Job Karma

There's a young woman selling children on the street. She's medium height, brunette, medium build, and devoted to her job enough to shout at all the strangers passing by her to listen to her speach for two minutes. She's dressed in a yellow vest with the company logo displayed prominently on the left breast, to readily denote her profession as a child peddler.

I was an easy target in the crowd. Dressed in my only suit, fresh out of feeling good from signing up with Staffing Solutions downtown several weeks ago, I was wandering around downtown Portland on my own for the very first time. I had the light in my eyes and the big city all around me. Feeling pretty good. What a sucker.

The children she deals in are the third-world variety. Pictures are solemn and formal. I bought an eleven year old boy from El Salvador named Carlos-Rodrigo Cruz. I'll try to get a picture up, because he deserves it.

It didn't matter that I didn't have a job and a dwindling cash supply. This kid had less, so while I could give I figured it was the right thing to do. "And it's good for job karma," she added after I accepted. "I had someone get a job right after becoming a sponsor."

What she failed to mention, was the bad karma that came from being negligent in your duties as a sponsor. For instance, buying a kid comes with the necessity of writing the kid every so often. Which I sat down to do the night after. And like most everything else I write, I needed to revise it.

Immediately I had two interviews that came just short, whether because I didn't have a car or because I knew I had no interest in the position. Afterwards I forgot about Carlos and the interviews dried up just as quickly.

I re-wrote the letter, made it simpler and shorter, and had another interview with Cambridge College. But I never sent the letter, partly because I was afraid like I'm shy of any first impression and partly because I am absent-minded. And subsequently, on the morning of my interview I woke with severe abdomenal pains and ended up in the ER of St. Vincent's for half a day. I called by interviewer to let her know, called from the hospital bed, but it was too late. The bad job karma had taken its toll again.

I wrote a third draft. Shorter and simpler still, and this time in Spanish even though I think I should have stuck to a language I know.

Not getting any leads at all led me to a second temp company, Express Personnel. I got a temp job collating at a printing company, and tore up my hands with paper cuts. We showed them to each other like battle scars around a fire, telling old war stories.

Finally, on Thursday I put it in the mailbox. Just do it, I was thinking. Just put it in and hope for the best and stop being a coward about it. Imagine, me afraid of an eleven year boy. But I was, and still am in a way.

That day I got a call from Express saying they had found me a job. It wasn't the best job, doesn't pay well, and I'll probably try to wait tables two or three times a week to pay the bills and such, but it's a job and I start Monday at 8am. Poorman-Douglas is the company and I still have little idea what I'll be doing. But it's a job.

To be fair, it's a temp-to-hire position. I get two months at temp status and if they like me, I get a slight bump in pay raise and they'll keep me on.

But something tells me I should send out a second letter in two months. You know, for job karma.

Would You Like Fries With That?

I forgot lunch today, so I settled for stale coffee. When I finally got off the clock I walked until I found a restaurant and then had an early dinner.

The two girls working inside were high school aged, both shorter, one with dark brown hair and the other with red hair, penciled eye-lashes and earrings that hung like counterweights. The redhead was talking when I came in the door.

"And it's going to be like two months before I can kiss my boyfriend again. And he's the really cute one too!"

I didn't say anything, just stood there and eventually a smile cracked on my face. The redhead turned and saw me and blushed, apologizing that I had to hear that. Of course, I had no problem hearing this; I think she was apologizing out of embarassment. (Aside to myself I wondered if "the cute one" meant that there were other boyfriends she had readily available.)

In the middle of my meal the redhead was cleaning tables and asked me if everything was going well. So I asked her,

"How much longer do you have to go until you can kiss your boyfriend again?"

"I'm sorry you had to hear that," she said, as if her embarassment wasn't funny.

"No, it adds to the authenticity of the place."

So she told the story, and I regretted asking about it almost immediately. The story goes, and I am writing this about as anti-climatically as possible, that she was with him on Saturday and they were doing their thing. She explained that she's a very ... sensual isn't the word she used but it's close ... person, very physical and emotional at the same time. But she just found out today that her boyfriend has mono and now she has been feeling a bit of a cold coming on.

This is the person who just served me my food.

Weekend Freeze #1

I'm going to start something for this blog, and with luck I'll keep it up. Going to call it my Weekend Freeze, just to stay on theme (and because I hate thinking up names -- I always come up with one better right after I'm done changing the old one!) Basically the Weekend Freeze will be a beginning of a story or at least a scene in something I'm writing. Maybe I'm stuck on it or maybe I already know where I'm going to go. The point is to share a bit of what I'm working on with all those surfers out there. If you really want to make my day, you can post (constructive) feedback.

So without further ado, here is the inaugural Weekend Freeze:


Alice is crying, but it has little to do with the fact her husband has come home late for the third night in a row. This night as he comes in late he heads straight for the bathroom, pausing suddenly when he hears her let out a sob. Funny how she can pick out the sound of his footsteps even between her tears.

