Leading by WHAT Example?

Good Heavens! Where have I been? Oh, that's right, looking for employment. It's certainly been a roller coaster (the least fun kind--the kind they have at the kiddie parks that just goes in a glorified circle and is shaped like a snake or a dragon and you feel mortified by the mere thought that someone might see you on it and recognize you).

Ultimately, my struggle for the acquisition of money meant that I couldn't very well turn down a job offer, even if it was a crap job with no benefits, poor pay, and a mean-spirited boss. A job in the hand and all that.

Meanwhile I keep looking for something significantly better. To give you an idea of the range of pay scales I've been offered, I'll tell you that the hourly salary of the highest-paying job was 10 times greater than the lowest paying job. That is a SIGNIFICANT difference, even when you don't consider statistical significance.

My current job suffers from a great amount of apathy from all who work there, including the owner of the gift shop, where I now wrap gifts [while being heartily lectured on "girl" colors and "boy" colors for gift wrap ('where does green fall on this binary gender range,' I wondered? 'Don't use it,' the managers replied. But come ON! There's a whole stack of green tissue paper and several rolls of green ribbon! If you didn't want me to use it, don't put it out there to tempt me!).

The best option, at this point, is to just find something better. I will feel unreasonably guilty about quitting, but I'll certainly have a much happier outlook once I'm out of there.

Bending the Rules

Now that we've been at this hospital for over 3 weeks, there is REALLY nothing to do there. I mean, it's ridiculously slow. Naturally, being an intelligent individual, I am endlessly searching for something to keep me occupied. Unfortunately, nothing is allowed by our "managers". damn. Now we're at a really really small hospital in Manteca. There are more of us than there are nurses! So we get thrown off the floor because we're crowding them.

Twist of irony: I drew this at work two weeks ago, and I am posting this update from work now. MUAHAHAHAH! I'm subverting the system!

Replacement Pests

Point of Fact; I have traded the roaches, not for ants (which are actually one of my greatest fears), but for Earwigs, which are relatively harmless (according to wikipedia), but altogether still rather too gruesome for me to allow crawling around my home.

Still, given the choice between one or the other, I'll take the earwigs. Maybe the spiders will take care of them.

Man, I hate ants.

My Unfortunate Guests

I am extremely sad that my PhotoShop hasn't resurrected itself. It'd been months since I made a comic, but I drew this one today. You'll be disgusted to know that this shoddy workmanship is all I can cobble together using a strange combination of MS Paint, Powerpoint, and ComicLife. I also frittered away $1.80 utilizing the scanner at Fedex-Kinko's to bring this to you, so I hope you guys enjoy it! You'd better!

My work provides me with corporate housing which varies widely in condition. When I lived in Sacramento, the housing was really pretty nice, with access to a pool (necessary. It was damn hot out there) and it was pretty clean. My housing in Modesto is not exactly nice. In fact, it's plain dirty, and when I first moved in, I was not aware of my cirtterly pests. I found one of them galavanting in my sauce pan and I just about had a heart attack. I resolved then and there to take care of it.

The Prom Dress Poisoning

"I'ma smack you up, B*otch!"

The best way to die...

So I had a wonderful dream after finals and during Winter Break. It was a dream above all dreams. In truth, now that I've gotten my special studies grade back, my major advisor doesn't really deserve much of the treatment in the comic... at least... not the flaming arrow. I managed an A-, which meant that fall of senior year was my first college semester that I managed straight A's (of any kind).



She totally deserves to at least be a little harassed by a squid though...

On a more serious note though, the spring semester went a lot smoother, and I no longer feel any sort of antagonism toward her. Advisor love!

Rage... Building,...Vision... Blurring... AAAARGH!

I know more of you are just dying to know what happened after I sent in my special studies. It eventually got there on time. On the other hand, maybe you're NOT dying to know, since you're probably all of the impression that that was the end of it. I know, I certainly did.

Unfortunately, no. It's not the end.



More stress and GRAAAAAAH! was headed my way. Needless to say, I was less than thrilled. I got an email from my advisor which basically said, 'I can't give you a grade until I talk to you face-to-face'. Big uh-oh moment. I marked it as un-read and vowed not to think of it for 2 days. Two days later, I opened it, sent her a reply and suggested a meeting time.

The day after I heard from my advisor, I also got a message from my Mentor who said my advisor had been talking to him and she had said my paper was SO good, she was trying to find out if I'd copied parts of it from somewhere or had had any outside help.

Yikes! Serious accusations there, and totally false! I was filled with worry and stress once again, because I needed to talk to her and make it all right. Tsoris! Anger! Frustration! Like a good soap opera, right? Now all I needed was an evil twin sister to run off and marry some guy named Hernando and they would come back in 2 seasons with a small child/baby and dump him on me. I hate babies.

Line-Art Therapy

Somewhere in my history I fell out of the habit of asking people for help. I think this is a trait my parents encouraged as they saw it as a type of independence and they knew that as an only-child, I was going to need to fend for myself a great deal. Far be it from me to judge my parents' techniques, but this one could have used some addendums. For instance:
You CAN ask for help or support when...
...you've made a total fool of yourself.
...you're about to fail at life.
...you're about to fail at school.
...dealing with annoying relatives.

So what do you do when you ask for help too late?

From Senior Year right before finals:
"I'm in a peculiar situation. I've never (in the whole of my life) asked a teacher for an extension on a paper or project. I'm currently doing a semester-long special studies that's a little outside my realm of experience, and it is battering me. I figured that since I'd basically been totally out of touch for a week (what with a needle in my foot and surgery and Vicodin and all that), it would be reasonable to ask for a 5-7 day extension for medical reasons.

'Course, my class dean is completely on some sort of bizarre power trip. She won't grant extensions for medical reasons (I have a friend who was just diagnosed with esophogeal cancer and is currently on 12 pills a day and the dean won't give her an extension) and says that a note from the hospital and health services isn't enough. She says she'll talk to my major advisor (who is currently in a state of HATE), and see what SHE says. That means, I won't know about an extension until Monday. For a paper that was technically due on Friday (yesterday). The following actions have run through my mind:
- jump in front a car
- have a tree branch drop on me all of a sudden
- use a voodoo doll on the dean (which won't get me an extension but will make me feel better)

Technically, the first two wouldn't get me an extension either... the dean has basically said no medical reason is ever good enough to get an extension. It's your fault for not looking both ways when you started to cross the street..."