The coordinator at the GLBT health center contacted me and they finally have an LCSW supervisor for me! Having a goal will take away from the general dullness of my job. I’m doing data entry right now and I’m bitter about it.

I need to take advantage of more outdoor activities before summer is all gone. I went to Ginza festival at a Buddhist temple in Old Town. The temple is really big and had indoor and outdoor vendors, food and dancers. One of their priests (yes, this temple uses the term priest) did a Q&A session on Pure Land Buddhism and the temple. I felt cool because I knew the answers to some of the questions. I’m still liking Zen over Pure Land. I went back to meditation with a friend and will hopefully keep going and get past the horrible feeling of my entire leg falling asleep.

Favorite quote of the night from my Buddhism teacher:
Student: How are these precepts different from The 10 Commandments?
Teacher: You aren’t going to burn in hell.

Also, one of the articles we read today said that many people ignore the precept that says not to drink alcohol. Yay!
I had something I wanted to write last week about Buddhism but cannot remember what exactly it related to now. I know it ended with comparing Buddhism to The Song That Never Ends.

Back to festivals, after Ginza fest I went to North Halsted Market Days. I watched the ROTC perform (Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps), found an awesome new toy in Tulip that I desire and got into a huge argument/discussion with my friend over transgender people. I already knew she was more conservative/less understanding than I was concerning GLBT issues especially related to fluidity of sexual orientation and gender roles.
I believe sexual orientation is fluid (see Kinsey Scale) and that it would be super awesome if gender roles would move more in that direction.

She spouted some pretty ignorant statements about 1 homosexual encounter=100% homosexual, transgender is OK but not in my house!, bisexuals are just greedy and don’t really exist, it’s not OK for a straight man to feel comfortable around gay men…stuff that I haven’t heard/tolerated in some time. Maybe I do have friends that have similar beliefs but they know better than to voice these things around me. I will argue and in this case, I have many more facts to back me up.

The whole situation just pissed me off, reminded me of arguing with my parents when I was younger, crying when my dad said that the GLBT movement should drop transgender people because they were on the fringe of society, getting harsh feedback from a boss when attempting to educate high schoolers about Matthew Shepard. Even now, educating my coworkers about transgender people and realizing I have to start at “this is what GLBT is.” I have low expectations at work but pretty high expectations of my friends and even my family now. (My dad no longer holds the same opinion of transgender people and my PFLAG award is hanging in my old bedroom.)

So maybe the GLBT health center has good timing.

Anti-Cruelty Society hosts workshops on everything from pet CPR to adding a baby to a household of pets. I should have posted about this earlier, they just hosted a workshop on bunnies. Tons of stupid parents get their kids rabbits for Easter and don’t have a clue how to take care of them.

I wish Anti-Cruelty held workshops on the commitments related to more pets-cats, dogs, lizards. Too many times I would see animals when I worked at a vet clinic that looked neglected and emaciated.
“How long has your pet been sick?” “Uhh.. a few days?”
What the owner meant was “I have no idea, I/my kids/my wife stopped paying attention to my pet years ago. I just feed the thing now.”
Go to the Anti-Cruelty society and you will see a lot of 3-5 year old pets. Just out of that cute puppy/kitty range and into the “Oh, I’m bored with you now” range.

So what I’m saying is pets are not disposable and don’t make good Easter presents. Go buy your fat kid some candy.

I’ve been fucking emotional the past couple days and anxious for a few days before that. I want to blame hormones for the mood swings but Yaz is supposed to minimize PMS symptoms and it’s a full week until my little white pills.

Anxiety is just my normal annoying hypervigilance at night mixed with a couple scary dreams.

Work isn’t helping either. Things are starting to get back to normal after the sleepy holiday season. The agency pretty much did nothing for a month, first preparing for the big audit/survey and then everyone going on vacation during the holidays. Now, for some reason, they are surprised that there is a money shortage. I went to a meeting that’s purpose was to blame clinical staff for the money shortage. Staff were told they could not use the audit or holidays as an excuse. So they blamed their funders. They haven’t been reimbursed for services by outside agencies quick enough. Sure, passing the buck sounds good to me!

Then there were small annoyances today with an Admin Assistant doing duplicate work as me and everyone coming to me about her mistakes. I don’t think that should have bothered me as much as it did.

The big thing that bothered me today was during my grant hunting process. My boss keeps telling me to look for these grants for new researchers. I find a conference for new researchers and grant. I don’t qualify for the grant because it’s for people with doctorates. I tell my boss I don’t qualify and in passing mention that she does. Even though she has been with the agency a long time, she got her doctorate recently. She looks at me like I’m dumb and says “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you to look for. Grants for me.”

