February 13, 2024
First, some background. Since the last EDLM day, my girlfriend and I, who both worked at the same place for years, were both fired. Some false rumors circulated, and people upstairs didn’t bother to investigate this – Indiana is an at-will state, so no reason was needed when they wanted to get rid of someone. Even as this has caused me a fair share of frustration, financial uncertainty, and a need to find a healthy way to deal with my need for vengeance, in hindsight now, I am glad to be rid of some of the classist, homophobic, fatphobic, rude elements that have been allowed to flourish at that workplace. My GF luckily found another (better) position in Gas City after only about 2 weeks. My career path is very specific, so it took me until January to find something, and it’s only part-time. It’s here downtown, and in general I like the position, except for the $7/hour pay reduction, and 12 hour/week reduction. Losing health insurance. No longer qualifying for the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness program, since I am no longer full time. I keep looking for full time positions, but for now, we are making do. Right now I only make about half the money I used to, and this has obviously been the source of a lot of stress. I cannot name names publicly regarding who made things up to get me fired, because that would surely get me some kind of libel lawsuit, so I struggle every day not being able to put these people on blast, and not taking steps to see they get what they deserve.
5:08a – I wake up and realized sure it’s early but I also have been asleep since like 10:45 so I did get a decent amount of sleep. It is very quiet in here, and dark. I get up, find some around-the-house clothes, and regret my putting-laundry-away mistakes I made yesterday (I hung things on hangers that she doesn’t want hung, and I didn’t know…I was trying to be helpful by putting laundry away and I got part of it wrong.) The cats welcome me when I move into the living room at about 5:40. Her alarm goes off at 7, so I have an hour and some change to get my morning going alone. At 6:03 I get up from the sofa.
6:09a – I sit back down with water, coffee, and having fed the cats. Money issues aside, I feel a lot less pressure for the workday coming up – I don’t have to be there at any specific time, or stay till any specific time; the only rule is “come in, work 28 hours for the week, and go home”. I stayed home yesterday to get some needed house stuff done, so I am left with what I imagine will be 4 7-hour shifts for the rest of the week. I tentatively plan on doing 815-315 each day. Not too bad! I pull out the book I started yesterday, and read.
6:29a – I am enjoying the book a lot, but I just couldn’t get settled into it, so I put it down for now. Little noises were distracting: the burble of the cats’ water fountain, one of the cats scraping in his litter box, the hum of the refrigerator. I keep going with my breakfast beverages and turn on Youtube. Cat 1 approached for snuggles. Cat 2 is hanging out on her own on the love seat, while Cat 3 is on the floor, digesting her breakfast. I remember how I had to call and cancel an upcoming doctor appointment yesterday because I no longer have health insurance. I remind myself to finish my HIP application at work today.
7:14a -I look over at the window and see the outline of trees through the very faint sunrise.
7:30a – I check on GF, shower, get dressed, and she leaves by 7:58. It’s a little bit impressive how we can both get ready so quickly with only the 1 bathroom. I pack my lunch, and refill the cat fountain to eliminate its horrible gurgling, and leave by 8:05.
8:05-8:35a – The car has a heavy coating of frost, and it immediately makes me despair. It’s a reminder that I am here, and it triggers all sorts of anxiety about the unknown future, how to get where I am going in life these next few months, how to even figure out where I am going. I get in the car, and as it is defrosting, I start the next episode of “Lore”, my commute podcast. Today, Aaron is talking about the Stanley Hotel in Colorado – and the romanticization of old, abandoned places really hits this morning. That is how I feel most every day walking around here. I parallel park by the Caffeinery, for coffee and possibly a pastry this time. I get in line, and of course someone from my old work gets in line behind me. I try to pretend to not notice them. I think they pretend to not notice me, but I am so bad at that game – I never know how oblivious someone actually is. Eventually, after my order, and as I was waiting for my cup, she turns and says “Hi, XXXXXX”. I say hi back to her, and have to wait then for probably 5 minutes as the staff work through the backlog of drink orders until mine is ready – the whole time I’m having this awkward experience under the eye of my former workplace. This one was one of the nicer ex-coworkers; she was not involved with what happened to me. But still, I get tired of being in a city this small, where every time you show yourself in public, you run at least a 40% chance of bumping into someone who you would be better off not running into. People whom you know their baggage, their issues. That one lady that you told “no” once, so she plotted for a while to accuse you of harassment at work as retaliation – that sort of thing. The GF has an amazing insight into people we run into – as a Muncie native, she will routinely give me some kind of dirt on whoever we see in a store or restaurant. – “See that guy, he only hires 16-year-old-girls and tries to get with them; a friend of mine used to work there”. I’d love to never be perceived by a good number of people here in Muncie. A city at least double to triple Muncie’s size would be great – Cincinnati, Washington, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Dublin – something like that. I need the kind of anonymity a city that large often affords. I think about all of this while trying to avoid any further interaction with my ex-coworker, and when my coffee is ready, I quickly take it, add cream, and leave. I pull into my parking lot a couple blocks away, and as I am getting out of the car, I notice what looks like a gigantic bird perched on top of this church nearby. It’s not moving, so I kind of find myself invested, and wait for it to turn around or something – making sure that I’m not looking at a weird gargoyle or some such. Finally it looks around, and I realize it’s just a famous Muncie goose. Something about the perspective of the building makes it look a lot bigger than it must actually be. I was imagining it as something much more cassowary-size. I walk in to my building, and settle in for my work shift.
