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today the glitterbomber is... |
2002-10-29 these past few days at work have been crazy. not that i'm complaining, mind you. being busy is preferable to being bored. it's been lots of meetings and lots of emails and phone calls and other office fun. when i got in on monday, i had a message from our administrator that i was on the payroll for the evil empire effective october 28. "why, that's today," i thought as i glanced at my calendar. um, yeah, thanks for the warning. at that point, i had seen the job description for my new position for the first time a week before that, i still had no idea of how much money i'd be making or my new benefits...i really didn't know anything, actually. i was feeling quite annoyed at being out of the loop, but the more i thought about it, the less annoyed i became. i think my irritation stemmed from being a part of a big change that i didn't initiate and in which i had no input. i'm trying to look at it differently...my transfer will be a big benefit to the study and to everyone else, and it's a promotion for me, and that is always a good thing. i guess i just need to quit my bitching and be a little more like pollyanna. (but not too much, 'cause that girl needs a good slap) so today, i filled out all the tax forms and got my ID and turned in my application. it is weird to fill out an application for a job you already have. when i was at the post office last week, there was a guy there who wanted "scary" stamps for halloween. he was disappointed that the USPS doesn�t have any stamps with pumpkins or skeletons on them. finally, he settled on the "love" ones..."i'll just draw pumpkins below them," he told the friendly neighborhood postal worker. i find that the post office is great for people watching, don�t you? boston was fun. amy and i did the requisite tourist-y stuff, like wandering about beacon hill and harvard square, seeing the boston tea party ship (it was closed, drat!), climbing up bunker hill, traipsing down newbury street (in heavy rain...not recommended), and exploring faneuil hall and the shops at quincy market. we spent some time at the museum of fine arts, too. amy saw lots more historical stuff than i did, since i was in my conference a lot of the time. but i got to explore the public garden and boston common and a cool old cemetery where paul revere and mother goose are buried. on sunday, after amy left, i got to spend some time with boston busties dina, iso, and heven, plus stray sisters and roommates. we went out for yummy food, and it was lots of fun. my conference was better than i thought it would be. though the facilities were less than ideal, i absorbed a lot of info., and it was interesting to see that much of the information and theories that i use every day in my work is brand new to a lot of people in the field. it made me feel like an expert. on the plane ride back, i was fortunate enough to sit next to a man reading emerging trends in oral care magazine (ooh!) and who, ironically, had bad breath. he kept looking at my wallpaper magazine over my shoulder (so to speak). at least i got the window. interesting people from the conference: eye-patch wearing man sitting next to me in one session. when we had to go around and introduce ourselves (an activity that inevitably leads to dissertations from some people), he wrote "help!" in his notebook. a large man wearing a black beret. aw, yeah. an asian man from ohio who videotaped everything. and i do mean everything. including everyone making their introductions. why would someone want video of fifty people introducing themselves? patients of the psychiatric rehabilitation center hosting the conference acting as "volunteers." this is mean, but before i knew that they were patients, i just thought that they were very strange individuals. it turned out that they were strange individuals with a diagnosis. one of them had very shifty eyes. another refused to be recorded "in any form." it was an interesting weekend... and i have a drug test tomorrow. oops. *** quotes!: "it must be drugs. no one is that stupid." �amy b "i�m trying to �recover� my english. i never speak english since ten years, and i realize that listening to CNN is not enough." �man from quebec in one of the "recovery" sessions at the conf. man leading a group of kids: what do we say? |
