A new books list

My first temp job has terminated. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. The people there were quite excited to have a bitch to order around, especially the secretary. I found myself being asked to reorganize shelving, ride six floors down the elevator and go out to a cafe in order to retrieve a single cup of coffee for a man with a superiority complex, file eight months worth of accounting invoices, and mailing, mailing, and more mailing. The people were friendly enough to make eye contact and lend a smile every here and there but never make genuine conversation. Until my last day of work, that is, at which point the CEO and my "supervisor" (who couldn't be bothered less by any clarifications I would need in order to do the tasks she asked me to complete) started getting fakely disappointed that I was leaving. Um, you didn't talk to me for five days and now you feel the need to say "oh what a shame"? Puh-lease. There were some positive and interesting points, however. Positive? I got a slow and easy transition back into the working world and an introduction into the admin world here in Australia. There are different systems for mailing and also different buttons they use for dialing out on the phone...all kinds of small things you wouldn't really think about but that I got some exposure to before I got an important job. Also, the job paid pretty well so for all of my boredom through the past week I was getting paid, so can't really complain! The most interesting thing I discovered while working there was stumbled upon as I was filing those damn invoices that dated back to January, nay, even June and July of 2007. I came across several letters from vendors stating that their payments were overdue and if they did not submit a payment within X amount of time their account would be closed. One of these letters from some mailing incident I could understand, but I came across them again and again. As I was ordering some items from a vendor one day, I got reamed by their new sales rep who was going through the accounts and telling me how overdue the payments were. There were invoices from October 2007 that hadn't been paid. She actually called the situation "ridiculous". I put her right on through to the accountant, who, at the beginning of the project, told me to keep the documents private and out of the prying eyes of the sales team who was not allowed to see the confidential information contained therein. Hmm, wonder why she wouldn't want other people poking around in there. It couldn't possibly be because she's not doing her job! Anyway, I thought it was rather interesting to enter into a workplace and discover a whole mess of accounting that I doubt anybody outside the accountant knows about.

My next job on the horizon starts on Thursday. I actually applied for this job which was advertised with one of the HR companies I ended up signing up with (after they told me I was ineligible for this job). It's for (I have come to learn) a conservative Christian organization which will be quite the experience. I have been told they hold prayer meetings daily, though as a temp I'm not expected to take part. I'll go ahead and give my own little agnostic prayer of thanks for that! The upside of this job is that it will be a much better challenge than the last temp job and I'll get to do a lot of tasks I did at CSF as an EA. Plus, they do relief work and I would get to help plan out some of their bigger organizational meetings. Event planning was one of my favorite things to do, so this would be right up my alley. AND as if these aren't all good things, they pay well. My plan (as has always been) will be to suss out the place and if it seems to be a good fit I will induce my mad charming skills and make them fall in love with me, at which point they will realize that their organization can't do without me and they need to sponsor me to stay in the country. Yes, yes, thissss will all do quite well (she said as she tapped the pads of her fingertips together). I also got home on Friday and was told by roommate Aidan's friend Matt that his company will shortly be hiring for an admin role. He works at the WWF which although commonly misconstrued as a panda wrestling establishment is actually the World Wildlife Fund. I will also be pursuing this as a possible job opportunity--Matt said they are known to sponsor employees (and he works in HR, so he should know), so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they might take a chance on this American girl.