What? She’s the new researcher? I guess I never thought of her as the new researcher because she’s so established at the agency. I thought of myself as the new researcher. So I pretend to know that she meant I should be looking up stuff for her and go print out info on this new researcher grant for her. The grant can only be hers, no co-investigators. And if she gets it, she can’t be on any other grants of the same type until the deadline for this grant (in the fall.) Great, so I will be working on a grant that my name can’t even be on and it will be holding up applications to other grants we can co-PI on.

The whole thing took me down a notch because I really saw this job as a way for me to start my own research, or at least co-investigate. Oh, and my boss’ insistence that I learn SPSS? That’s to work on her stats because she doesn’t want to relearn the program. So I get to do data analysis which is pretty much the same thing I was doing in undergrad and is something an intern should be doing. But we don’t have any new interns because we are so slow replying to them that they find other placements!

This agency needs to get it the fuck together.

I wrote this a while back and never posted it. I feel OK about posting it now. Probably because I’m in a monogamous relationship now and feel somewhat detached from what I wrote because I have an awesome sex life and a boyfriend! But I really was frustrated at the time I wrote this and even though I got what I was looking for, still think what I wrote is valid:

A lot of things run through my head while I try to finish making a cute DIY purse. Mainly, why the hell am I making a purse? I don’t even like purses.

Some other thoughts go a little deeper. I’ve been single for a few months and recently decided to start dating again. Of course that means I’m never going to find anyone to date because that’s what happens when you look. But that dirty Murphy’s Law is not what I was focusing on tonight. Tonight I was thinking about how some girls are the ones you love to fuck and some are the ones you want to date.Why do these have to be two exclusive groups?

I have no trouble finding people to sleep with. Men will fuck anything that offers. And I’m not just referring to one night stands. Men will continue to fuck anything that offers for as long as they can get away with it. The problem is the girl they want to fuck isn’t the girl they want to have a relationship with.

I, along with some of my slutty friends, have been given compliments about having the best kinkiest sex/sexual act or hottest tits/ass/body. In bed they look at you with excitement in their eyes and they smile when other guys check you out in that dress. Sex or sometimes casual dating goes on and then there is an abrupt halt. He stops calling, grows distant, pushes away advances toward a real relationship. Later you find out about the girl that he started dating after you. She’s not as cute, not as good in bed, not as fun but he’s willing to put up with the things she is lacking because she is good girlfriend material. There’s always a feeling of “I was dumped for her?” But there wasn’t any “dumping” because there wasn’t a serious relationship to begin with. There was sex. Damn good sex.

An ex suggested that when pursuing new relationships, I give it up too quickly. He said I should wait and I laughed when he said guys would wait months to get anywhere with a girl they were dating. “Not the guys I date.” I thought. I’m sure he thought “Exactly.”

So I’m supposed to hold out to create this emotional before physical bond? I’m a pretty smart girl and I can multi-task. I can have sex and care about a person! I can see what the ex said being true but I will probably never find out his way. I like sex. I don’t want to wait months before having sex with someone I’m dating. When I start dating someone, I think “Yay, regular sex!”

I’ve read studies on college kids and their tendencies to “hook up” more than date. When these studies are published in women’s magazines, there’s always some bitch saying “Oh these poor girls will never know emotional intimacy.” Hook ups can lead to relationships and relationships to emotional intimacy. Maybe the bitches in the magazines are really saying “sluts don’t get love”. Girls that like sex are not the girls you marry but they are the ones you fantasize about when you’re in having sex with your boring wife. The one you started dating after you dumped the slut.

So why is sex equated with lack commitment? Does it go back to good girls don’t give it up? Sometimes I’ve been told that guys can’t “handle me”. I am an intense person but easily manageable if you can stand up to me. So are men are not confident enough to handle sluts?

I got to leave work early because of the forecast predicting lots of snow. I don’t know if they closed because it’s the first snow or because they’re not aware it is December in Chicago. The early leave didn’t mean much to me since I had to take work home. We have Big Things coming up next week and I have a lot of preparing to do. The agency has been chaotic and everyone keeps putting off daily tasks to prepare for the Big Thing. I feel like I have to sneak around if I’m doing anything unrelated to these preparations. A big part of the chaos/stress is that the managers don’t know how to manage. They can make sure daily operations get done but when it comes to a big project, they can’t set goals, delegate, stick to deadlines. They have to be chased like kids.

The managers have demonstrated that they cannot work independently. I email a manager and ask for something and it doesn’t get done. I have to email the manager again, theur assistant, cc my boss, stop the manager in the hall and ask.

