#33: Assimilation

After producing 3,852 forms of ID, studying, standing in 197 lines, signing over my first born and listing 100 reasons why I deserve to pay the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles $280 for highway taxes, I am finally a fully licensed and license-plated North Carolina driver. For the past three months, I've wanted nothing more than my North Carolina driver's license and my new plates. The process took for-friggin'-ever. But now that I'm all plated and carded, I really don't want to give up my Minnesota plates. I actually made the mechanic who took them off for me (they were doing an inspection anyway and they offered to take them off and put the new one on. It's not like I can't figure out how to unscrew the plate on my own. What do you think I am? Blonde? Oh... wait...) The Minnesota plates are sitting in my car in the envelope and I want to keep them, but I just can't figure out what to do with them. I like them. They're... Minnesota.

You know what's not Minnesota, that I'm learning to adore? Spring. In Minnesota, spring is just someone winter picks on. It's gray, rainy and puts forth a wimpy effort at almost warm weather before winter bullies in one more time and dumps two feet of snow on your doorstep on May 1st. Here in North Carolina, the winter gracefully retreated at the end of February and by the first week in March, the daffodils were in full bloom. Since then, something new has blossomed every week. Every time I think the flowering season must finally be coming to an end, I see a bright magenta-blossomed bush blazing up against the white-painted bricks of someone's home.

After the daffodils began blooming, the thermometer has only briefly flirted with day temperatures below 60 and has remained in the mid seventies, to low eighties, for weeks now. I've even been able to convince Sir to turn on the air conditioner when the temperature inside the apartment neared 90 degrees last week.

Of course his decision was probably influenced by the great amount of pity anyone who saw me last week swelled with. My entire upper body was covered in a bumpy red rash that was so itchy I toyed with the idea of just gnawing my own arms off and being done with it. I mean, I don't really need arms. I'd still have two legs and I've seen that Dateline or 20/20 (or whatever) where double amputees learn to do things with their feet that normal people do with their hands, like paint. I could gnaw my itchy, itchy arms off and become a world-famous foot painter. Double bonus! But I didn't remove my arms, and they remained covered in a very diseased-looking rash for at least three or four days. It kept many people at bay and those people I didn't feel like talking to, I let them think it was contagious. I may have even coughed a little in their direction. But the rash was not contagious. It turns out I am allergic to Coppertone sunblock. Therefore I have a fun decision to make this summer: sunburn or rash? I'm really not looking forward to the money and time it's going to take to spot-test all of the other sunblocks on the market to see which ones give me the Bubonic Plague Rash and which do not.

My job is going well. That's about all I'm going to say about it, too. I'd rather not get fired for writing about my job/company/coworkers on the internet just yet. Maybe later.

I'm trying my hardest to do something active every day to avoid office-butt and be able to fit into my summer clothes from last year. Well, I've tried to do something active every day except today. Today, Sir and I went out to eat and then walked around Target for almost an hour (which totally counts as exercise, right?) and now I am tired, so instead of exercising, I'm writing this to you. Don't you all feel special?

Sir is trying his hardest to thwart my goal of physical fitness and fitting into my summer clothes again by taking up a new habit. This new habit of his both makes him the most wonderful man in the entire world and the most evil. He has taken up making cake. Not your little picnic cakes or one-layer sheet cakes, but multi-layer, multi-frosting-can cakes. I have recently finished a devil's food cake almost entirely on my own. Devil's food indeed. It's so moist and delicious and fixes my little afternoon chocolate/sugar craving so well! I think Sir realizes that if he continues to make me cake, he has a mate for life. For. Life. People, I like me some M&Ms, but I LOVE CAKE. Cake, as Chandler Bing would say, is perfection. Cake, is my kryptonite.

It also doesn't help that Sir is trying to put on weight. He's trying to beef up, so our freezer is full of ice cream, our fridge is touting cake and full-fat cheese, mayo, and 2% milk, and our cabinet has potato chips.

I have this foggy feeling that I'm fighting a battle I am destined to lose.

I'm also failing at trying to disassociate myself with the southerners, linguistically. I have caught myself saying things like "a good bit," "ya'll," "put that thing up," and I may have, may have let a "sheeeeewwwwwt" (southern-speak for "shoot") slip out the other day. Luckily I'm heading back to my snowy roots in a couple of weeks for a visit and will be able to remind myself how to say things like "don't ya know" and "you betcha." I'll reacquaint myself with all-things Minnesotan like wearing shorts during "spring" (aka, 40-degree) weather, freak May snow-storms and the largest mall in America. Ahhhh.... Minnesota. I kinda miss ya'll.

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#32: Yes, I am a girl. No, you may not be an ass.

Happy Belated St. Patrick's Day everyone! Sadly I was neither drunk on Irish beer nor marching in the St. Patty's Day parade in St. Paul with my fabulous friend Mav and her family on St. Patrick's Day. Those are my two most favorite things to do to celebrate the wee Irish festival but, alas, I worked all day and then went home.

The day was not a total loss though, as now I can tell you all that I have a REAL job! The morning of St. Patrick's Day I accepted a marketing position at a civil engineering firm and it's all salaried and benefit-ed and 401k-ed and everything! I even get a whole hour for lunch! No more of this temp job, with its hourly pay rate and crappy half-hour lunches. (For those of you who didn't know, I have been temping as a graphic designer for the past month and have haaaaaaaaated every minute of it. The majority of the women I work with have made sure of that.) I'll be making better money than I made in Minnesota (not like I'll be rich or anything, but I'll have a nice sum to start a I'd-like-to-get-married-sometime-this-century savings account.) and guess what else? There will be people working under me! Not working for me per se, but there will be people in the marketing department that are lower on the totem pole than I am. Do the Happy Employment Dance with me! "I am not the bottom ru-ung, I'm not the bottom ru-ung!"

