I’m not really sure which was worse: being asked to take a test to prove my my Microsoft Office abilities, or the fact that I didn’t score 100% on it.

I have a meet n’ greet (I’m awesome at lining up not-interviews) with a recruiter today, and I was asked to take an online test before the appointment. I admit that I spent the majority of last night foaming at the mouth in pure indignant rage over this, because it was really quite ridiculous (and insulting) – open this document. Bold this text. Change the font size to 16; print the file.

I’ve been a tech writer for a million years. I regularly pull Word-based trickery out of my ass; making it do things it wasn’t intended to do. I’ve built documents and spreadsheets so complicated it crashed the program. I’ve worked for a lot of really cheap companies that wouldn’t spring for any “specialty” software; I taught myself to make do using Word and Excel in place of Visio, Photoshop, Infopath, Robohelp, and more – and you want me to prove I know how to OPEN A FILE?

To add insult to injury, I then had to take a TYPING TEST.

I’d understand this whole testing process if I was applying for entry-level jobs as an office assistant or basic office temp – but I’m NOT. I’m in the middle of my career, and I’d hope I’m past the point where I know how to do the most basic of computer functions. It was just .. infuriating. I was very, very angry. Whether that anger is justified is another question entirely, as I know I have a tendency to explode and overreact when asked to do things I see as a massive waste of time and .. well, let’s be honest: beneath me. It’s not that I think I’m so high and mighty that I’m above following the rules; it’s that even a quick glance at my resume should tell you that I am way, way past the skill level these tests are aimed at. I have a huge chip on my shoulder with regards to being as a mere administrator – I DID my time in the trenches. I worked as an admin assistant for years, and worked hard to move beyond it because I was bored. I know this is more about me and my quirks than it is the stupid test, but nothing gets my back up faster than people dismissing my work as “making things look pretty” as opposed to something requiring actual brains and skill.

Also, the test was a huge joke that made me look bad: I scored 87% on Outlook and Excel, 93% on Word, 97% on PowerPoint, and 64wpm in the typing test. In every test but Excel I should have received 100%; I did what was asked but via a different method than the Only Correct Answer (just like in the real word). The test site wasn’t Mac friendly, so I had to dig out (seriously, there was an archaeology dig involved) an ancient laptop running XP with a keyboard I LOATHE because the keys are in the wrong places and the tracking pad likes to insert my cursor in previous paragraphs without warning. I type a hell of a lot faster than 64wpm (it’s almost double that when I’m mad, and boy was I mad last night), but I’m on an unfamiliar machine using an outdated OS being tested on an old version of a program I mastered in 1995 and have used daily since then – and the site was broken; 2-3 minutes of “loading” would happen between each of the 120 questions I answered so it took way, way longer than it should have (and I seethed every goddamn second).

Apparently sleep did little to quell my rage – and now I have to go make nice.

Deeeeeeep breaths.

Here we go.

I’ve had Lola for almost three years, and I’ve always wondered what would happen if I dropped her. Lola is a masterful feat of Italian designed (and likely Chinese built) ingenuity, and a lot of her price tag came from the fact that she’s mostly made of actual metal. In contrast, both Oscar and Sally were 95% plastic and if (when) I dropped them, I could easily wrestle the scooter upright again. Lola is in another class altogether, and I worried that should she fall over I’d be unable to pick her up.

Turns out my fears were entirely grounded in reality: Lola weighs a million pounds (okay, 350 pounds) and I absolutely can’t get her into an upright position on my own. However, I also now know what would happen if I dropped her: a big burly man with a big burly moustache would step out of his big burly pickup truck to help me pick Lola up!

I dropped Lola today, for the first time ever. I am seriously bummed out about it, because she was pristine before this afternoon and now she has ugly scratches on her right side. I know things could have easily been a lot worse, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to curse my own stupidity (more on that in a second) and feel sorry for myself (and Lola).

I’m also likely going to be really fucking sore tomorrow.

See, I didn’t so much as drop Lola as I did completely fall off of her. Luckily, I wasn’t moving at the time (my relationship with gravity is an abusive one at best) and the damage is relatively minor; confined to her lower side bumper (and on the only piece of her body made out of plastic). I also made it 32 months with the Vespa before I had an incident – my first crash on Sally happened 13 months in (wet leaves), and I banged up Oscar but good on Day 6 (tipped over trying to turn around on a hill, slid down it). Getting a little banged up in almost inevitable, and I should be at least pleased that it was an incredibly minor event that didn’t hurt all that much. And I will be, later. Right now: pouting. Lots and lots of pouting.

So, what caused the fall? Nothing major: just my being really, really stupid and cocky and bad with measurements – you know, the usual.