Fig. 1 – The Church Goose
8:35a – I manage to make it in before my supervisor. He actually used to be on my staff in my former job, some years ago, but he moved on, and got a job here as director. It is just the 2 of us here in this much smaller department than where I was working. I was alone here in the office until 8:45, when he arrived. Since I was first, the plausible deniability of my arrival time was maintained (since there is no proper timecard mechanism here). No, I am not a bad employee, I just recognize that my position here really isn’t that necessary, and that just sitting here doing literally nothing every day gets very old, and usually it’s all I can do to make it to 2pm before having to get out of here for the day. That, and I am in this new and strange situation where I don’t necessarily plan on staying in this position very long, only as long as it takes to find another, full time one – so I find that fact acting as a barrier between me and really getting 100% involved with this job. I would do way more here if I knew this was going to last any amount of time (Do things such as having a conversation with my boss’ boss about his fitness and if there is anything I should do to work around him – as someone who was a supervisor for years, I’m finding it difficult to act as underling again…there are things I could easily swoop in and improve, but I guess I just don’t have that kind of authority anymore). Since I was out yesterday, I will take it as kind of a personal challenge to last until 3:15 today. My director is a very nice guy, but he is kind of technologically illiterate, and he makes things much harder for himself than it needs to be. (Last week, he spent the whole day grumbling about not being able to print something, and I went over to look at his screen, and walked him through it in 30 seconds). This adds to my inability to stay there a full work day. I don’t feel bad about it though – it’s a part-time job, I’m not expected to. He talks at a whisper all the time, which makes it incredibly tough to hear what he’s saying. That, combined with his needlessly flowery and elusive turns-of-phrase, makes it nearly impossible to understand what he’s going on about. Last week, the main IT guy told me that they all feel sorry for me, having to work with him – he’s always having dumb tech issues and is generally befuddled. I work on my Caffeinery beverage and type this while listening to him repeat anecdotes I’ve already heard several times in the month I’ve been working here.
9:49a – It’s going on 10am and I am wondering how long I can hold out until I have to break away for lunch. I haven’t had to do a single thing during my shift yet; I’ve just been typing this. Don’t get me wrong – I am thankful for a chance to earn what is basically free money, even though it isn’t as much as I was making, while putting in essentially 0 effort – but I can’t wait to find something that offers the level of responsibility I used to have. Out of desperation, I applied for a branch manager position in Indianapolis (which is completely something I’d qualify for) a few days ago. Turns out it is in a dangerous part of town, so I am very on the fence about whether or not I’d reply to any request to interview for it.
10:22a – Foot traffic has picked up in here, but I’m still waiting to be asked for assistance. I am reading through the news, and sending a couple of messages to people – I am reminded that we need to find 1-2 more friends who might want to join in on a game night we are hosting this Saturday. My director announces the time, again, to no one in particular. Coffee-related bathroom break. I contemplate the further planning of a couple different road trips for this summer. I’m not sure how feasible such things are given our money crunch, but we can possibly do a couple of smaller things. I need stuff like that to happen, in order to not spiral, mentally. For the last couple of weeks we have been kicking around the idea of a weekend camping trip. Neither of us have done that before, and I do like the idea of getting out into nature. Having looked at campground layouts at a couple of state parks (Chain O’ Lakes, Turkey Run, or Brown County), I am a little dismayed by how close-quarters and crowded the sites are. I thought camping was supposed to be a situation where you were in the wild, not squished together between so many people and their campers and trucks. Google street views make it look like a kind of trailer park without houses. But I will reserve judgment until we can actually try it out and see for ourselves. I do like the idea of getting a kayak or some such and exploring the “chain-o-lakes”. Being raised near the coast, I miss water and need it badly.
