks.

Blow-Up Dolls and Poop-Eating Disease

I last saw Bevin one hot July weekend a week before she left for the Peace Corps. We met halfway at her brother’s house in Champaign to spend one last night together in what I like to call “the jungle room.”

She thrust a document and pen at me when I stepped out of my car. “Great, you’re here! I need you to sign my last living will and testament!”

That was eighteen months ago.

This week she is home for her first and only break from Africa. Noemi and I went to meet her yesterday at Bread Co.

“I’m starving!” she said. “My appetite is finally back after my giardia.”

“Gonorrhea?”

“Giardia. It’s an illness you get from eating poop.”

“You ate poop?”

“Well, you know. I was hungry and it was brown.”

The last couple weeks in Iowa consisted of:

1) Doug breaking out in a rash that he is convinced, after extensive Googling, is “Cat-scratch fever,” resulting from Ketos’s bites and scratches. Seriously. He thinks this.

2) Playing games at a friend’s house when a bullet (or BB?) got fired through their window, shattering the glass in a perfect bullet-shaped hole.

3) A child telling me he was pretending I was a robot speaking through a funnel.

4) Getting locked out of my student loan account after failing to correctly remember my password within three tries. Why such heightened security? If someone wants to break in and pay my loans, fine by me.

And then I came home to St. Louis to find my home decorated in wreaths made out of toilet plungers, Photoshopped pictures of the royal family holding paint rollers, and two blow-up dolls that still creep me the hell out whenever I walk into the rooms they’re in.

“I think the blow-up dolls are crossing a line,” Jenny told Dad.

“No,” Dad said. “As someone who had to shop for blow-up dolls, I can tell you what’s crossing the line. Crossing the line is when the store offers to deliver dolls to your house in unmarked white vans after sterilizing them.”

But that is surely another story.

Merry Christmas!

Thumb in the Cheese Grater and Other Tales From my Week

My blood, sweat, and tears LITERALLY went into last night's dinner, as I accidentally grated my thumb on the cheese grater.

+=

(That is definitely the last time I do a Google image search for "blood puddle").

Anyway. Cooking tends to be stressful for me. I need to have something I enjoy as I do it, so I've been buying sparkling grape juice to drink as I cook. Without fail, every time I buy it at Walmart, there is some old man behind the register (different one every time) who will, without fail, make a comment about my purchase. Something along the lines of "Don't get too crazy now, you hear?" or "All of the sparkle and none of the pop?" Right. Not alcoholic. I get it. Ha. Ha.

Now that I have secured a job that provides me with paychecks that I do not have to pick up on street corners, I have been making all of the purchases that I had been putting off due to the perpetual state of all-consuming dread known as upcoming student loan payments. (Or, as I think Ketos would describe it, "She has been bringing home lots of stuff with fun new smells in those white plastic things--great for chewing").

Like a hanging zip-up case for my jewelry, so that Ketos will no longer run around the apartment with my earrings in his mouth. And those sweet laptop pads I've envied Noemi for for months that are so damn soft it feels like you're typing on a cloud. And a $2.99 bathtup stopper, so that I can finally take baths without using Doug's invention of cramming a handful of tin foil down the drain.

Yep, things are looking up.

How Ketos Stole Christmas

Our little Christmas tree has been lying flat on the floor ever since I put it up last week. We stopped bothering to fix it, because Ketos will never be able to resist jumping up, wrapping his body around it, and bringing it crashing down. He even broke the wing off my cherub angel. Doug's theory is that he's so much of a devil that he can't stand the thought of an angel being present in our home.

So now we have.... refrigerator tree.

Still can't work yet. Inquired again to the lady at the board who said, "Not this week, maybe next week."

So I've been spending my time conducting in-depth background searches on past and present friends, lovers, teachers, and relatives, as the recent past has led me to believe I'm far too trusting. If you have dirt in your past, rest assured that I will find it (or have found it already).

I conducted a thorough background check on the clinical director of my previous job, not to be confused with my drug-dealing boss who hired him (not a sentence I ever thought I'd write, but alas, life is unpredictable).