Most of the time, I’m smart. I’ve finally learned to acknowledge that what I usually dismiss as “I just have a way with xyz” is actually some pretty serious intelligence on my part, and the reason I pick things up a lot faster than those around me. It’s a nice feeling; admitting something good about yourself – I’ve never really done it before, out of fear of seeming egotistical or in love with myself.

Of course, there’s another side to my smarts that quickly quashes any sort of ego that might arise: the side that does things so incredibly stupid that you wonder how I manage to get from A to B without a government-appointed handler.

See if you can spot the problem here:

big mirror is really, really big

no worries, i'll just turn it sideways!

It was a gorgeous afternoon, so I hopped on Lola and went for a ride. I decided to go to Ikea so I could pick up the mirror I wanted for my Lady Cave – I knew it was pretty big, but I was confident it would fit. After all, I’ve ridden home with lamps, moving boxes, 40lb bags of cat food – how hard could it be? I enjoyed a glorious ride out to Coquitlam, had some meatballs for lunch, then bought my mirror. Hooray!

Then I ran into a problem.

I knew the mirror was a hair under three feet high, but for some reason (possibly sheer stubbornness) decided to ignore my limitations and charge forward. I had no rope, no bungee cords, and nothing big enough to make this work – there was nothing to do but try. What’s the worst that could happen?

Well, I could fall off the damn scooter, for one.

The entire time I was trying to make this work, the aforementioned big burly man was watching me from the bumper of his truck and laughing. It really, really didn’t help matters that he was wearing a Harley Davidson shirt and biker boots, meaning he was either a poser or far more likely, a biker who would never do something so stupid. Still, he did give me a hand when I fell off Lola. After he drove off, I inspected the damage:

:(

Shiiiiiit. I had fucked up my scooter, leaked a bunch of fluid, and I STILL don’t know how I’m going to get home. I didn’t want to call for help (because that would have been the smart thing to do), so I went ahead with plan C: removing the packaging to see if the mirror would fit sideways in the bag:

take THAT, laws of time and space

I rode home like this; a precarious and ridiculous sight all the way down Lougheed. I made it back in one piece, and so did the mirror. It took some bumps and bruises to get here, but I triumphed over my own stupidity .. and now I have a giant mirror for my Lady Cave. Success! Sort of. My foot hurts, where I landed on it.

It’s a good thing I’m pretty.

I might be too depressed to shower, but it’s equally likely (if not more so) that I am just lazy. I haven’t showered in TWO DAYS and am generally a giant mess – it may not sound like much to you, but I am usually dressed quite well and I always smell great. I’m the girl who shows up to breakfast at 9am the morning after the party looking like I just slept for 12 hours on a bed of feathers and marshmallow fluff with winged infants flapping a gentle breeze across my brow. My friends routinely comment on my varying levels of fanciness, from the “hey you look nice today” to “so what time are you meeting the queen?”. Right now, I am not fancy. By my standards, I am disgusting. Once many years ago Ed was without a job and he managed to go 7 days without showering or getting dressed – I am not that strong (or gross). The only thing keeping me from having a shower right now and getting dressed as though I were going to buy and sell people like toilet paper is the fact my bathroom has once again been hotboxed courtesy of the people downstairs (and it’s almost 1am and Ed’s asleep). Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow I will wake up, have a thorough shower, and put on clothing that does not have to be tied around my waist so that I am not in danger of tripping over myself and falling down. I will shave my regions, and I will put on a skirt. I may even put on a petticoat – if I’m going through the trouble, I might as well go all the way. I don’t have any plans for the day other than my usual job hunting duties, but I will pry myself out of the house and go somewhere. I don’t know where. Maybe across the street; maybe to Surrey (just kidding). I am tired of being at home, looking greasy, feeling sorry for myself, and staring at the internet: tomorrow I will pretend I have a purpose (outside of monitoring Twitter all day long).

Honestly, I don’t THINK I’m any more depressed than usual. My therapist likes making me Rate My Crazy on a scale of one to ten (one being I am the best I’ve ever been and exude a trail of glitter everywhere I go; ten being too depressed to shit out sparkle one), and these days I tend to hover around a 4/5 – things could be better, but I keep on keepin’ on. Maybe I’d put myself at a 6 right now, because I am increasingly convinced that I will never find a job because no one responds to any of my emails or applications (except that one guy who was so moved by my lack of skill he felt he had to shut me down immediately). I’m stressing out a little – and I’m bored out of my friggin’ mind – but I don’t think it’s the reason I’ve let myself fester in my own crapulence like this. I think I’m just really lazy. It was fun while it lasted, and now I know the limit of enjoying my own filth (2 days is too many days) so tomorrow I will clean myself up and go outside. I need an adventure. And more Diet Coke.

