Facebook oops:

I was on the facebook the other day, and noticed that Notre Dame has been added. I decided to see if any of my cousins are on there. I see that there is someone named the same as my cousin. Though my cousin's name isn't very common, I happen to know that someone else at Notre Dame shares her name (she attended the Indiana REU conference with me). But this person is a grad student and her picture shows someone in a marching band uniform, and my cousin is a first year law student who was in the marching band as an undergrad. So I figured that this is probably her and friended her. She approved me, but when I went to read her profile, I learned that this person was in fact a math grad student and therefore not my cousin. Oops.

It's funny that she figured that she knew me from somewhere and approved me. Not that I don't approve everyone who friends me, even if I'm not entirely sure who they are (uh, not that that has happened or anything).

Mini bottles:

While watching The Daily Show last night, I learned that South Carolina's constitution requires that alcohol served in restaurants and bars come from un-opened mini-bottles (so one drink=one mini bottle). God, what a stupid law. Not only does it make it impossible to buy one Long Island Ice Tea (since it requires 4 different kinds of alcohol, and 4 mini-bottles is larger than a glass), but, more indefensibly, it increases the amount of trash generated by bars and also probably has something to do with South Carolina's high rate of alcohol-caused road fatalities since drinks in SC are twice as strong as elsewhere. You have to wonder what could possibly be the reason for such a constitutional provision, other than to make sure that the liquor industry makes more money.

Taking a little trip:

Some of you already know this, but I am heading to London to visit T-- and then we are going to Ireland together. I'm leaving Sunday.

It will definitely be good for me to get out of here. I've been moderately situationally depressed. This is really really hard for me, in a city where I don't have many friends, am without a job and am getting more and more worried that something bad is happening with the job that I'm supposed to have eventually. If it weren't for A-- and D-- this would have been substantially worse. Anyway, I really appreciate all of you who called/emailed/showed me you gave a shit about me in some way. Y'all have really helped, and thank you.

As it is, my sense of adventure is back into force. While I'm not super-excited about Ireland (D-- reminded me of how much I had wanted to go to Lithuania and Poland when I went out and drank beer with him and K-- on Saturday), just getting away for ten days is definitely worth it, and it'll be great to see T-- again. It's funny, though, this trip was originally planned to cheer her up since she had a bad summer, but now it will really be to pick me up a bit. I've had to turn down two jobs because of it, so it had better be fun.

Goodbye Rich's:

This won't mean a lot to many people, but Rich's was the Atlanta department store. It was founded by Mr. Rich, who came to Atlanta in the 1860s (he was probably a carpetbagger, but no one really talks about that). The downtown store for many years was the place where people from all over the south would come to buy clothes, eat in the tea room, and celebrate Christmas. Most of this was before my time, but I remember the downtown store (it closed about 15 years ago), with the giant Christmas tree that was lit every year as a singer hit the really high note in "O Holy Night." To this day, I can't hear that "O night divine" without making the universal tree-lighting gesture, sort of flicking both my hands out.

My favorite Rich's Christmas memory also occured at the downtown store. On the top floor, above floors of storage and offices, Rich's always created a Christmas scene, snow on the ground and trees and presents and, best of all, a little tiny train with cars shaped like a pig. The Pink Pig was so small that an adult would have his knees to his chest riding it and this scene was reached by riding up in a freight elevator that rivalled the elevators in Harper and Blackstone for pure scariness, but I was always so excited to go ride the Pink Pig. They did it a couple of times in the Lenox store, I think, but I was too old and it wasn't the same anyway.

Rich's was more than a store to Atlanta, too. It was part of the community. Everyone shopped there, of course, in the days before malls and much competition. But the store also helped out when it was necessary. During the Depression, Atlanta Public Schools ran out of money to pay the teachers, so Rich's paid them. The store took essentially worthless crops for farmers in exchange for merchandise.

Once Federated bought Rich's, it has been a long slow slide down. The downtown store closed, Rich's and Macy's began selling the exact same merchandise, and now the Rich's name will be gone in January. It is really the end for Rich's.

Hey:

I've been working at a golf show the last two days (don't ask). I heard one of the other temps there was a baseball player. I figured he played some sort of winter ball or something, and didn't think much of it. Today, though, I was talking to him and I learned that he pitches for the Expos' AAA affiliate (so one step away from the majors). I googled him and learned that he is a pretty highly regarded prospect who is expected to be good enough to be a big league middle reliever. And he graduated from the next high school to mine.

I'll look for him in the next couple of years, pitching for the Expos. Well, assuming the Expos still exist, natch.

