All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

OMG OMG OMG I HAVE A JOB

Finance, Work

In which I rejoin the workforce!

Last night I took myself out for dinner and drank a lot of wine (because that’s what you do when you’re damn near broke and the check you’ve been expecting for weeks still hasn’t shown up, right? RIGHT?), which means I was still in bed at 10:30 this morning when G’ma called up the stairs, “Shelly! There’s a man from BMI here to see you!”

A what from what? Did she say BMI? “Um, okay. I’m not dressed! Tell him I’ll be down in a minute!”

I grabbed some clothes from the floor and put them on, found my glasses, put my messy hair up in a pony tail and stumbled downstairs.

The man turned out to be RB, my old boss from BMI… with a job offer! Their network engineer has taken a position elsewhere, and since they really weren’t excited at the prospect of running ads and doing interviews and background checks and calling references and finding someone with the right personality for their small office, they thought of me! (I left because I wanted more responsibility and there was, at the time, no room for growth.) Then they checked my blog and saw the job hunting post, realized I was still available, and started trying to hunt me down. Since I hadn’t answered my phone, RB decided to jump in his car and come find me. Continue reading OMG OMG OMG I HAVE A JOB →

Job hunting. It's so awesome. Where 'awesome' equals 'not so very.'

Finance, Whining

In which I apply for jobs.

So I’ve been more-unemployed-than-less now since December 2009. That’s nearly two years, if you do the math. Sure, I spent nine months of that time in school taking CCNA classes, but I didn’t really enjoy it because I perpetually felt like I was way far behind and I got a shit grade I may never get over in one of my courses the last trimester.

Today I applied for a retail job at a Halloween store. (Yes, I just wrote both RETAIL JOB and AT A HALLOWEEN STORE. I will only stab myself in the eye socket with a broken chopstick if they call me for an interview.) Tomorrow I’m going to apply for a clerk’s position at the liquor store next to the Hasting’s over on 9th.

I’ve gotten one callback from all the applications I’ve submitted, at a rate of no less than three per week, since I got out of school in June. It was for a part-time, minimum-wage, first tier tech support position in a suburb of Portland. I accidentally deleted the number.

If it weren’t for gigs and the few hours I get from that remote QA testing job, I wouldn’t have been able to buy a four dollar bottle of wine today. (YES, I AM DRINKING FOUR DOLLAR WINE. THAT’S FOUR DOLLARS I DIDN’T SPEND ON CRACK.)

The no-refined-carbs thing: an update on the experiment.

Food, Health

In which I tell you all about my avoidance of refined carbohydrates.

As you may remember, I went on a traditional low-calorie, low-fat, semi-starvation diet on January 5th. I did this because I was so fat I could barely cut my own toenails and I felt uncomfortable in my own body. I was twenty pounds shy of obesity, and at the rate I was gaining I’d have been clinically obese in a year or two.

I lost both weight – mostly water, at first – and inches for about five weeks. The experience, after the third or fourth week, was nothing short of miserable (save the pride I felt in my accomplishment): near the end of the diet I was obsessed with food and calories, and I literally spent most of my time planning my next meal.

By the end of the diet, my body was buying and consuming entire bags of potato chips without my consent. I was hungry all the time.

Then I read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, more or less by accident (someone must have recommended it to me, because I found the sample on my Kindle). It was astonishing, this book. Game-changing. Mind-blowing. It challenged every single thing I knew about diet and weight loss, and it did it with actual science. I decided that although a lot of the author’s conclusions were, by his own admission, anecdotal or theoretical at best, and needed more studies, I could do some experiments in my own lab: my body.

Continue reading The no-refined-carbs thing: an update on the experiment. →

Go die in a fire, Sales, you stupid prick. (And hey: nobody likes you, by the way.)

Soapbox, Whining

In which I HAZ A MAD.

Dear cell phone carrier,

JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW MUCH IT COSTS WHEN I ASK. I’m going to sign up anyway, and your stupid contract will ensure I can’t go anywhere.

Do not tell me “it’s sixty-nine ninety-five a month,” when that number is as related to how much the service actually costs as peanut butter is to parallelograms: which is to say, NOT AT ALL.