Wow – I was looking around for an image to post here, and ended up doing a search for myself. Apparently, some French website wrote an article on HIV and used one of my swabbing photos from Flickr. Awesome! My name is also on some Justin Bieber fan art site, because of the masks I made in ’10 for Northern Voice. How awkward for me!

Tomorrow will be a good day.

Or else.

A gaggle of hipsters going for a photowalk (lo-fi only, please):

digital photography is cool and all, but it has no soul unlike film

Today I am discouraged and blah.

We’re so close to being done I can almost taste the floor! The Lady Cave needs a couple pictures hung and more secret unicorns, and it’s ready for the Office Warming Party; the living room needs to be emptied of all donative goods (and someone to take the damn excess furniture) and we’re FINISHED. For now. We’re already talking paint and accent colours, which is terribly exciting – we always have Grand Plans for paint but never seem to actually get it done, and then there’s just too much stuff in the way. Almost every trace of my existence is gone from the living room, which means it’ll be so much easier to paint – especially when you consider my former corner will soon be utterly naked and ripe for dazzling colours.

The shelf I built on Monday is now in place, and we loaded it up with our books. I purged several boxes worth of literary goodness, yet my collection still took up more than four of the 5 shelves on the new enormous unit (not to mention the “special” books that hold a place of honour on in my Lady Cave). The bookcase itself is very nice, but it looks very haphazard in the bedroom because none of my books are the same size. Ed’s books are all trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and neatly stack in two rows along the top shelf. Me, not so much:

boooooooks.

If I don’t get a job soon, I’m going to end up sitting in front of the shelf and attempting to arrange all my books by height. I’m a creature of organized chaos, and this makes me twitch if I stare at it too long – there must be order! Everything must line up!

While I was carting armful after armful of books from one room to another, I was struck by the glaring difference in our reading tastes. For example, Ed’s books have titles like The Fallen Fortress and Council of Blades and Song of the Saurials – basically, his entire shelf is a tribute to Forgotten Realms, D&D and emo dark elves with pocket cats and daddy issues.

On the other hand, my books have titles like Cunt, The Vulgar Tongue, The Complete Manual of Things that Will Kill You, and Anne of Green Gables. There’s also half a shelf dedicated to lesbian erotica, a whole series on word origins and grammar, and an equal measure of books on survival (zombie apocalypse, lost in the woods, dragon attack) and ways I could die in the next fifteen seconds. As much as Ed is all about high fantasy and leather jerkins, I am about sex, words, and my own mortality – we make a good pair.

Once the 2012 House Reshuffling is done, I plan to take up knitting again and grow my nails out so I can make them plaid. And hopefully get a job. I would really enjoy  a job.

these are my "special" books (they're in a separate room because Ed was tired of my trying to make him gay by osmosis - apparently, sleeping on top of the Big Penis Book was uncomfortable)

I just built a bookshelf, which better count as my exercise for the day. I don’t think a personal trainer could make me hurt any more than I do right now, and besides which, I’m fairly certain the types of  injuries I’m currently sporting have been banned as motivational tools by the Geneva Conventions.

On the plus side, hey! New bookshelf! It wasn’t too difficult to put together, but the secondary person the instructions mentioned as a required tool was not included in the box so I did it all myself. It wasn’t the screwing that I really minded – it never is – but the hammering can suck it. I am really bad at hammering. Things that require hammering is why I tend to have men around.

There’s a really dirty remark to be made there, but I’m not your filthy monkey – use your own imagination and figure out the pounding joke on your own.

You know, I’ve  been on the internet since the Dawn of Time. I understand spam – I don’t like it, but I understand it. Sure, sometimes I get annoyed with the sheer amount of spam I get and the way my filters sometime decide not to work, flooding my inbox with pleas from horny Russians wanting to show me heaven via webcam. With a resigned sigh and a heaving bosom I wade through mortgage offers, Nigerian princes, accusations of being unable to satisfy my woman with my tiny rod, and easy ways to lose those unsightly pounds that never ever feature decapitation as a viable option and delete/flag/swear as needed – but this time, they’ve gone too far: an email from Restore Our Future, saying that Mitt Romney needs my help and a reminder to vote for him tomorrow.

Just for fun, let’s count all the things that are wrong with this situation:

• I’m not American
• If I were American, I wouldn’t be Republican
• The only possible way I would ever consider helping Mitt Romney would be if he needed someone to explain the merkin or the etiquettes of pegging, or to share my personal theories on the lack of facials in gay porn

I am seriously offended that someone sold one of my rarely used email addresses to a fucking political group; one for a country I’m not even in. Assholes! I am vibrating with righteous ire and the weight of Hobbes purring on my arm!

