Next week I’ll be getting interviewed for the customer service position I’ve been doing since February as a contractor who gets no benefits and only six days unpaid days of holiday a year. It’s a stupid, low-paid job, but my contract is up in February and if I don’t get hired on as a regular employee at this company, God know what else I will find in this economy.
Also, I have to admit that I do, oddly enough, actually like this job. If you have to work in corporate America then this is really the only place that would be bearable. For the most part, my colleagues are nice, and very few people are total corporate whores. In fact, most people just do this job to pay the bills while they work on creative stuff on the side.
I am so tired struggling to make ends meet, so I will delighted to get health benefits, more pay and job security if I get hired. At the same time, I know deep-down that this could be a slippery slope. So many Americans get sucked into staying in a less than ideal job situation because they don’t want to lose their health benefits. I don’t want to be one of them.
I’m ashamed to say it but the whole “Occupy” movement has somehow passed me by. I am very much a part of the 99% but these protests just failed to move me, and I didn’t go to any although there was an “Occupy” movement in my own city. A part of me is happy that other people are, like me, now over-educated and horribly, horribly under-employed. I know it’s bad to want others to suffer just because you’re suffering, but now I don’t have to feel so embarrassed to have such a terrible job at the age of 34 because I’m just one of many.
Despite not having written in here for nearly two months now, there is not much to report. I go to work, come home, eat, watch an episode of “Mad Men” and then go to bed to do the same thing all over again. Métro, boulot, dodo indeed. I had imagined that changing my schedule to four ten-hour days (instead of the regular Mon-Fri, eight-hour day) would be the answer to all my creative prayers, but sadly this was not the case. Despite having a three-day weekend every weekend, I am usually so exhausted by the time Friday comes along that I don’t want to do much. The same goes for the work week; with a ten hour work day (and that doesn’t include the one hour for lunch, and the forty minutes I spend sitting in a car) there’s no time to do anything. I feel myself becoming stupider and less informed by the second.
Relationship-wise, MM and I are getting on “okay”. Just okay. I can’t remember the last time we had sex. Probably a rushed affair about a month ago. I’m so tired of always being constantly broke, and I feel that he is trapped in a poverty mindset. It’s the same old story – he wants to be an artist, or have some kind of visual arts job, but he doesn’t make much progress towards that, and he constantly changes his focus. I can’t imagine myself ever having a comfortable, normal life if I stay with this man. And, yet, of course, it’s the same for me – I don’t work on my creative ambitions at all.
One of the reasons – the main reason really – I haven’t written in here was because I didn’t really feel like sharing, or being judged for, what I’m going to write next. But I don’t think it’s healthy to keep it all to myself. A few months ago, I got tired of never having enough money, so I started to work as an escort again – behind MM‘s back. Yes, I know that I’m married, and that I’ve broken my marriage vows in what many would consider the worst way possible. Of course, I feel some guilt about it, but nowhere as much as you’d expect. I just feel that I’m doing what I need to survive. I don’t think about what I’m doing all that much but when I do I’m surprised at how normal it seems to me to be doing this. I don’t think of myself as a bad person, but of course I wonder if this means that I am.
