Avoidance...

I have actually started cleaning my bedroom. This, of course, is why I am sitting at the computer talking to all of my loyal fans...it takes me a LONG time to work up to actually cleaning something, and I find it absolutely necessary to take many, many beer and cigarette breaks before I actually finish the job.

But I have cleared off the balcony chair that was sitting in my room piled with various people's laundry and delivered said laundry to its rightful owners...Sarah, Joshua, me and the linen closet. I have made a stab at clearing up some of the books that have fallen to the floor during various periods of A. depressed boredom and B. insomnia (both of these conditions require large amounts of reading material). The ironing board is momentarily not open (largely because I needed to get to the bookshelf). And the balcony chair has been returned to the balcony where it belongs. And there is a load of laundry in the washer which I am about to pull out and put in the dryer.

Now, isn't all this enterprising of me? It began to occur to me (later by far than it would have occurred to anyone else, I'm sure) that maybe the reason I felt so laden down was because I kept waking up to the horrendous mess in my room (I believe this is covered in Psych 101 for 19 year old freshmen in college, but I'm a little slow). So, what the hell...I'll give it a try.

Meanwhile, my temp guy called today to ask if I wanted to take a test at a new law firm (I mean, new to me). On the list of things I want to do, that one comes right below trekking through the Amazon with nothing but a compass and a backpack (I feel nature has its place - preferably not near me - nature doesn't come equipped with taxis and all night delis, which are necessary to my wellbeing).

You have no idea of the horror of these tests. Yes, I can run a computer. Yes, I have taken a course in advanced word processing. But Chris sent me a list of what was on this test, and it included the following:

Rebuild a document. I have no idea what this means. None, nothing, nada. I assume they mean the formatting is taken out and you have to put it back together, but I've never even heard the term before.

Do a three column table with decimal spacing and paragraph borders...in Word. For those of you who do this sort of thing, my hat is off to you. I can run Excel very nicely, thank you. It has neat little buttons that say format cell and a three column table takes about 5 minutes. Doing it in Word is the most cumbersome damn thing you can imagine, and the decimals are a bitch and a half to sort out. And I haven't the remotest notion what a paragraph border even is, unless they mean me to go into borders and shading on the tool bar, which I presume they do. Well, why?

Then it gets really impossible. I won't even bore you with the rest of it, but I will tell you that me attempting to do this stuff would be a disaster of epic proportions. Trust me...I've done these tests. They are ghastly.

So I emailed Chris thanks, but no thanks. If I could do this kind of thing, I would be working in a word processing center making 30 bucks an hour, for God's sake, which is why I took the course to begin with. Aaargh.

I have so many talents...it's just that most of them don't involve computers. Why can't I get a job where I just sit and type all day? I like doing that. It's nice and mindless. I can easily sail through miles and miles of legal and/or financial jargon without missing a beat. It's just that when they want to fancy it up that it gets nasty.

Ah, well. Clothes into the dryer, clothes into the washer. I have actually been trying to do laundry for some time here, but I seem to be last in line...every time I try, somebody else is in there with their laundry. I'm deeply afraid that my tiny little washer is going to go on strike, and we can't have that. I mean, in the increasingly remote case that I might possibly get a job, clean underwear is pretty much a necessity, isn't it?

Love, Wendy