Stolen clothes!:

I went to Macy's today with my mother for the annual Harvest Sale. I was really going to look for silverware, but while I was there, I tried on a cute sweater/skirt outfit. I went out of the dressing room to show it to my mother and was gone for maybe two minutes. When I got back, the clothes that I had worn in were gone. Now, in perspective, I was wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt made by Champion and olive green Banana Republic cargo pants. The part of the store I was in was selling skirts and dressy clothes, mostly in light colors.

I stuck around while my mother found the employee who had been cleaning up around there, R. She said that she had only moved Charter Club stuff (I think it's a Macy's house brand, but definitely not like something I was wearing). I asked another woman in the dressing room, and she said that R. (well she pointed her out, but it was the same woman) had taken some stuff out of there, so my mother went back and asked her again. She swore up and down that she had only taken Charter Club clothes out. My mother started going through the pile of clothes that R. had waiting to rehang, and sure enough, she pulls out my pants and shirt.

Talk about unobservant. The clothes are old, obviously worn, with no tags, both brands that you don't sell, and look like nothing else in your department. So what do you do? Pick them up, put them in your pile, and tell the person looking for them that you couldn't possibly have them. Then, when it becomes patently obvious that you have them, naturally you don't apologise for what was clearly your mistake.

New Password:

I just changed my blogger password. "bloch eats babies" is a little annoying to type all the time. Sorry, Maggie.

Friday at the Biscuit:

Last night, A-- and I went to the Flying Biscuit in Candler Park. A friend of mine from high school is a manager there, so we got to talk to him and got the "good buddy" discount. Cool. Our waiter was nuts, but the food was delicious, and the waiter seemed impressed that we knew S--.

I got home about 11:45, and was sort of putzing around as you do. My cell phone rang about 1:00. I assumed it was a mistake, but saw the call was from another high school friend, D--. So I answered it and D-- demanded, "why didn't you tell me you were in town?" Now I last talked to D-- in July or August, and he was in NYC, on a trip to LA, no mention of Atlanta anywhere in these plans. But he's here now. Yay! What with the UofC alum happy hour thing and A--, D--, and S--, perhaps I can begin to have a social life.

Quick update:

I had three days of work thie week and have two and a half for next week. I've basically paid for my plane ticket to England temping. That's kind of nice.

No word from the real job though. I'll have to tell them that I'm leaving the country in two weeks, though, so that'll give me another chance to communicate with them. I'm really hoping for news by the time I get back. Please.

But yeah, I'm officially going. Leaving on Saturday, I think. Spending a couple of days in London and a couple in Ireland. Coming back on Wed the 13th. It should be fun to see T--, have somewhere free to stay, see London again, and go back to Ireland. No Dublin this time, or at least as little as possible.

Hurricane:

I'm fine. We had a pretty bad storm yesterday afternoon, but luckily I had just gotten home from work before it started. Particularly lucky since they closed the MARTA station that my car was parked at after I got home. Trees and flooding on the tracks, they said.

We got a lot of wind, lots of branches down, some trees in the area but not in our yard are down. No major flooding around here. We lost power for about 15 hours, and cable for longer, but everything is back, the streets are more or less clear, and we got some awesome wind.

Temporary assignment:

Temping is different from working. Temps talk about assignments rather than jobs, and "I'm on assignment" is a universal excuse for postponing interviews, skipping lunches, changing any plans. On short term assignments, though, temps spend all their time talking about the next assignment and the last assignment. This is what I did last week. Let me call to find out what I'm doing next week.

For me, if I'm not on assignment, it isn't the end of the world. Not paying rent has some benefits. I needed at least a week of work to make sure I could pay for England, $400 after taxes would be brilliant. I should get there, even if I don't get any more assignments.

Right now I am on assignment, working at the registration desk for a government conference held in a swanky hotel. The work is ridiculously easy, it's just check people in when they show up and occasionally clean up the front table. We would have random busy spurts, combined with lots of slow periods, where I talked to the other temps and read some of my book.

It's a little boring, but it is the easiest job I've ever had, and I don't even have to pretend to be busy. The only real issue was that I had to be downtown at 6:30am today. Yes, 6:30am. I left my house at 5:35, caught a 5:50 MARTA train, and got to the CNN Center at 6:15. At least there's no traffic at 5:35am. And I got a REALLY good parking place.

On forgiveness:

I went to Mass yesterday, and the priest gave his sermon on forgiveness, tied to the Prodigal Son and, of course, September 11. His conclusion was, naturally, that we should forgive the terrorists.

Maybe that's not entirely bullshit. Individually, perhaps we should forgive, if we can, for what happened three years ago. But our government shouldn't forgive. As a society we shouldn't forgive.

We should instead hunt down the perpetrators and kill them or lock them up so that they can never do something like that again. We should make an example of them so that other people will think twice about attacking American civilians. We should do our best to make sure that nothing like what happened on September 11 can ever happen again.