All rage aside, I do feel sorry for the US. They’re basically being asked to choose between the lesser of three evils (and a running joke) – it’s like asking if they would prefer their town to be destroyed by an enraged Godzilla hellbent on protecting her young, a kittenish Cthulhu who only wants to play, or a krakken-sized El Chupacabra foaming at the mouth and holding the half-open seventh seal (I’ll let you decide which candidate is which). Unfortunately, I think it’s unlikely that Obama will be reelected for a second term .. which means their future is in the hands of either the guy who hates women, the one who only likes them when their legs are spread, the one who wears magic underwear, or Ron Paul.

Then again, we’re stuck with Harper.

Who’s up for moving to Micronesia?

dot dot dot

I feel like a terrible, disloyal gamer: as part of our home organizations, our framed series of original MDK2 posters from Bioware (like, directly from Bioware – they said “hey, want these?” and I said “hell yes”) are coming down for the first time since 2000. I love the set and they’re certainly not going anywhere – they just won’t be on the wall for the time being. I’m sorry, MDK2 posters! I still love you!

Yeah, I’m that person – the one who feels guilty when she throws out a toothbrush for a new one. Years ago I had to make Sophie’s Choice and ultimately decided to retire my original Transformers: The Movie poster from 1986, which had been hanging in my various rooms since .. well, 1986. It was tattered and in rough shape (and for some reason has Rick Hansen on the other side) from repeated hangings and framed in 1997 to try to stem the tide of deterioration and is one of my very favourite things ever, but there was simply no place for it in this Brave New World of matching furniture and not wearing old McDonald’s uniform shirts instead of doing laundry.

Being an adult is such a drag.

rest in the closet, mdk2 posters.

I’m spending more time in the spare room these days, as I slowly move my life out of the living room. It’s a drastically different setup for me – in fact, I’m taking over Ed’s Jerker desk (we stupidly got rid of mine two desks ago because it didn’t fit in my corner of the North Van living room) and selling the enormous one I’ve been using for the last three years (does anyone want a huge desk? cheap!). The sheer volume of stuff I kept on my old desk has to change, as I’ve got a lot less surface area to work with. This isn’t a bad thing – I’ve purged a great deal of stuff, which makes room for other, better stuff – but it’s going to take a lot of work to make the house livable again, which is likely causing Ed nightly conniptions. He is not alone in his anxiety, because the move is going to make things different in more ways than one: I have to start wearing clothes at home.

One of the nice things about the space are the enormous windows that fill an entire corner; my computer is set up in such a way that I can look outside yet avoid most of the glare on my monitors. However, windows are two way – which means my habit of lounging around the house in the all together is going to have to change, and quickly. It’s like there’s a fucking force field around that corner of the room – if I’m not wearing clothes, I CANNOT go to my desk. Even if it’s just for a second. Even if the blinds are closed, or it’s dark outside, or it’s 3 in the morning and no one is around except the spine-snipping hobo. I’m going to love having my own room once everything is set up properly (and all these keyboards go away – why the fuck does Ed have so many keyboards), but I may have to go out and buy some house lounging stuff to hide my shame from Hastings Street because I love my vagina far too much to let just anyone see it from across the street.

The move is going a little too slowly for my liking, because I am impatient and have a messed up internal clock. Most of the purging is done, but I ran out of room to sort things so I forcefully declared last night as relocatey times. Today I’m shuffling things around to make room for others – it’s like one of those sliding block puzzles, where you have to move things over in the allotted space in order to extract one piece (in this case, Ed’s hideous green chair that makes me feel like I’m sitting in a highchair) – but I’ve hit another brick wall. I may be a Proud Independent Black Woman, but I officially need Ed’s help because others tell me it would be somewhat rude for me to throw his things around all willy nilly in my haste to set up my Lady Cave. I want to do it NOW, though. Furniture is ready to be moved, and I am simply not mighty enough to do it on my own (believe me, I’ve tried). This means waiting until Ed has time to help me, what with his being gainfully employed and unfairly demanding sleep and all. Complicating matters is my hopping social calendar, which has me out of the house all weekend volunteering at Indie I Do on Saturday and going to a meatball party on Sunday – so the house (and more importantly MY STUFF) won’t be less everywhere until sometime next week.

I left the blinds raised a little so the cats could look out the window, and I have a great view of the passenger seats of cars when they stop at the light – this is why I know there are a lot of very pregnant women riding shotgun in East Van this afternoon. How odd.