“Oh, honey,” he says in the wake of the toilet flush. “I brought you some flowers.”

Eric, Alice’s husband, has a perfectly valid excuse for being late all week, and it’s one that he recites to her verbatim whenever she asks if he can just get off early once for her. One of the hotel managers (whose name is Tom) was ran over in the hotel parking lot last week after his shift ended. Backed over by a pair of honeymooners who didn’t even realize they had hit a person. After settling on his leg, they pulled forward, the driver thinking he had just hit one of the speed bumps that covered the parking lot.

The speed bumps had been Erik boss’ idea. Erik’s boss, the hotel’s general manager, spent all summer watching drivers speed through his parking lot and saying to himself, “Somebody is going to get run over unless we do something about this speeding.” Most of the offenders were tourists, always in a hurry to cram in some other sight-seeing nook, or to buy some of the many obscene gifts offered downtown.

Erik’s boss is well aware that in the police report the driver said he thought he was backing over the speed bump in the parking lot. Everyone in the hotel knows this; it has become taboo to even allude to it.

And so the other managers get to divide up the extra hours together while Tom lays in a hospital bed recovering. None of them will see an extra cent for the extra hours; they are all paid salary wages. Tom and Erik’s boss says he’s searching for someone to fill in temporarily, but he won’t decide to temporarily promote Gretchen, the bell captain, for another two weeks, and only then because she wouldn’t shut up about it.

Erik’s contribution to the company is staying an extra four hours every night.

Sandwiching Stereotypes

Maybe I'm having a hard time processing it all, but the city keeps coming at me like clowns piling out of a VW Bug. But that wasn't the vehicle that raced past me on SW 149th this evening, with someone leaning out the window shouting "Whaddup, my nigga?" Never in my lifetime would I try to claim that title as my own, if only because of the dangerous ground you tread on in doing so. Even quoting the person has me wondering if I've stepped into social faux pas. I am white, and furthermore a pasty white that comes from too many hours indoors typing in front of a computer.

Back some ten years ago in high school, I went to a small school. But with only 200 or so students we still had our different cliques, many of them seemingly drawn straight out of a teen movie. But they weren't as stereotypical as the cliques you saw on television. Nobody dressed alike, and while many of those people hung out amongst themselves, everybody knew each other well enough to mingle about with the other groups as well. Or maybe that was just me...

On the other hand, every young person seems to fit in their group like they came off a factory made by Fox. I've seen more "cowboys" here than I have on the rural coast farmlands. I've never honestly heard someone talk in a lisp before intentionally. Naturally the first impression was that they were gay, but I told myself that I shouldn't be so quick to judge. Certainly this is the city, there are all types of people. But then five minutes later he was talking about his boyfriend to go along with the pastel colors and accentuated feminine movements, and I was overhearing as bad a stereotype as any TV sitcom.

Walking down Hawthorne a few weeks back might have been the antithesis to this post.

I went to the 7-11 tonight to get dinner because I hate cooking for just myself, especially when it is still Elise and Josh's house I am living in. The clerks were both high school aged boys and both acted their best to talk like someone out of a 50 cent video. It was the gangsta clique (which even my small high school had a few of, but they really did not fit the mold -- wait, maybe I should be congratulating them on that) that I recognized. The half-shaven, bald-headed, earring in the right ear, inner-city accented persona that my grocer said as he told me that the sandwich I had chosen for dinner was da' bomb.

Now, I may just be over-simplifying things so I can process them internally, but are there any individuals around here? Or is everyone my age or younger in the city so eager to belong to something that they all become the same?

And that sandwich was not da' bomb, either. It was worse than the bland hogies they gave us for marching band sack lunches. Really kills any idea of a treat for dinner when the dinner is barely palateable. So word to the wise: stay away from the black forest ham sandwiches at the 7-11.

Working on my Limbo

How low can you go? Or, more revealing of the symbol in mind, how low will you set the bar?

When you first get into the process of finding and starting a career, you tell yourself that there are things you most definitely will not do. Garbage collecting for instance. Can you imagine how heavy those bags must be? Lifting them day in and day out, that must drain a person. The kind of feeling that the end of the shift, all you can envision or dream about is going home and sitting down. Still, they make good money and rightly so.

Working in restaurants is another one. I did that part time for two years of school and full time when I was in Fairbanks. Being on your feet all day is just draining, it doesn't matter if its a slow day or a busy one. You get home and you need an hour or two just to recharge. Even if you work the graveyard and can only think about heading to sleep to get up for school the next day, you still need an hour just to unwind before bed. Funny, huh?