I know that the dream of the pax Americana was shattered, and that that dream was never exactly substantial. The words "I am an American citizen" will not protect me anywhere that I go. And I don't want the US to rule the world by fear. There is a reason that the Roman Empire fell. (well, OK, there are many reasons that the Roman Empire fell. But one at least was that the Empire depended heavily on continuing to conquer new lands, and once that was no longer possible, ... kaboom)

It's one think for me to talk about turning my other cheek. If I make the decision in a fight not to fight back, that's my choice. But if my decision results in the deaths of three thousand people who didn't get to choose, then I should fight back with every ounce of strength, I should keep fighting even when it seems hopeless.

And then we should remember our dead, to remind us of what happened and of how hard we muct fight to keep it from ever happening again.

We are though perhaps too obsessed with memorials. An Ulster poet named John Hewitt wrote about the dangers of memory: "Bear in mind these dead. I can find no stronger words. I dare not risk using that loaded word, remember." Sometimes we forget how subjective memory is, how easy it is to reinterpret the past. We worry that our dead will be forgotten and overreact, making a memorial of a day and a place and a hundred other things. It's easy to get caught in the past too, to forget that ultimately what will be is more important than what was. Hewitt understood that too. There's a song about Belfast that includes the lines "it's too hell with the future and long live the past/ May the Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast." That doesn't mean we should forget the dead, or that we should not memorialise them, even that we should not keep the day of their deaths as a day of remembrance. In London, I went to a Mass for those who had died at the battle of Crecy in 1346. The news had reached London on All Souls' Day, and every year since, a Mass had been said for the souls of those dead, in case some of the sould were still in Purgatory. It was a beautiful and fitting memorial. At Mass this past Sunday, the priest said a few words of the Requiem Mass: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine." "Et lux perpetua luceat eis." "Dona eis requiem." That seemed more fitting than a hundred prayers at football games or on the Senate floor.

It's hard to have just a simple memorial now, though. The grief is still too fresh, we are still angry and unwilling to forgive. A few words aren't enough, particularly not words that seem timeworn. We want to trumpet out the dead to remind everyone of the horror we all felt only three years ago.

But for now, maybe all we should do is bear in mind our dead.

Still here:

I'm still here in Atlanta, working for the next couple of days at a conference. Had a good weekend; Braves on Friday, lunch and Manuel's for the ND game (sweet), dinner and drinks with U of C folks Sunday.

I do love me some football.

Employed and, well, not loving it:

Updated below

I got a job. It's through a temp agency, working as a file clerk for a law firm. The work itself is pretty boring: filing, mailing, making coffee, the kind of stuff that I expected my $130,ooo education would more or less place me out of. I don't even mind that so much, though; what I really mind is the fact that there isn't really much work for me to do of any sort.

Case in point, I've been working at the job for two days. Today, I got to work at 8:30, made coffee, unloaded the dishwasher, and generally putzed around until 9:00. Did the morning filing, mailed out the last few invoices for the month, and took the mail out till 10. Cleaned out my desk and did what filing came in from 10 to 12(!). Sat at the reception desk for an hour, went to lunch. It's like 2:15. I got about 8 more files for the day. After 5, I cleaned up.

One assumes that I'm only going to get faster at this job. As it is, I worked about half the day today. This is beyond boring.

Still no start date and no prospect in sight. The current plan is to work here for three more weeks, then go visit T-- and Ireland, come back and hopefully have a clearer idea of what is happening with my state of employment.

I need to wait on one email that will hopefully come either tomorrow or Monday. Assuming it doesn't say something like, expect to hear from us in the next week, I'm booking my ticket. Right now it's $450 inclusive on STATravel, and I don't want to lose that fare.

About 10 minutes after I wrote this, I got a call from the temp agency. Apparently I am no longer employed. The company said I wasn't working out. I did everything they asked, but didn't really seek out more work or make any effort to appear busy, so maybe that's it. Or maybe they expected me to know how to do everything in their office (things like where the faxes go, how to put soap in the dishwasher, how they want their files made) since they seemed to expect me to learn by osmosis. I was the fourth person from the temp agency rejected by the law firm, so the temp guy wants a report on what's going on there from me. I'm really marvelling in the irony of being fired from the job that I was so far overqualified to do when I wasn't fired from the computer programming job that I had no skills for. And excited that I get to sleep in. I honestly thought I would be more upset the first time I got fired.

Not dead:

Sorry. I know I suck. But I'm in Atlanta after an uneventful drive home. Still waiting on a start date for the job, so I'm going to try to get some temping here, to earn a little cash and stave off the utter boredom. Hopefully I'll be able to scrape the money together to go do some travelling with T-- around the first of October, too, assuming I'm not starting the job before then.

More later. Probably not till after the weekend, though.