Since this is my forum for writing about whatever it is I am contemplating or feel the need to write at the time, I'm going to expound a bit on a subject on which I have been confused for...basically most of my life. It sounds strange, but this subject is alcohol, something that is pretty much unavoidable in this country. :) I grew up in a conservative Mormon household, which, as the rest of the LDS do, forbade the use of alcohol. Alcohol was presented in a very negative and evil light. Those that partook of the A were looked down upon and as people do as young people, I adopted these opinions. Even when I started drifting away from the church, it continued to be one of those things I stayed away from. For a while, anyway. Well...a bit. I had my first drink when I was 15, pretty typical these days. I can easily admit that I didn't want to drink but the person I was with had been intent on getting me to drink for quite some time and I finally gave in. It was a new experience, one that gave me a bit of a headache the next day. It was also an experience I repeated with one of my best friends a bit later. We lied to her parents when we got home the next day about what we had been doing, and I loved her parents dearly and hated lying to them. Bad associations were made, and I decided no more drinking for me. A year passed by and in that year I had made a new best friend. This best friend was also interested in the alcohol experimentation. I knew she was a silly girl and I didn't want her experimenting with this particular item with some of her even sillier friends, so one Halloween later we got into her parents' rum cabinet. Baaaaaaaaaaad idea! Not only did I stumble around that night forgetting certain segments yet remembering that I was unable to speak with sense, my stomach churned, incensed that I would abuse it so. Rum is the worst friend known to this girl's belly and I spent the following three days breathing the nasty, rum-filled air produced by my lungs, a breeze that made me want to vomit with each deep breath. That experience was enough to put me off of alcohol for the next five years with an attempt here and there to discern what its appeal was, each repeated attempt again putting me off of the juice for an elongated period of time. First of all, alcohol (especially beer, wine and wells) doesn't taste good! Why would I drink something that didn't taste good to me? Secondly, I felt stupid when I drank. There I was in school trying to learn how to not be stupid, trying to expand my intellectual capacities, so why would I go imbibe, an action that would not only kill brain cells but also make me feel stupid? Seems counterintuitive to me. (On the brain cell killing, I admit that I do love to breathe me some helium, an action also known to kill brain cells. But come on, helium breathing is just funny!)

I didn't look down on my friends for their drinking habits, because they were different people than me, making their own choices. My choices aren't everyone else's choices, and my friends' varied experiences added to my spice of life. They could do whatever they wanted (as long as it didn't hurt them or others, naturally). There was one person that did get subjected to my anti-alcohol stance, though, and that was my boyfriend at the time. When we first started dating, neither of us enjoyed alcohol or its effects and I, in my naivete, assumed that this wouldn't change with time. Silly, silly me, of course it changes over time, especially with the influence of friends who do drink, especially guy friends who will make a dude feel inferior and unmanly if he doesn't give into "manly" activities. I had a near-breakdown in the month prior to my boyfriend's 21st birthday, during which he promised to stay reasonable and "only have a drink or two". That alone freaked me out enough (let's remember, we still had traces of that "alcohol is a juice of the devil!" mindset that hadn't loosened its grip in all of my 19 years at the time), but oh when I found out that he drank to black out that night, was I pissed! I told him he was lucky his drunk ass hadn't come to me that night. I would have left him out on the porch passed out in his own vomit so that he would learn to deal with the consequences of his actions. I can be a harsh bitch, I admit it. Now how did boyfriend deal with this? He began to lie whenever he drank. Every time I found out, it was tears and fighting. I didn't want alcohol to be a factor in my life, I didn't think he would remain faithful while out drinking and I didn't want to have to worry about a drunk partner coming home to me at night.

Right around my 21st birthday, yet another failed birthday as my last four had been with that boy, a bad move when you're dating the girl who's obsessed with her birthday, and about five months after getting engaged to this chameleon whose sense of self changed according to whatever company he was with at the time, I discovered that he had yet again lied to me about a weekend filled with drinking. Damn it! My dear best friend (the same one I had the rum incident with five years before) listened to me, hugged me as I cried, and suggested I go and talk to boyfriend about this, about my failed birthday, and that whatever the result may be, better communication, a postponement on the marriage (that was to take place in a month and a half!), a break-up...whatever the result, it would be okay. We did just that--we broke up. I know that his lies were his attempt to maintain the peace and he was doing the best he could. But lies are one of the worst methods of conflict resolution I can think of. I hate lies, I hate lying, I hate the idea that people find the need to hide their actions. It leads me to believe that if someone lies, it must mean that there's something about their actions they're not happy with, and that they're not being true to themselves. Can you imagine committing the rest of your life to someone who you didn't trust? Someone who you saw actively change their story depending on the present company? A person you once thought was true and honest with you and just lied to everyone else, but you realized they were actually lying to you? Someone who didn't even know who they were themself? I couldn't. It ended. Over lies. Lies that were created to placate my feelings about alcohol. In all reality I'm thankful for my stance on alcohol at the time because it saved me from making a huge mistake that I would have regretted for the rest of my life.