10:48a – Still at my work station – I check the status of my 1 open Amazon order – it’s the next book in the series I am reading. Muncie Public Library didn’t have it. Do I want to give a show at Muncie Civic a try? I’d love to find a good play, without having to drive to Chicago. I looked up “The Play that Goes Wrong”, but I realized that one of the cast is closely related to my firing, so there goes that idea. Again, this town is too small and I need to do better. My director is mouthing something to me that I can’t hear regarding his fears of our organization’s funding being cut, but I’m not entirely sure. I do some light job hunting but after 3 months of that, I get so sick of looking at the same Indeed, Linkedin, and [industry redacted] job boards that I give up after 2 minutes. I check the 4 applications I submitted to Ball State back in November. Here we are, 3 months later and they all still read “In Progress”. Why the hell do they move so slowly? It makes me want to never apply for anything there ever again. My goal every day is to make it to 11am before I take my lunch break. It’s now 11:02 – I made it! GF laments to me over messenger that her baking plan for Fat Tuesday hasn’t developed – she was going to do paczki, but today snuck up too quickly. I grab the apple I packed as part of my lunch and nibble on it while trying to hold out as long as possible for lunch. The longer I hold out, the less time I’ll have left after I get back before I can leave!
11:25a – Still here! I realize just now I forgot my book at home, which I was going to read at lunch. That, combined with not wanting my leftovers, and the need to get out of the building for a bit adds up to me buying lunch today. Voices in this room are louder, more intrusive. I need to get out of here for a little while. Left for lunch at 11:29.
The goose is gone.
I’m not particularly hungry, but if I don’t eat now, I’ll be hangry in about 2 hours. I end up at Taco Bell on Tillotson. The poor bastard on the corner of Tillotson and White River dressed up in a crappy Statue of Liberty outfit looks bored and sad. I park, go in, order $7 of food at the kiosk, and over the course of the next 15 minutes, transmute my food into a small pile of paper trash. I wonder how my brother is doing. I should call him soon. I don’t want to be the type to only contact him when I’m having a financial emergency brought on by being fired. Back into the building and at my station by 12:14p.
Fig. 2 – Gooseless
12:24p – Onboarding at my new job has been kind of a headache. It has taken quite a while to get me fully entered into the various systems and online tools I need for my position. I spent several minutes trying to see if any progress had been made on this front. Again, this is something I’d be much more interested in addressing if I knew I was going to stay here long-term, but as it is, I am kind of content to ride it out. But I do put forth effort to try and figure out a couple of these issues now that I am back from lunch. At any rate, making the occasional outward display of my desire to get this stuff figured out is a good move – it shows I am interested enough in the job, and really want to do well (which ordinarily would be true). My director goes on and on about the fear of the higher-ups defunding us or shutting down the whole operation. I am guessing he’s a nervous talker.
12:53p – Why did that one country guy feel the need to cover “Fast Car”? It was fine the way it was. I went to the HIP site to finish my application and their system doesn’t remember me, so it won’t let me in. I suppose I will have to make an in-person visit to their office to get it going.
1:05p – I have already entered “7 hours” for my time today. I wonder if my director would even remember towards the end of the week if I didn’t stay all the way until 3:15 today. I bet I could get away with only staying until 2:30 or so. Possibly I could do a little DoorDashing when I leave. I signed up for that and have been doing that on a very infrequent basis – I made $11 one week and $44 the next, mainly in a small effort to make do until I received my first paycheck at the new job, which didn’t come around until I had already been on the job for a month.
1:24p – I received an email just now, a rejection for the application I put in for the open director position for the company I was fired from. I applied mainly to irk a few people there that can’t stand me. If I can cause them even 10 seconds of annoyance or disgust, it’s worth it. Their HR system is all automated; all they have to do is click one button and a “Sorry, we have filled that position” email will be generated and sent, which is the exact one I received. Knowing I made one of the 3 HR people upstairs have to do that, muttering “that little asshole…”, is all I needed. Maybe I will keep applying for any open positions they have, just to make them twitch. I am quite sure they put a “Do Not Rehire” on my employee file, so there’s no real hope of anyone there taking my application seriously, not that that’s why I would be submitting them. If you can’t get even, get petty!
1:50p – This place has really died out today. I haven’t had to do anything here all day. This is not an exaggeration. I only hope that my position remains necessary in the eyes of the admin. I personally wouldn’t be too happy to be spending money on people that had no function.
2:08p – I’d love to be able to go see the movie Hundreds of Beavers, but there’s probably no chance that it’s coming anywhere near here. I think it’s only making its film fest circuit now – maybe it’ll make it to Indy at least when it gets some kind of limited release? Director is mumbling something to me (I think it’s to me and not just talking out loud?) about the Library of Congress.