You'd think I would have searched him sooner, and I had, but searches weren't turning anything up and it wasn't until I thought to start Googling his name along with words like "unethical" and "scam" that I really started getting results. I've learned that he's been sexually abusive to nursing home residents, abuses cocaine, and was fired/escorted out by police/banned from the premises of his last job. But, most amusingly, I found him featured in this newspaper article from 1992...

Nobody's Therapist

Getting tired of waiting.

I can’t start my new job until the woman at the board processes my temporary license. (Temporary license = a $300 document that confirms you have a Masters degree. Not to be confused with your diploma, which has already cost you thousands of dollars to do the same thing).

I call to check up on the status of this license so much that I have a very real fear that they may turn me down simply because I’m obnoxious.

“Can you please just give me an estimate of when it will be processed?” I ask Elaine at the board. “I’ve been out of work a long time."

“I’ll get to it when I get to it,” she says.

Gotta love bureaucrats.

I have only been living here for three months now, which doesn’t sound like a long time. I’ve had longer-lasting leg rashes, afterall. But time moves differently when you’re new to a city and looking for work. Time slows down. Like a crippled turtle walking the perimeter of the moon.

I turned on MTV the other day and watched True Life: I’m Relocating for Love. It followed three long-distance couples, in which one partner moved to another state for the other. I hoped to draw strength from people who had been through struggles similar to my own and had successfully made it through to the other side of adjustment. Instead, I watched as these three people each got frustrated, lonely, and went crazy. They all ended up moving back home less than a month after relocating.

I’ve been working part-time at a crisis center for the past five weeks, where my job is supposed to be to answer the crisis/suicide hotline. But I’m not allowed to answer the phone until I’ve been fully trained, and my supervisors are too busy to train me. So I sit there for four hours a day and literally do nothing. Sometimes I listen in on crisis calls, and it makes me so eager. Because I know that I'm fully qualified to handle these phone calls, and I’m so ready to be someone who helps others find strength again. I remember coming out of my very last therapy session at the Family Center last May (a session that had been spent eating chocolate cupcakes with my clients), and declaring to anyone in the pod who would listen, “I’m nobody’s therapist!” (After a stressful two years, it was mostly a good feeling despite being bittersweet).

But now I would give anything to get to be a therapist again. I would give anything to do anything again.

I’ve been doing some cooking, which is a big deal for me. (The first night I cooked I had to call Noemi to ask how to boil water and ask Doug how to make meat “not raw anymore”). It’s been going mostly pretty well, with the exception of one night a couple weeks ago when I attempted to imitate my favorite meal from Panera: the steak and blue cheese salad. I somehow managed to ruin every element of it, and Doug later admitted that the reason he loudly hummed “Stars and Stripes Forever” as he scraped his leftovers into the trash was so I wouldn’t hear how much of it he was actually throwing away.

Life After my Stint with the Drug Dealer

I walked into my first training class yesterday, took one look at the other new hires, and prayed that I was in the wrong place. But I was not. These were my fellow trainees: a teenaged girl with the largest ear gages I have ever seen, three African men who I would soon learn spoke basically no English, and a woman with whom I have a very awkward (and recent) history.

I got a new job as a therapist working in elementary schools. And since my new employer is not Iowa City’s most well-known pot dealer, I now get to do official things like attend training classes.

This training is required for everyone in this very large organization, which includes three separate divisions. Two of those divisions provide shelter care to the mentally and physically disabled. My division is mostly unrelated, and provides therapy to non-handicapped people in the community.

I was the only therapist at the training . The others were hired as caretakers for the handicapped. (A job that I learned, during this class, has an annual employee turnover rate of 75%--likely explaining what I felt to be quite an unusual pick of employees).

Our presenter introduced herself by saying she’d had no interest in working with handicapped people when she started this job four years ago, but that she’d applied because she needed the money. She then asked us to all state why we had applied, and everyone else also listed money as the only reason.

