El Dugan

Hey there! No, I’m not dead or trapped under something heavy. I just haven’t been feeling like posting. There has been some stuff.

We can start with the fact that I have been unemployed for like seven weeks and still can’t get unemployment because my former employer hasn’t done their stuff in IL. They also filed my 403b under the wrong name, my COBRA under the wrong address, and my SS under the wrong SSN AND the wrong name. As far as I know, this wasn’t a calculated thing to f up my life, but all mistakes. It’s been AWESOME sorting it out.

Sadly the job market hasn’t sprung into place around me. No job. Not many prospects. Boo. Still looking though. Big A is working on my website at bethdugan.com. Should be up soon. He has some elaborate plan to use my amigurumi animals to anchor my website. Here are the animals!

Big A was offered a permanent position at the place he was temping which is great news for us! And so we are moving into a larger place. A larger place down the street but off the main drag from where we are now. And…IT HAS A PORCH! We are very excited. Also, we don’t have to share a closet or bathroom anymore and I shall have a pleasant place to hang out and look for a job. Also, we should have a party when we get settled. His friends. My friends. Oh boy. So now while looking for a job, I get to pack, clean and organize, which are all things I am good at.

And then my best friend and her lovely family moved to Boston for reals. Sigh. I miss them all and am missing my nephew’s birthday at the end of this month. Boo. But they are in a place they love with people who love them and Boston is a lovely place to visit. And there is always Skype.

Yesterday I did a whole bunch of stuff that needed doing. Today, I wait. My new laptop is being shipped from China and, per the Fed Ex website, it should arrive today. So I am waiting for Fed Ex.

Yesterday I went to the unemployment office three times. That’s right. Three. Times. Oh joy. It’s in like Garfield Park which isn’t all that far away so it didn’t take long to go back and forth but so annoying! And yet, watching people there struggle to understand how to fill out really basic paperwork and comprehend the Byzantine system they have in place reminded me how lucky I am. I know how to work the system, whatever system. I am not stymied by things like not having a pay stub or knowing where my SSN card is. Or having an SSN card. There was a women in front of me in line who didn’t have a permanent address. She was crashing on someone’s couch so she didn’t have a pay stub from her last job. She didn’t have a SSN card, didn’t know her SSN. She can’t get the benefits she is entitled to. I can, and I need them a whole lot less. I also have the resources to get to the IDES office  three times in one day. I’m not dependent on the CTA. I can drive, pay for a cab, have a friend drive me, since my friends are also similarly endowed with, well, money and resources. So the issue, which was that the sisters didn’t file for me in Illinois, rather Nebraska, should be resolved swiftly. I am lucky.

And to hit another first world kind of problem, I have to wait, kind of by the window for Fed Ex because my buzzer is broken. And my iPhone reception is bad in the house. So to get my shiny new technology, which will hopefully help me work as a freelancer and earn money, I have to hang out at home, watching Roku and crocheting. Poor me.

Here is the new thing I learned how to make:

Farkel, the Amigurumi pig

My godson likes pigs a great deal, so I choose this as my first animal to make. I have a ton of pink yarn now, so I have to find other pink animals to make, or make an army of pigs. I have four nephews now, and they are all getting a pig, obvy, as is my new friend Kenny, who grew up on a farm and don’t dig on swine since he had a pet pig.  Anyone else want a pig? Or another pink animal? I have a bunch of gray as well and Randy wants a rat so that’s next. Today I sit and wait and crochet silly animals. Tomorrow, we take over the world, Pinky!

