What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

So late Friday afternoon my manager called me into his office and I thought it was the see-you-bye chat but it turns out he wants me to stay on through at least sometime around August 5. I�m project-managing and writing a quarterly bulletin and, ironically, working on some Homeland Security-related grants. (Or is Homeland Security the new black?) He also mentioned the possibility of documenting some security protocols, which I would love love love to do; I�ve seen the job req and (a) I meant to study it this weekend and do some research so that in case I got tossed into an interview/audition situation early this week I would not disgrace myself (b) they are advertising for someone with a hardcore technical background who is accustomed to making the hardcore-technical-background money if you know what I mean. I have no idea by the way of the relationship between those two facts: "but"? "and"? Bah. Logically a person might go "so," � if you know what I mean, *so* maybe they�d be open to possibility of taking a risk on a known-quantity B.A. type who would work at a lower salary and spare them the time and hassle of the interview process, *but* this is the government, so no go. Who knows. For someone who was whining about wanting July off, I het up to this new scenario pretty fast. The upshot is that I get paid for at least a few more weeks of work and, *and* I get to take time off in July, twice, and there�s no such thing as a vacation-time hit or anyone getting peeved at me for leaving projects in the lurch. The permanent employees have so little accountability that I guess my taking on, as a contractor, what seems to me the minimum amount of it, i.e., promising that a project will be all done by its delivery date, engenders in upper management the approximate happiness level as in yon fabled clams. (Which, huh, I guess also implies that the projects are really mine.) Let�s hear it for low expectations! In addition, I�m getting so immune to the insurance issue that I scare myself sometimes � I went to the organizational, get-in-on-the-ground-floor meeting of a boutique tech writing outfit that Mandy is starting up and at this stage it is all about "dreams" and "goals" (as you see, I myself am all about "jaded") so from the less jaded at the table there was some oozing hopefulness about the possibility of one day getting to pick and choose assignments while working from home exactly as many hours per week as we chose to while remaining serene in the knowledge that we were full-on Blue-Shielded. That would be nice, said I, politely, because I haven�t had health insurance in more than three years. And everyone�s heads swiveled and they stared at me and, this was the strangest thing, it reminded me of when I was in college and one of my radio-station pals was this guy Jeff who did the sports-talk show on Sunday nights and felt that a woman�s place in society was to stay home and prepare beef dishes for her man that she would serve to him each night in worshipful silence but for some reason he liked me and made a place wherever he was for me and my heretical politics � I�m sure I can�t remember how this started, but Jeff and I did this thing where when we passed each other on campus during the day, he�d say to me "Pat Buchanan! Pat Buchanan!" in a voice that, well, was like someone who was training a dog, the same voice in which you�d expect to hear something like "Go on, boy � go get it, fetch!" and in reply I would, well, bark at him. People standing there staring, me barking, Jeff getting barked at, and both of us grinning like we�d just won a prize or carjacked a Porsche together. What that can have been about only my next therapist will be able to say for sure. I should have been embarrassed, I should not have been making a spectacle of myself in public and among people I did not know � because there is a sense in which my whole non-anonymous life is about avoiding those things � but I wasn�t and I did and it was totally exhilarating, last night when I said what I did the other females turned to stare and I felt my face light up not with shame but with, with, what? Something barkworthy. I just don�t care as much about the insurance as I used to, in the way that this is not a decision I made but something I noticed, that by and by I seemed to be less consumed. Maybe the pendulum swung so far into the cringing and fearful physical-timidity zone that, in a variation on what often happens when I bite my fingernails down to bloody little chips, I reached the inscrutable point of self-disgust and, again without the kind of volition that costs one effort, I started to stop. I�ll probably get insurance again one day, like maybe in four years when I have a grad degree and am a candidate for better jobs. And maybe I won�t, and maybe that will be OK.

I�ve been in training for my date with Bill Clinton, which starts tomorrow: since last Saturday I have read "Random Family" (typo: "Randy"), which I am going to mail to my sister as soon as I stop typing and call it a lunch break, "The Beauty of the Husband," "Jennifer Government," and the one with the curious incident about the dog. Also by means of said binge I�ve been practicing not to have cable anymore, which is going to be the state of the union starting tomorrow. I know, big step and a big deal � this was the opposite of one of those non-decision decisions and every so often I have to take some deep breaths and go my happy place and tell myself it�s going to be fine. The thing is, we used to have satellite TV with TiVo, and, lo, it was good. Now we have digital cable without TiVo, which is not only like going from Stilton to Velveeta but it costs a lot more too. Last night I couldn�t sleep so I got up around 1 and, feeling valedictory, switched on the teevee. There was nothing I wanted to watch, nothing, nothing I�d even consider until "All The President�s Men" at 1:25. Which I have already seen. Not having TiVo, being bereft of its glorious stash of teevee-in-waiting at all times, makes those 25-minute periods until you�re waiting for a program to start seem like they�re three hours long, and if you�re like me you spend those seeming three hours sitting there doing nothing but hating yourself because that�s what you�re doing, you are sitting on your sofa waiting for some TV show to start because if you got up and did something else for a while chances are you would miss the beginning of it and the fact that this would rankle � that you care � is something else to hate yourself about. And we could usher back in that golden age of the satellite dish by getting the other kind of TiVo receiver, the one that is compatible with digital cable, and paying for the TiVo service on top of the cable bill every month, but do I really want to be the person to whom TV is so important that on top of the new hardware I pay that much (hint: would be three figures) every month? Finally, O Rory, I do not. So we�re going to kiss Jon Stewart goodbye tonight, tender yet resolute, and then I will call up Millennium Cable tomorrow and schedule the excision. I am going to read, write, study a lot, cook, and take photography classes. I am going to try not to feel like an old lady or some smug NPR Birkenstocker blathering about how mainstream media poisons the mind anyway, it is true because Noam Chomsky said so. I guess that means that I�ll have to renew my Entertainment Weekly subscription after all. All right, I can take it.