2:27p – I am giving up for the day! It’s time to get out of here – there’s been enough mindless rambling from my cohort here. If I need to fix my time later, I will. The extra $12 or so isn’t worth it. Time to be home and await GF’s return! My commute home takes me right past the workplace of a former friend. She and I had a massive falling out this past summer. I passed by there today, seeing her car in the parking lot, and it made me remember, as it always does, the good parts, and the many many bad parts of our friendship that lasted 2020-2023. I would say “I wish I would have done things differently there”, but in the end, it’s probably for the best that we are not in each others’ lives anymore. I keep driving, finishing up the Lore episode from this morning. Home, and in comfy clothes by 2:45. Now I’m watching John Stewart’s return to The Daily Show.
3:30p-5:30p – I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 in a couple of months, and I had been meaning to get back on that. I start it up, and give it a couple of hours, waiting for GF. I had to kind of relearn it a little bit, and indeed I got destroyed by a boss fight. But I will try it again soon. It’s nice to dive into a different world and live in there for a little while. Yesterday, GF and I exchanged a bit of an early Valentine’s Day gift for each other. Among other things, we gave each other some candies. She got me a batch of dark chocolate-covered caramels. I grabbed those and had maybe half of them while being killed by an undead dragon. It was a fine way to cap off my otherwise drab and pensive work day.
5:30-6:15 – GF is usually home by 5, and I was wondering where she was. I knew she said she was going to stop by Meijer on the way home so I didn’t really think much of it. It got to around 5:30 and I looked at my phone for the first time in a while, and I saw a bunch of messages from her, asking for help. I always start to freak out when people are later than they say they are going to be, so I quickly call her. Turns out she went in the store for 5 minutes, and spent the next 45 in the parking lot with a dead battery, trying to get me on the phone to come give her a jump. I felt terrible! Here I was completely zoning out while she was having some trouble. I am the worst! Luckily, she got a good friend of hers on the phone, and they came out to help. She arrived home soon after that, frozen and a little sad. She said she called me 4 or 5 times, and there was no indication of that on my phone, but I saw them on her phone. I really need a new phone; it’s several years old and it is starting to fail on some fundamental levels. I apologized profusely, and got her tucked under her heated blanket,
6:30-7:30 – She went to Meijer to buy a couple of items for a cajun meal, being Fat Tuesday. She came in with premade paczki, and some andouille for a cajun pasta dish she does. I jumped up with her to help out with meal prep, slicing up the sausage and doing a load of dishes. We both kind of joked about how neither of us earned any beads at our jobs (one of us working with kids, the other in a room with only 1 other coworker). Beyond that it was kind of a 1-person job to finish cooking, so I got out of her way, and sent messages to a couple of people to see if they wanted to fill one of the remaining spots in our Saturday game night. I got 1 to say yes right away, and another went unanswered for now. I think it will turn out OK this weekend. While she was letting it bake, she sat down and nibbled on a couple pieces of her Valentine’s Day candy, and we talked a little bit about a couple of road trip ideas, and her work day before the battery incident.
7:30-930 – Dinner was ready, and we got settled in to carry on with our run through Game of Thrones. I had seen it all the first time around, but she had never got past season 2, so we are finishing that up now, having reached the season 7 finale tonight. ack out. So I let her go another half hour, to 9:30. I put on some ASMR video about rail travel. (I am finding it odd right now that the idea of a zombie dragon would occur twice, unrelated, within the same journal entry). We got down to about the last half hour, and she was fading out. She said she really wanted to finish the episode but just had to do a 15-minute power nap. I said “OK, I will wake you up right at 9 so we can keep going”. Which I did. But she fell right b
9:30-??? – She woke up better at 9:30, and popped up realizing she hadn’t had the paczki yet. (She wanted it to be a more full Fat Tuesday experience, so it was important that the pastries happened). We each had one while finishing the Games of Thrones episode. It was now 10:15, and she didn’t sleep well last night, so she was ready to call it an evening. I had been up earlier than I needed to, so I was perfectly fine with crashing, myself. We shut it all down out front, and head to the bedroom at around 10:40. She takes her meds, I grab the lotion and attend to my dry hands. Cat 2, who always pops up to doze on my corner of the bed, is in her usual place standing on my nightstand. I gave GF a nice big back scratch, which often puts her right out, and tonight, it did. I roll over and put on “Nothing Much Happens”, a sleep-time meditation thing that helps you nod off. I don’t remember anything about tonight’s story.