� David Eason, in "That Same Lonesome Blood" (guess where)

And why was the temp gig *so* demoralizing? (Note use of past tense, which I am entitled to because late yesterday afternoon when I figured out that today�s stint would have been very abbreviated, I managed to beg off, which was not a problem because two of the three people I was working with had already declared their mission to draw out the next day�s work as much as possible so as to maximize paid hours, and I figured that if they wanted them that badly well then they could have them.) It is an interesting question, and one that didn�t even occur to me to examine until I�d been free of it for several hours, and by "free of it" I mean walking around the house in kind of the good version of a state of shock, every few minutes stunned all over again into inexpressible gratitude that I wouldn�t have to go back to it the next day after all. I felt like I�d had a religious visitation or been granted political asylum. So that was all out of proportion too.

I�m probably not going to want to dwell on this to the extent that the subject in general starts to make me anxious, but it seems important for me to record that if I�d been doing this job alone, if I�d been the sole temp assigned to the demesne of Eileen, I don�t think the job would have rattled me at all. As I�ve said, I am attracted to the romance of the light and the bushel and the narrative of the close-mouthed and inscrutably smiling secretary who knows more than all the suits put together � probably a doomed love affair as far as anything like my career path is concerned, but we�ll take a look at that some other time � and if I�d been there by myself, I would have shown up every day in my nice office-girl outfits and done the work steadily and impeccably, and when my supervisor would have stopped by to check in, I would have told him what was up and given him my own version of the inscrutable smile, the one that says, That�s *Professor* Mona Lisa to you. Fine, it�s more performance art, but what does it hurt? The work gets done, the supervisor is happy, I�m happy; wait a minute, against whom am I defending myself here, anticipating an attack? Hmm, let us press on with the story. But of course I was not alone in the file room. The other people sent over by the temp agency � and the one where I aced the Wonderlic, which hurt a lot � were (1) a young woman in Crips colors and sporting amateur tattoos on her hands, who wore jeans and a sweatshirt and took cell phone calls all day during which she alternately humiliated gentlemen of her apparently intimate acquaintance and took the saps down again in the course of conversations with girlfriends; (2) a guy who just seemed to be not wrapped too tightly; his features sat slack and crooked on his face and there was something off about his sense of balance and he never made eye contact; and (3) a woman maybe in her late thirties or early forties who was made up like a hooker, dressed like a demented cocktail waitress, and who although she had decided within a few hours of meeting me that we were going to be pals and go to movies and shows and stuff all the time also dedicated herself to insulting me whenever possible, for instance noting that the novel I�d brought to read on breaks looked good "if you like that sort of thing" but really she was more into literature and intellectual subjects and, when I got out of coming back for the final file this morning, reading it as a statement about my shitty work ethic as opposed to her more virtuous one. And the thing was, for the duration of the temp job, these were my people. I could not hide and lose myself under an imaginary bushel because I could not run from them. Someone�s going to read this as me being a snob, ranking on what I perceive to be the underclass and people who do not measure up to myself, and I don�t know what�s the more infinitesimal integer, the extent to which this is true or the amount of patience I have even to engage with the challenge. That�s not it at all. I mean, thing one is just fucking show up and be professional. Dress in clothing that�s appropriate for an office � no gang colors, no sneakers and no open-toed Carmen Miranda wedges, no bronze glitter eye shadow, no finger gantlets or elaborate costume jewelry, no low-rise jeans that advertise either your underwear (Tuesday) or the fact that you�re not wearing any (Monday). If there is a reason you can�t turn your cell phone off during the course of the workday, at least please refrain from having graphic sexual conversations on it while in the common work area. Do not assume that everyone else is interested in your personal life, family tragedies, and medical history. But most of all � and here�s where people who have this idea of me, I don�t know from where, as a super hard-boiled bitch, are going to be surprised � just please have a nice attitude. Friendly, competent, innocuous, unchallenging. Yeah, we�re temps and the situation is not ideal, but let�s make the best of it. I came here to make some pin money, get on the good side of the temp agency and get out of the house, not to flaunt my in-your-face individuality and simmer all day about the inequity of my life and how much better I deserve and am not getting (ha, because that�s what my diary is for). The cocktail waitress, who by the way I also suspect of being a pathological liar, would not shut up about her fourteen-year career as a software engineer and the lifestyle to which she�d become accustomed during her six-figure-salary days and how much HR departments suck and are out to get her. The mental patient, when he finally started talking around 3 pm yesterday, had his own song of woe about the IT industry, which was actually OK for a while because he and the cocktail waitress bonded in a hurry over this shared persecution and I didn�t have to deal with either of them. The gang member kept calling the temp agency and, in tones that were strangely extortionate as if she were owed a huge favor, insisting that the placement person change her schedule and make time to see a friend of hers. Everyone had their own ways of expressing this, but among my � oh god � colleagues there was a combination of an apathetic hangdog attitude about the job, resentment over being in the position of having to do it, the arrogant piety of believing not only that they deserved better but that by some mysterious forces better was being withheld from them, and occasional flashes of fury that quickly subsided into palpable generalized bitterness and, let me tell you, made that file room bubble and stew with an emotional volatility seldom found outside the bedrooms of adolescents. It all could have been so easy, it could have been no-problem, but last night when I got home I had to make myself something special for dinner, drink a beer and then another one, and then stare at TV for three hours just to decompress and let my various systems unclench; I realized that I was acting just like any other person who had a job she actually despised and whose whole life away from doing it comprised holding herself together against it.