I have to go finish putting on clothes (this won’t be a cold turkey change; I need to ease slowly into being decent at all times) – it’s time for Indie I Setup and hopefully tacos.

this did not get purged. old timey porn is good times, hairy nipples and all.

Yesterday I stumbled across a perfect job posting for a tech writer. I updated my resume to match their requirements, wrote an elegant and concise cover letter, and hit “send”; confident that they would be delighted at my sheer awesomeness and want to offer me untold fortunes within minutes.

Instead, I was utterly rejected. Not just form rejected, but a personal rejection from the department head saying “It is well known that you are completely incompetent and also a fraud, so it will be a cold day in hell before we hire you and also you suck.”

I might be hyperbolizing there a little bit, but I did get an email saying “lol, sorry, no”. I had a bit of back and forth with the guy to address his reasons for my consummate and rapid rejection, but the end result remains that I don’t have the skills they’re looking for to such a degree that it warranted a personal email of “no thx”.

Logically, I know that rejection is 99% of the game. I know that I’m lucky that I not only got an immediate response from my application, but had someone willing to answer my questions about why I was turned down – it’s a far cry from the waiting game I’m playing with companies I applied to last month. I know that my not being what this company is looking for doesn’t mean that I don’t have skills, or that there isn’t another company out there that would be thrilled to have me. I KNOW all this.

.. but that didn’t stop me from spending most of yesterday afternoon in a serious funk, convinced that I will never be employed again. There is very little room for logic inside this glittery unicorn head of mine, least of all when I am busy wallowing in my own crapulence. I feel slightly better about things today, but I am still full of illogical woe when I think about it (like when I write updates all about how much I suck).

I HATE job hunting.

And relentless logic.

It’s been a struggle to keep away from all those drugs and alcohols I love so much, but so far I’ve managed to maintain my Mike-inspired vow of straightedginess. However, for all my valiant efforts of actively denying myself things that were never an issue to begin with in order to attain artistic inspiration through withdrawal and suffering (you can tell I’m not serious about it because if I really wanted to suffer for my art of sitting around the house naked there wouldn’t be 12 litres of Diet Coke in the truck of the car), I’m probably getting a goddamn contact high every single time I pee.

On the plus side, three ongoing mysteries have all been wrapped up in a neat little package:

The Smell: What I was afraid was the horrible stench of hobo poop is actually nothing of the sort – it’s pot. Really, really skunky pot. Our new downstairs neighbours like to hotbox their bathroom every single night without fail (the appearance of The Smell began shortly after someone moved in below us), and as our bathrooms are connected, it wafts in through the ventilation and makes our place reek. It’s probably coating everything in resin, which results in the contact high via my butt when I pee. I don’t really know what (if anything) I can do about it, since this isn’t an apartment building and I know they don’t have a balcony. I’m not so Evil Neighboury that I care one way or another if my neighbours smoke up, but it smells AWFUL and is incredibly strong, and it’s every. single. night. I have to keep my bathroom door closed to try to contain the stench, because I really don’t want it reaching my clothes (the closet is attached to the bathroom; it’s an ensuite). Even worse, my brain immediately associates the smell with hobo poop even though it knows better, and it makes bedtime kind of unpleasant. I don’t WANT to trip balls every time I pee. This is most worrisome.

Like I said, all the mysteries are falling into place – suddenly, the 1am baby in 217 makes sense. I don’t yet know (or care, really) if he (I’m assuming it’s the dad, because if it was a breastfeeding mom that baby would be a lot more mellow at 1am) is having a hard time coping with parenthood and smokes up to deal OR if he was a pothead all along and the baby screams at 1am because it doesn’t like the smell any more than I do, but all of these things started at the same time and are likely related.

The third mystery does not have to do with my neighbours or my THC-laden butt: for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out why the hell I’ve suddenly acquired a gaggle of recovering alcoholics as Twitter followers. I’m wondering if someone (they’re all connected to each other, and all annoying) searched for “straightedge” “never again” “giant floppy dongs in my face”, found my stream, and assumed I was ONE OF THEM – and the rest did as Simon said. I’ve been blocking people who constantly tweet at me by mistake (they were filling my screen with retweeted hellos), so the Recovering Alcoholics of Twitter and the idiots who think I am their friend in Thailand despite my repeatedly telling them that they don’t need to see my identification and I am not the Kimli they are looking for (I can go about my business; move along) can all suck it – blocked blocked blocked. Their lack of exquisite, finely honed internet etiquette – such as the one I’ve acquired through being online for 20 years – is a distinct pain in my super high ass.

the fabulous lord of the sith