• Watched the new season of Doctor Who, or at least the six or so episodes available.
• Had two interviews with recruiters.
• Been sick.
• Got my car all legal and shit to the tune of $350 (title, registration, plates, city sticker…)
• Got better.
• Sorted out all my old books.
• Put together a professional portfolio
• Watched my new obsession, River Monsters, Seasons 1 and 2. YIKES! There was a bull shark in Lake Michigan. El Dugan OUT!
• Got sick again. Perhaps not again so much as never really got better the first time.
• Bought a new laptop. It was necessary.
• Got my BFF to call in a Zpack for me with wondrous results.
• Started some writin’. Clearly not on the blog. Other writin’.
• Lost weight just from not being at work with the old ladies and their damn treats.
• Fixed the stereo.
• Fixed the toilet.
• Fixed the cat vomit and cat pee issues in one fell swoop.
• Canceled on a bunch of people because of the sickness.
• Cried about how my life has no direction.
• Gotten very excited about my new direction.

More to come. I have been so busy with sickness and trying to make my new career a thing that I haven’t sat down in a while to write much. The laptop should be coming  tomorrow and then it might not take 5-15 minutes to boot up and run a program. It just may increase my productivity. And the peace.

Though I haven’t been unemployed in over five years, it feels like I have. I have had employment woes. I really don’t know if I am making some seriously bad choices with good intentions or if there is a deep and serious flaw in my personality that makes it hard for me to hold a job, but, once again, I am sans employment.

My position was eliminated and I am on the dole again. Never fear! I have a plan. I am going to hang out my shingle and work freelance for a while. Maybe forever, if it works out.

This was not totally unexpected, and I have already made inroads into my new path. Big A is working on a website for me to sell my wares. I have contacted a number of talent agencies who find freelancers work. I have been pitching like a mad woman and getting back into the swing of thinking of story ideas. I’m hopeful about freelance work. For one thing I like it a lot. For another, I am very fast. A third would be my experience in marketing myself, which I think I am pretty good at.

But as soon as I got the news, I got sick. I have been sick with a cold-like  thing all weekend and I am not sleeping well. Yesterday I watched a whole bunch of Buffy on Roku and then had Buffy dreams. Blah. And I had Bust A Move stuck in my head, thanks to watching The Blind Side.

So look for my new website coming. Big A is designing a logo for me. He asked me to describe myself in design terms and I said something like, “Sans serif, clean, sharper lines, bright colors but not too bold. I’m really a marshmallow inside.” Apparently this is not how he sees me and he laughed and laughed and has been repeating this story to our friends. Who also laugh. Maybe I am just feeling a little marshmallowy this week. Next week I will be back to kicking ass and taking names or whatever it is that he thinks I do.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen the ending of LOST , don’t read this.

Sometimes I feel kinda shallow.

I don’t need to know why we are here…I don’t want to think about and puzzle the different reasons we may or may not have this or that and do this other thing. I did this already. It was called high school. I thought about free will and destiny and why humans are here and if there is a god and what his/her/its plan is, where we go when we die.These conversations BORE ME TO TEARS. What’s the point? We don’t know. We’ll never know, not for reals. I have opinions. I really doubt your argument, that I am sure I have heard before, would change my mind, so ssshhhh. And if it did change my mind? So?

My issues are much more prosaic. I want to know why I keep having that dream, the annoying one about moving, how I can make a dressing that tastes like the one they have at Domo 77, why people do stupid things,  I want to know about the nature of friendship and relationships, and I want to know if there is really a good garlic press out there, or if I am just spinning my wheels. I’m all set with the big questions, it’s the littler ones that niggle at me.

Anyway, I watched the Lost series finale like a bagillion other people. I watched the first two seasons, lost interest, caught up because it was all available on my Roku, and became very into it again. That whole Roku strategery was a good one, Lost-dudes.

Apparently the whole thing was a Bardo or bardos. It’s very interesting. The concept that I have been reading a little about, and the show. Both. I wasn’t so intrigued with the whole thing coming to some kind of understandable fruition. Granted, it would have been tedious if it had just gone on and on. But I didn’t need the big story solved. Again, I want to know how/why the polar bears were there, who built the giant statue, and how did they get that tattoo on the shark. I loved the patterns in the show: the numbers, the reflections, the books, the daddy issues everyone and their…daddy had. Hey, let’s call a spade a spade: I loved seeing Sawyer reading on a beach with his shirt off. There. So sue me.