So today it�s cooking the vegetables then doing the dishes, house-y tasks, find-a-job stuff, and then this afternoon a haircut and then pub trivia with Jerry and maybe (I hope) Popeye and Vanessa. This afternoon I am going to call what I�ve decided is my favorite temp agency and let them know I�m up for one-day gigs tomorrow and Friday, even though they told me that it might be quite a while before they can put me in them. They like me, though, and would never send me out to the kind of hellhole I spent Monday and Tuesday in. I am not kidding or being Pollyanna about what I wrote yesterday, the better choice being not even to accept jobs that come with yellow flags attached. And my personal yellow flags, I have decided, include being sent out in a group. If the placement chick wants to know why, I�ll just tell it to her, I was appalled by the lack of professionalism among the people I worked with, and I feel that this reflects poorly on me if only by association. (Can you tell, secretly I�d love the opportunity to say this, I feel almost as if it�s my civic duty. And I wouldn�t rat anyone out in a specific way, because I don�t want to interfere with their ability to get other jobs, and as long as the supervisor didn�t complain it�s all good as far as the agency is concerned. I�m not the bitch you think I am, you know.) Rebecca was talking on the phone earlier and mentioned maybe looking for some Christmas-season part-time gig, and I hadn�t thought of this myself but maybe I should too, sometimes I think the soul-cleaning nature of pure customer service, where you reduce yourself to the smile and that�s all � and that�s OK � would do me a world of good. Though, as I told her Monday night, if the filing dealie doesn�t kick my butt into the highest gear possible on the job-search tip, there is something seriously wrong with me.

Last night I think I had a dream about the end that Julian and Art forsee to the DL. There�s a part where I am explaining, maybe to Cheryl or Karen, "It took so much out of me I just don�t have anything left," and then I am going online and reading about sperm banks, since obviously there isn�t going to be any dude in my life again ever. I don�t know how I feel about this. That�s a lie: I just started crying a little.

All right then, what else what else? Let�s distract me here. My dressers look beautiful. Rebecca wants to get a dog (did I mention that before?) and the leading candidate will spending this weekend with us. Running�s going fantastically well � last time I went out I hit the magical legs-accustomed-to-running point where I could run up hills on the balls of my feet, all springy-like. I�m running a 10k race with Lloyd and Cheryl two weekends from now, only please do not call it a race because I�m not doing it competitively I�m just doing it to why-not do it, and when I went to Teachers� Cocktails on Friday Robin said that I should also think about the Seattle half-marathon at the end of November, hmm, interesting. I read "Cowboys Are My Weakness" twice in 36 hours because it is that damn good after getting it at the Twice Told Tales sale and then loaned it to Vanessa, and Rebecca called my attention to a theater production based on it that closes this weekend, and I think I might try to go to that. I got a stack of great stuff at the sale, including a gorgeous edition of the memoirs of U.S. Grant; Jane Smiley�s "Barn Blind" (only OK); "Night Train" (reading it now, marvelous so far); "A Walk on the Wild Side" and a book of interviews with Algren; Rick Bragg�s "All Over But the Shoutin�" and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison�s "An Accidental Autobiography"; and two slang dictionaries. One of them does not have "schmuck" and one does not have "putz" and both are missing "piehole." I�m going to Nicole�s birthday party on Friday night and, softened by the experience of the last Tank party, I�m going to try not to tell lies, even if what I tell instead is a surface-glancing version of the truths, even if, going by the evidence of talking to George last night, this is still enough to make people feel powerfully sorry for me. One woman I talked to at a temp agency is related to someone who works at the Tank and got nasty to me and gave me the brush-off when I said that I didn�t remember him.

I can�t tell whether I�m not doing so well at distracting myself or I�m just wanting to head upstairs to eat some food and do some cooking. But in either case, here�s where I stop typing.