Wine, notes in a parking lot, and job thoughts

When I came home from work (late, again) my manuscript was sitting in its beat-up shipping box on the kitchen table, returned from the agent in New York who has had it since July. She wrote something on it about "fascinating premise, but I can't take it on with enthusiasm at this time, best of luck."

So.

(J. Star sighs.)

That's pretty much all I want to write about that, right now.

M and I went out into the wilds of capitalism on steroids that is our local suburban commercial grocery experience tonight to look for e2 lithium camera batteries and some wine for our trip. We didn't find batteries, but we did find wine. From the back of this bottle: "G'day. In Australia Woop Woop means not nearby, remote even. In sourcing fruit for this well-balanced South Eastern Australian Shiraz we went outside our normal territory to blend the best regional attributes into a soft, elegant wine of rich flavours and good palate length. We went to Woop Woop to bring Woop Woop to you. Enjoy Enjoy."

While I'm dubious about the potential quality of this wine (it was cheap and that's some pretty badly written copy), and not the biggest Shiraz drinker (I prefer Cabernet or Merlot, sometimes Chianti), it seemed a fitting wine to bring on a camping trip in a place so desolate it's been called "The Badlands" by every ethnic group who has been near it.

We also bought a load of other stuff. We were stoked to find Mackeson for ten bucks. They charge $17 at Party Source. (And that dope who wrote about Mackeson on Epinions doesn't know what he's blathering about. This beer is the greatest.) They had a good variety in the single-beers cart, for a nice change, and we got some good deals.

On a more depressing note, when we pulled into a parking spot at the grocery, I saw a yellow, crumpled piece of paper lying on the pavement. Being naturally curious about discarded bits of paper, especially ones with handwriting on them, I of course picked it up to have a look. Click the image for bigger view of it. It's not cheery. The fact that the person in whose car it was left crumpled it up and threw it in the parking lot just makes it even worse.

Work is giving me fits lately. When my job is good, it's really really good, and when it's bad, it's awful. It's been the latter for chunks of last week and for all of this week so far. I don't want to write too much about my job for obvious blogger fear reasons, but I've been giving it a lot of thought lately and it's hard not to write about it. I feel torn about the possibility that I have an opportunity to switch to a different position, which would eventually pay better and have many more opportunities for promotions, etc., but I don't know if I want to take the risk that it might suck a whole lot. I also don't know if I want to keep doing what I'm currently doing, proofreading in the trenches, because recently it has not been satisfying. In fact, it's been extremely frustrating. Today it was so frustrating that I threw a stack of papers over my shoulder into the air behind me. They scattered all over the floor and then I had to pick them up and sort them back out and keep working on them.

When I worked with handicapped kids for a living, at least I felt like I had a reason to get up and go to work every day. There was somebody who needed me, if for nothing more menial than to feed him and change his diapers and teach him the difference between the letters "b" and "d." When I had a bad day at that job, it was really, really fucking bad, and bad days at my current job don't even start to hold a candle to bad days at that job. At least with bad days at this job, I don't have to deal with diapers full of diarrhea, or fistfights, or snot and tears and epi-pens and insulin shock and screaming breakdowns.

The important difference, though, is in the good days. A good day at my current job means that things are slow and I get to sit around and read blogs all day. A good day at my former job meant that one of the kids read an entire story aloud with no help, or walked across the whole length of the gym in a walker without stopping to cry about how hard it was, or emptied her piggy bank into the charity small-change jugs set up in the cafeteria. A good day at that job meant I was satisfied that I had made a positive difference in someone else's life. A *really* good day at that job meant that I had finally gotten a kid to understand the concept of money, or time, or that black marks made on a white page weren't just a boring obstacle to be dealt with every day but could be translated into something like "it is time to eat lunch now."

There's surely no satisfaction like that in proofreading copy for the F*ebreze website.

But. I can do nothing about this just at this moment, except think about it, over and over, late into the night.

At least my house was not destroyed in a hurricane. I have a bed to sleep in. I'm glad for it.

I suppose that's all.