I knew I wanted this job the moment I left the interview and realized I had not spoken to one asshole the entire two hours I was there. Hopefully, for you, it is rare to encounter assholes when doing something as stressful as trying to find gainful employment. I, however, have had the unfortunate experience of seeming to find the assholey-ist of asses who are looking for employees. For awhile Sir was actually worried that I would think all southern men were jerks after my experiences.

At my very first interview down here, the CEO popped into the office where the interview was going along just fine without him, grabbed my resume (which he had no knowledge of whatsoever) from the Marketing Director's hands and asked me why I had moved to North Carolina. This interview was before I had come up with a stock answer for that question, so I started with "My fiancé is going to school at..." He immediately interrupted, "Well which one of you wears the pants in the relationship?"

Um... Excuse me?

"I need to know which one of you wears the pants in the family because I don't want to hire someone who is just going to move away after her fiancé finishes his school and he says so."

I had never thought about who "wore the pants" in Sir's and my relationship, but at that moment I was having very clear thoughts of who would be wearing my 3-inch pump. And he wouldn't be wearing it on his foot.

I think I said something along the lines of, "My fiancé and I just relocated here. We like it so far and we're not planning on moving any time soon. In regards to our decision-making abilities, we make our decisions together." Unfortunately I don't think the jackass heard me. He was already puffing out his chest and talking about his own dedication.

I was offered that position. They couldn't pay me enough money.

A week or so later I was on the phone interviewing with another company. That interview was just weird right from the get go. The first thing the president of the company asked me to do was to talk him through my resume. In fact that was exactly how he phrased it, "Talk me through your resume."

"Sure. I participated in two internships during my senior year of college..."

"No, no. Earlier. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to elementary school? Do you have siblings?"

... Seriously? So I told him. Not as much as he wanted to hear. In fact, there were some mighty awkward pauses while he tried to wait me out to see if I would spill more information. Ha. You can't pull that trick on someone who is trained in journalistic interview procedures (a.k.a. how to get someone to tell you something they don't want to)! He wanted to know when and where Sir and I were getting married (dude, when you figure it out can you let me know?), where my favorite vacation spot was, etc. Very, very strange.

Then he started to tell me about himself. He told me that people describe him as "moody" and "hard to work with" and as someone who "doesn't listen." I sat there as he recited a litany of his faults thinking, 'Mr. Guy? A bit of advice, this isn't exactly the way to get people to want to work for you.' Little did I know he had left the best "fault" for last.

"My wife always cringes when I say this," He told me, "but weak women don't do well with me."

Let me type that again for you: Weak women. Don't do well with me.

What. The. Fuck.

I acutally had to write that quote down on my notepad to convince myself that someone would actually say that to another person who is not only female but whom they are looking to hire.

I almost ended the interview right there. I wanted to slam down the phone. I wanted to lecture him on the "art" of talking to people. I wanted to tell him that the fact that his wife hates it when he says things like that might be sign that he, I don't know, shouldn't say them? And as Sir pointed out later, you just can't say, "I'm not a chauvinist" and then follow it with, "but your only assets are your boobs." The "but" negates the assertion. Also, actions speak louder than words. And I love that in his head it's the women who don't do well with him. It couldn't possibly be his fault that women (including his own wife) don't want to be around him.

There were so many things wrong with what he had said that by the time I had started listening to him again, he had completely changed subjects and now wanted me to come to the office and meet people there because he felt that I "really had something" and that I would fit in there. Guess I'm not a "weak woman" then, huh, Bucko? Asshole.

You'd think it'd be over, right? That there is no way I'd set up another interview with this guy? But I was still sort of convinced that maybe I was hearing things because no human could possibly be that asinine for crying out loud, or maybe I was overreacting and he was... joking or something, so I agreed to meet with him the following Tuesday at the office.

"Great! I'll be looking forward to you coming in. We're in the building across from The Hotel. In fact, after you've met people here, I'll take you across the street to The Hotel and we'll some wine."

Whoa. What? That sounds highly inappropriate, but strangely in-line with the way the rest of this interview went but I still don't think that's such a good...

"See you then!" *click*

He mailed me a stack of company brochures a couple of days later containing a note that said:

In addition to the interview I'd like for you to go to The Hotel for
drinks and dinner at 6 PM with me. My wife may attend (she also works for
the company).

Heh. Yeah, your wife may be there until she suddenly comes up with a "prior" commitment and then it just happens to be you and a woman young enough to be your daughter (me) who is anxious to please you so that she can become gainfully employed and maintain her M&M habit, in a hotel, where you will buy her drinks. Please, please, please can I put myself in that situation? Please?

God.

I emailed him that day and told him that I didn't think I was right for the position (or any other position he was considering me for). (ew. EW. I just majorly squicked myself out. eewewewEW! Sorry.)

Do you see how after those interviews I just felt like giving up? And how I could have buried myself under the covers while proclaiming there were no decent, respectable business men anywhere south of Des Moines? But I did not give up. I kept my chin up, my head on straight, my feet pointed forward... my arms... swinging...jauntily... you know. And I got rewarded! Job! No assholes! Whoo! Rock on!

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