Working phones was something I did not envision myself, but I just called up a staffing company who has me in mind for that very project. It's not telemarketing (I couldn't live with myself for that) but customer service, so at least I'm not being invasive into other people's lives. I went to this staffing company yesterday because my first one has not called me in two weeks in spite of me keeping them apprised of my situation. (Yes, I am still poor and jobless.)

So with the impending hospital bill, I lowered my bar today. I told them to shop me for the customer service jobs. I did score well in data entry (over 13000 kph), so I'm sure I'll get at least a few bites. At my last interview they told me they didn't want someone who would come in and then leave for their passion, what they went to school, after a few years. Well, I didn't want to do that to them so I took my name out of the pool. But I don't have that luxury anymore, I don't think. And I can always write in my spare time. And I'm tired of dancing from job to job (to stretch my use of a limbo symbol into a second light).

Writing. The Beaverton Powell's has a writing group that meets every other Wednesday. I just found out about it last week and have been set on it since. If you're there, you'll probably be able to pick me out of the crowd. I'll be the tall youthful kid who has a look of constant bewilderment and intrigue on his face, like he's taking everything in and yet not willing to incorporate into it all at once. I guess that's called being shy.

I've worked on St. Vincent's a bit, but I'm not brass enough to bring it on my first visit. I'm just starting on another one, with the idea still fleshing itself out in my head. I was going to sit and write at the coffee shop outside of the temp agency I went to, but then after I had gotten my coffee and written a page I got the idea of listening to some jazz invigorating me a bit. So I walked out to the bus stop only to see it pass right before I got there. I could have ran across the street, but I didn't. Once again I walked a good way home. I like walking, but after forty blocks I was tired when I got home and rather than write I took a nap.

I just had a friend find me on AIM and catch me up to date with what other people from high school are doing. How people can split and divulge when they get out on their own, and here I am pointing my toes in the water to test the warmth. One of these two is a girl I got myself in some trouble over back when I was a junior, some eight years ago. But it makes me think a cannon ball or two would do me some good.

St. Vincent's

I wrote "St. Vincent's" when I was a junior in college and to date it is my best work. I just need to finish it.

"St. Vincent's" was inspired by a personal case of chostocondritis -- where the cartilege between the ribs and around the chest cavity gets inflamed. It hurt like hell. Because it was around my heart it was also one of the scariest pains I'd ever had in my life. In "St. Vincent's" the main character has a case of chostocondritis and also doesn't know what it is; I made her middle aged so she would presume heart attack. I had her watching "Alien" on TBS because that movie was running over and over in my head on the trip to the hospital. The catch in my story, that I didn't have to deal with in real life, is that the doctor in the story is the ex-husband of the main character. The story is solid; it just needs some fine tuning and I've left it alone for far too long.

When I broke my leg, it didn't hurt that bad. It was just a throbbing pain that wouldn't go away. It didn't swell, and my middle school track coach couldn't feel any tendon or ligament damage so she told me to walk it off and stop being a baby. I walked gingerly off the bus to the school and at home I iced and elevated the leg while having bean burritos for dinner (funny the details we remember). I took several doses of pain medication and went to bed, only to wake up in the middle of the night in pain. The throbbing was still there, only more intense, and I woke up my brothers and parents in my moaning (which I hardly remember). That began one of the longest days of my life. The ER in Lincoln City directed us to OHSU due to the severity of the break; OHSU admitted me in the early afternoon and had me prepped for surgery that evening. I stayed the night only because of the hour and the operation was almost a complete success.

Today I woke up with pain that topped them both. The dull ache surpassed the constant deep ache of my broken leg. The intensity and fear of the pain was worse than the chostocondritis episode. I woke up around five in the morning with a constant throb in my back, like I had slept on a rock and all the muscles in my back had tightened up. That's what I thought it was, just some muscle tightness in my back. So I changed positions: to my side to my back, to my front. I put a pillow under my back. Nothing helped.

I tried to pick myself upstairs to get some ibuprofin and water and never went back downstairs. Ten minutes later I was near tears in pain and trying to find a comfortable position. I settled with an all fours, crawling position -- it didn't make the pain any less, but it didn't make it any worse either.

For two hours I crawled around the front room. I didn't want to wake Elise; even worse, I didn't want to go to the hospital. My parents' insurance stopped covering me not even a week ago and I am almost out of my own money. I couldn't afford to go to the hospital. But at 7:40am I heard Elise's alarm go off upstairs and the pain was so much that I did call upstairs to her. We were at the hospital within the hour.

I want to say it was a personal message to me that we ended up at a hospital named St. Vincent's. I had never even known that St. Vincent's was a real hospital name when I used it in my story -- I had gone online and found a registry of all christian saints and found that St. Vincent was both the patron saint of something to do with medicine as well as something to do with marriage. What a perfect fit for my story, I thought. And going there felt like a perfect fit for my life, a symbol. I'm a writer. These connections come naturally, even unwanted at times.