My $70 plan now mysteriously costs nearly $100 a month; that’s an extra $360 a year. Why not just tell me what the fees add up to in the first place? I mean, I asked you right to your goddamned face, and you decided to lie to me. Continue reading Go die in a fire, Sales, you stupid prick. (And hey: nobody likes you, by the way.) →

Why the iPad doesn't matter.

Gadgets

In which I may be talkin’ shit about the iPad, but I still totally want one.

There are these awesome people I’m friends with on Twitter. Right now they’re all pissed off at me because I don’t agree with them that the iPad is the Bestest Thing Evar And Proof That Apple is Ascendant In All Ways, and I have to quit discussing it with them or they’ll all quit following me. One of them’s pissed because I called him an Apple fanboi, and another told me that the iPad is a “cultural phenomenon.”

Well, the iPad is not a cultural phenomenon. It’s a boutique social networking device for university-educated white people who can’t be arsed to carry their 17″ laptops all the way to the couch so they can check their Facebook during True Blood.

Continue reading Why the iPad doesn't matter. →

The current state.

Soapbox

In which it’s all peace and sunshine!

People are rioting in the UK, and apparently no one can figure out why. (Hint: happy people don’t riot.) Egypt thinks they’re doing it wrong, and Egypt’s right. Authorities are freaking out that rioters are coordinating via technology so watch this space for more legislation seeking control and monitoring of electronic communication.

There are kids in jail for sending packets to corporate servers. Seriously. Fuck you very much, Paypal. It was really cool when you blocked donations to Wikileaks but allowed donations to the KKK.

Parents seem to believe that protecting children from perverts is government’s job, not their own. They’re wrong. Don’t want your 13-year-old in a chat room with a pedo? Then fucking monitor your kid yourself, breeder.

The Anonymous and Wikileaks drops are proof that government keeps horrible secrets. They tap, they lie, and they kill. Transparency is essential; allowing more and more government monitoring of citizens’ data does nothing but tighten the noose. There is no privacy on the Internet for individual users, there should be none for governments and corporations, either.

Oh, and if you don’t believe corrupt government is corrupt, human beings are starving to death in Somalia as we speak.

Have a nice day.

Fuck the American Dream.

Soapbox

In which I suggest that the American Dream is propaganda.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I’m following more and more political feeds (as a result of my fascination with Anonymous). I now even see tweets I disagree with, because my timeline’s not as curated as it once was.

And so this[*] bullshit happened the other day:

The Poor

And it got me thinking.

“The poor” are all lazy, entitled creeps who want to take our wealth from us, right? We seem to think so, even if there really isn’t much evidence to support it. The idea’s so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even I used to believe it, to the point of being frightened of the poor: the most helpless, disenfranchised, and powerless sector of America.

Jeez. I’m not like that. I pride myself on my compassion. Where did this heartless idea really come from?

And then I realized: it came from our pride and joy, our rallying point, our deepest belief. It came from the American Dream.

Continue reading Fuck the American Dream. →

Love and sex. And suffering. And thinking.

Soapbox

In which there’s an incoherent brain dump on love, desire, and the mind.

I am surrounded by human beings who appear to be quite infatuated with romantic love and/or the frequency and quality of sexual intercourse they are (or aren’t) experiencing.

As I’m currently seeking neither romantic love nor sex, I end up watching behaviours and parsing sentences and thinking thoughts I often can’t voice because they’d be tangential or inappropriate, but here are some of the observations I’ve been mulling over:

Romantic love hurts you because it’s false, not because you’re unworthy of it.

I’ve wasted a lot of time recovering from gut-wrenching break-ups, and I’ve seen a lot of friends waste a lot of time grappling with intense emotional and psychological pain due to failed romantic entanglements.

Romantic love isn’t a universal human experience; it was invented in or near the 12th century. Before that, we didn’t have a way to think about it or express it, so it effectively didn’t exist. People knew about love and sex and partnership and family and raising offspring together, of course, but they didn’t have some kind of nebulous, Disney-fueled desire to meet a prince or princess and live happily ever after, nor did they experience the crushing pain of disappointment and self-doubt associated with failing to achieve or maintain it.

Continue reading Love and sex. And suffering. And thinking. →