Interestingly enough, I began drinking shortly thereafter. Not with frequency, but I was open to the idea and even found a few drinks whose tastes were enjoyable. I can even remember the first drink at that point. I was out at a work meeting with a bunch of ladies from WSU that I absolutely loved. While I was away in the ladies room, they had ordered me some kind of tart, blue and green slushy martini. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I didn't drink (they were so excited to be able to buy me a drink now that I was 21!) so I went ahead and drank it. Afterwards, I didn't drink often just on occasion. When I went to South America, I drank a bit more and even tried banishing some of my perceived princess status by extending my drink selections to wine and, with less frequency, beer. Any drinking event that was ended with sickness was met with a prolonged period of not drinking. If we fast forward to now, we will find that my drinking habits are to not drink at all during the week and to save any possible consumption for the weekends. (Let's face it, I still prefer to get my calories in sugar than in alcohol.) Australia is a new environment from that which I have known in terms of its consumption. Evening socializing during the week is usually accompanied by libations. Socializing during the weekend typically centers around them. I mean, I have come to enjoy the feeling associated with my first beer--a slight relaxing and stress relief perhaps. But additional drinks thereafter just don't entice me the way they do others. And people here...wow, they can drink a lot! We went out with a few friends on Saturday and my stomach was not permitting any additions after having eaten a rather dodgy pizza earlier in the day. Sitting around in one location, then another, then another, my present company proceeded to consume copious amounts of spirits, and talking about previous accounts of indulgence to the point at which someone did blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank with any of the stories you have heard beginning with "I was so drunk...". These people are all great people, but I felt like I was at a frat party. I felt outside of my culture, outside of my comfort zone, and although these people are wonderful, I felt...away from friends. Maybe I wouldn't have felt so uncomfortable if I had been with close friends, people I'd known for a long period of time. Maybe I would have felt better if I'd had a car outside and I knew I could just hop into it and leave at any time I wanted, rather than knowing that I was not going to walk a mile home by myself past the sketchy stretches where an acquaintance was recently mugged and had her jaw broken in the process. Maybe I was homesick for my friends. I don't know, but I was cranky.

I suppose drunkenness doesn't bother me as much when I've been drinking, too. It may be that I only get cranky about it when I'm sober. That doesn't give me the right to get cranky at other people for being drunk when I've made the choice to be sober, though, does it? It does not. That would be hypocritical. However, I do feel myself getting cranky, then I get even crankier because I'd rather not be cranky but it's there anyway and I can't figure out how to turn it off. I shouldn't turn it off, though, because it's coming from somewhere and I should locate where it's coming from. It could be the religious background. It could be my own negative associations with alcohol (sickness, past relationship, and perhaps some past peer pressure). It could be a perceived inequality, something that only my imagination could muster up. It could be that I don't want to deal with whatever their drunken personalities are (repetitious talking, fight-picking, etc.). It could be that I still have something against those stupid kids from high school who all thought partying was so cool and I was so anti-that crowd (I must be an individual!). I'm trying to figure this out...

How must it be for those individuals raised in an environment where alcohol isn't forbidden? Or bad or abominable? What must it be like for people who were brought up where alcohol is just another regular item in the fridge? I know that alcohol can have some hazardous side effects, but isn't it like most other substances, something to be consumed with moderation?

My musings on this subject will continue, perhaps indefinitely. I'm still confused, but my present life begs a solution...