The presenter then admitted that she knew absolutely nothing about the therapy division for which I’d be working. So we spent the next five hours talking exclusively about how to care for the handicapped and how to restrain them when necessary. Not a single relevant thing for my job was mentioned.

Imagine the driest PowerPoint presentation you have ever suffered through, and now please try to understand that whatever you are imagining might as well have been an uncontainable fit of passion compared to this PowerPoint presentation I endured.

I think that at some point in our presenter’s career, she must have been encouraged to garner audience participation. But that no one ever told her how.

One of her PowerPoint slides said “Mission Statement,” followed by the organization’s mission statement. She paused the presentation here and asked, “Does anyone know what mission statement means?” Dead silence. I thought about answering but refused to out of principle—I mean, even if you hadn’t heard the term before you could certainly use the context clues in this situation. She rolled her eyes as the silence continued. “This morning is going to go on a long time if no one participates,” she scolded.

Her next attempt at getting us to participate was at a slide that described the organization as innovative. “Does anyone know what the word innovative means?” she asked. Silence, and more eye rolling on her part, until I eventually answered.

The only time that anyone perked up was to ask questions about taking time off and missing shifts. Everyone had a situation that they wondered if it would count against them as a tardy or unexcused absence. Including the three African men, who each had to repeat themselves about seven times before anyone could understand what they were asking.

We seriously spent about ten minutes trying to understand one of the men as he asked his question, which at it’s most decipherable, was phrased something like this: “But… chronic disease… what if… have disease… chronic symptoms… happen unpredictable… miss work… chronic disease?” We eventually just had to move on.

After the training portion, we had to take a 60-question quiz as a group. The presenter read each question out loud and we had to call out the answer. Even though none of the questions had anything at all to do with my own job, I answered the first ten questions in a row because no one else would. At the 11^th question I decided not to answer, because I didn’t want to keep being that girl. There was dead silence for a solid sixty seconds.

The grand finale of the training was the presenter saying that she would not let us leave until everyone asked one question, which was long and painful and made me wonder if I would just eventually starve to death and die in that very room.

Luckily, I live on.

Top 14 Signs it’s Time to Quit a Therapy Start-up (And Reasons You Should Look up Your Boss’s Public Records Before Accepting a Job)

1. You are hired without a background check or references called to go into children’s homes to provide therapeutic services.

2. Your boss asks you to drive your clients long distances to dance classes and gymnastics classes. Without reimbursement.

3. You are required to ask your client her size in leotard and tights, when body image is one of her trigger issues.

4. Your boss’s mom repeatedly asks you, in front of your clients and their parents, when you will be available to voluntarily host weekly arts and crafts and checkers club for your clients (something you’ve never heard of, let alone volunteered for).

5. Your boss encourages (insists) that you conduct confidential sessions in public settings.

6. Your clients’ parents have your cell phone number, and they call at night to ask for rides to Walmart.

7. When you drive to your clients’ homes for your scheduled appointments, they are not there.

8. Your boss plans the one and only staff meeting for 6:30 pm on a Friday night.

9. Your boss says he will bring your paycheck to Friday night meeting, and then fails to show up for said meeting.

10. Your other boss says he cannot afford the gas to drive in for meeting because he has not yet been paid. As he puts it, “You just can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

11. You make plans to meet up with your boss the next week so he can give you aforementioned paycheck, and he doesn’t show up there either. When you call, he asks if you can pick him up and give him a ride to his house, where he left your paycheck.

12. As you are driving your boss to his house to pick up aforementioned paycheck, you notice his street address mysteriously matches the address of the “office” the organization is rumored to be building.

13. As you pull away from boss’s house, you open your paycheck to realize that all the hassle of the past two months has made you a grand total of forty dollars.

14. When it finally occurs to you to look up your boss's public records, you discover his extensive (and recent) history of drug busts, getting his driver's license revoked multiple times on account of drug busts, and driving with revoked license (maybe that's why you had to drive him home last week..?) Probably doesn't bode well for an agency designed to keep kids off drugs and out of legal trouble. Just sayin’.