Not counting self-inflicting reasons (alcohol and exercise) I haven't thrown up since I was twelve. Sitting through rush hour traffic on the way to the hospital was so painful that I was nauseous as we pulled up and by the time they rushed me to my ER bed I had vomited for a full minute. It had the aftertaste of cheap orange juice, that sour, acidic flavor. I could barely make myself lie on the bed, but finally the IV came in and the pain meds followed after bloodwork was taken. It took several doses and even then I could still feel a dull pain.

They wanted me to stay the night for observation, at least at first, but then the specialist came in. "If he can keep down food, he shouldn't have to stay here," the specialist said. I passed the Sierra Mist and saltines test with flying colors so I'm a free man tonight.

What was wrong with me? Not even the doctors know. Their best guess was a viral infection inflamed tissue in my abdomen, or caused an excess of fluid in my abdomen, giving me the pain. The symptoms fit, the doctor told me. But once again I was spared from any big syndrome or disease; the only consolation for the sure-to-be huge hospital bill (that I can't pay) is that it is very rare to happen in men, and of course the pain meds.

I missed my interview because all of this. I did get to call ahead of time, but I've yet to hear back so I can only hope I will get a phone call for a rescheduled time tomorrow.

Still, St. Vincent's is St. Vincent's and this is a coincidence I can't quite put down in my head. I need to finish that story, need to make it right. It is so close anyway; certainly I should while I have it on my mind.

Rain

Did I ever mention how much I miss the rain? I know, it sounds ridiculous, but after six months of seeing snow pile waist deep, something warmer is a welcome change.

The day I left Fairbanks it was raining. Not a drizzle, but a good, healthy, northwest rain. That scent of the first rain hitting concrete and asphalt was in the air. I was going between my faux log cabin and the dumpster, throwing out everything I wasn't going to bring with me. Very irresponsible of me not to look at recycling or a garage sale for the stuff, but Alaska had worn me down to the point where I just had to throw everything out: all the bad, the good, the useful, all of it, and just start over again. I remember standing outside just soaking up (haha, i love puns) the smell, the feel, the warmth of the rain. It was time to go home, I realized. Nothing had ever felt so certain or liberating in my life before.

It's crazy, but I still love rain. I never did growing up. I mean, I didn't hate it. I was an Oregonian; I was used to it. I didn't bother with umbrellas half the time (and truth be told, I probably ran better when it did rain -- at least, better than the people I was competing against). Last week I was walking south on NE 181st when it started raining and I might have had a gut reaction of being irritated, but that was not the rain's doing. But I took in a breath of air scented with rain and let my mind empty.

I'm still trying to fit in, Stumptown. Still trying to make everyone happy I can, like the naive country boy in me tells me I should do. I've bought a cigarette for some kid beside the 7-11 once -- don't ask me why, I really don't know -- it was a strawberry swisher sweet. I was heading in for something to drink because I was thirsty from all the walking I had already done.

It was on the way back from my second interview. This was last Thursday. They told me I needed good spatial skills, to be able to envision the product in my mind as people called in with their custom orders. I was only thinking how far off-base this temp agency thing had gotten to land me an interview doing something like this. Or they're scraping the bottom of the pot for me.

Without a doubt it was the best interview I had ever been on. By best, I mean the most thorough. I spoke with five or six different people at some length about the company, including one who was doing essentially what I would be doing if I worked there. I toured the entire facility, got more than one detailed explanation about not only what they do, but where they do it and who does what and where what gets done and so on and so forth until my head was swimming. And they were Oregon State fans to boot; the Beaver banner flew proudly from the fabrication floor.

It just wasn't for me, and I knew it after fifteen minutes. The remaining forty-five were spent watching the clock for when the bus would be coming back.

When we parted ways (both of us knowing I wasn't going to make the grade) I was told the best bet was the 181st and Burnside MAX stop. "Just a mile away" my interviewer said, and who was I to doubt the man who just told me spatial thinking was an important part of the job? I didn't plan on following his directions anyway; I knew where the bus-stop was and how to get there.

Of course, I also knew I was late, and when the bus passed me when I was waiting for the crosswalk to change to get to the right side of the street, I figured I could try his directions out.

One mile is an understatement of immense proportions. I believe I walked two and a half, maybe three miles to get to the light rail stop. And when I finally did get there, one cigarette and gatorade bottle later, the ticket machine at the MAX stop blared sirens at me when I tried to purchase a ticket. So I rode home for free.

The rain was off and on that day, and it didn't rain on me again. My next interview just got set up this morning, sans temp agency, and maybe I can succeed where they failed. I don't know, though; I basically applied to everything titled "entry level" in Sunday's Oregonian that I didn't grow nauseous at the sight of. I don't know: how does Financial Aid Advisor sound to you?