And they can’t work in a team. If we have a meeting where the 2nd in command is present but not their manager, we get no info. The right hand has no idea what the left is up to.

Luckily my boss asks for a lot of feedback from me, especially since I’m new and feedback she will get!

I’ve been watching a bunch of movies the last couple weeks, something I don’t normally do.

First one was No Country For Old Men. Lots of killing and that guy. You know, that guy. He’s in everything. Even my dreams. The movie felt like it was 10 hours long. Maybe it was because everyone had a Southern accent and talk reaalll slooww. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a hard on for the Coen Brothers like I do for Wes Anderson.

So I finally saw The Darjeeling Limited. There’s a group of actors that will always have work as long as Wes Anderson is making movies. I don’t even know some of their names, it’s just “Oh, thats the same Indian guy from Life Aquatic.” The movie was good, the scenes on the train were excellent but it didn’t stun me like Life Aquatic did. I still think Life Aquatic is a great movie and I love the animation with the fishes.

In between these two movies I saw Knocked Up. It made me mad. Mad because it was not nearly as funny as everyone said it was. Does the girl have a single funny line or is it all riding on the guy and his stoner friends? Even the bitchy sister is funnier than the girl. Also mad because one conversation with her mom about “taking care of it” is not “addressing abortion as an option.” Funny that right after I see the movie, I see an article in Bitch magazine addressing the same thing I was bothered by. Why create this movie that has so many serious parts (too many for a comedy) and totally gloss over abortion? Yes, I know there would be no movie if she wire hangered the thing but she can at least have a moment where she thinks about her career, the fact that she doesn’t even have her own place, her pretty little figure, her dumbass baby daddy and say “fuck, I can’t have this baby.”

Sarcastic Spoiler Alert! It has a happy ending. Even the though whole movie is about how wrong these people are for each other, they stay together. For the baby. Aww, isn’t that the worst decision ever? Yes it is! Yes it is!

And in the To See pile: Why didn’t anyone tell me that Angelina Jolie is in Beowulf? I’m seeing that in 3-D!

Unrelated, my computer speakers seem to be getting quieter. I can’t even dance to Daft Punk in my room! Now that I think about it, my speakers are at least 5 years old but I don’t think they are the problem. My little brother just bought an insane amount of computer parts from an auction at his school. I might enlist him to help me put my computer in a new case(one that actually has a back!) and get a new sound card. I also hate that each program I use has it’s own volume control. And there is a master volume control for my computer and an external volume control for my speakers. WTF redundant.

Clean, clean, clean and everything is still covered in cat hair. How does my friend have 7 pets and her apartment is clean and there’s 1 animal in my apartment and the place is furball central? I’ve been home most of the morning, sweating and mopping so I’ve had lots of time to dwell on the furballs and smelly litterbox. I’m selling the cat to Gypsies when my roommate isn’t looking.

And about the sweating-I really don’t mind that part. This weather is awesome for October and I can pretend this makes up for not going to the gym. It’s just the mess that bothers me, for some reason I have a low tolerance for it lately.

My first semi-research related task! Make numbers pretty. It seems like it would be an easy task, my boss showed me nice program outcome grids with goals, benchmarks, results all clearly labeled.

Then I started to get the actual data. I got one that was done exactly how it was supposed to be. This is now my favorite department. There are 4 departments and you know what you have to do when you have more than one of something. (Make them fight!)

The next department could not grasp the concept of “this is what I did last year” vs “this is what I will do next year” and put everything on one grid marked 2008 and gave me narratives. Now there is reading involved? Hate this. It took me a while to figure out but eventually confirmed that the grid they gave me was referring to last year even though it said 2008. I know, numbers r hrd.

The data just went down from there. The last thing i was given was handwritten and given to me at 4:00 the day my numbers were due. I suppose I should be happy I didn’t get anything in crayon. Since I got everything so late and half-assed, I had to take work home with me which made me feel very adult but mad that the people I’m working with are so unorganized.

My boss looks to me to magically make coworkers respond to deadlines when they never have before. My first few weeks I panicked when people did not return my calls and things were not handed in on time. Then I learned that coworkers do that because there are never any consequences. One night when there was lots of drama going on, I suggested consequences rather than hounding people for answers. My boss agreed but I think she just explained to the person dodging questions how their inefficiency was making other people’s jobs difficult or impossible to do. And these aren’t low level staff I’m talking about, these are clinical supervisors, directors of departments.

So I’m not sure how I am supposed to magically change the culture of an organization. Especially in my position. I’m a gatekeeper because my boss is one of the top people at the agency but I’m not in a position of power. The majority of what I do is very independent from the rest of the agency.