The finale didn’t answer all the questions and GOOD. All tied up in a neat little bow is frankly annoying. I like a little weft back and forth in my stories. At the same time, this was kinda neat and tidy. Everyone got to get together at some point in time and space, clean, smiling, not beat up on anymore, out of their wheelchairs and whatnot. I wept when Juliet and Sawyer got together. And again when Vincent came and laid down with Jack so he didn’t have to die alone. WEPT! Overall, I found it very satisfying in the sense that they had the courage to not answer all our questions, and even end by opening up some new questions to the audience, while killing off…everyone, and bringing them back again. I liked it. I am sad it is over, but glad it ended.

I have always wanted an exotic pet of some kind. I know, I know! This is not a good idea. I blame it on a book I had when I was little called, If I Had a Lion by Liesel Moak Skorpen. It is about a little girl who has a lion pet. He follows her around, waits outside of school for her, eats her veggies when she doesn’t want to, and puts his big shaggy head on her bed at night if she has bad dreams. It is a very cute book and I still have it somewhere.

I want a lion or a tiger or a monkey or a sugar glider or a fenic fox or a sloth. I know this is not a good idea, especially with those larger animals who would eat me. I don’t want a real lion, but that child’s book version of a lion, like a person in a lion suit. And having heard Big A’s story about when his dad bought them a monkey and it wreaked havoc in their house, I know even a monkey would be problematic. Jeff Corwin says his fenic fox attacks visitors. Even Shreve over at The Daily Coyote says having a wild animal as a “pet” is tough and limits your life very much.

Ok, all of this is true.  I am never going to get a monkey, or a chinchilla, or a sugar glider…BUT LOOK AT THE SLOTHS!

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

I WANTS ONE! My precious…

I do a two-toed sloth imitation, you know. I am quite famous for it in some circles.

Okay, maybe I will stick with the mini-pony. Look at it! It’s apartment sized!

The inevitable Facebook backlash has begun, or perhaps it is well underway and I am just noticing its vitriol now.  I just saw a someone on Facebook joined a group called “Quit Facebook Day”. Oh, the irony. And that day is May 31. You gonna quit?

I have been proponent of Facebook for a long time. Years, in fact. I played Bejeweled Blitz until I saw gems floating on the back of my eyes as I tried to sleep. I stalked and found dozens of people I thought I would never find again. I have rekindled friendships with some amazing people, received support and congratulations for accomplishments, satisfied my curiosity about a number of exes and wasted a goddamn lot of time. I know of events, planned events, learned way to much about people, waffled about my relationship status, had fights about what was posted or not posted on Facebook, and discovered communities I am surprised I ever did without. I have had the bizarre experience of getting a Friend Request from a person I knew who had just died. It, in short, changed my life.

But I get why people are starting to be done.

The privacy stuff is upsetting. Instead of opting in, now you have to opt out. Bummer. And you have to do it OVER and OVER. It is a drag. I have to keep locking down my profile. I had to start a separate profile for work because I couldn’t control what was going on there, enough. No problem. Now I have profile #2 on which I am friends with a bunch of work people and nuns. But I can’t quit. Not yet.

Seriously, how would I keep up with my cousins in California, Seattle, Pittsburgh, not to mention my friend all over the world? I feel like my world would dramatically shrink. I might have more privacy but it would not be worth it. So far. But I am waiting for the next thing.

I was heading to a meeting in the city yesterday, from my job on the South Side and I heard/felt weirdness in the car. I was going about 60 on the Dan Ryan. There is no shoulder on the Ryan so I drove a little bit while swearing, to a safeish place to pull over. It was a triangle of road in between an  exit ramp and the rest of the Ryan.

I had a flat.

This is not a surprise. Big A is secretly good at car stuff and noticed a weird tire noise a while ago. He told me the right front tire was going to go. My response? Turn up the radio.

I’ve had flats before but I was taught you stay in your car, call AAA and wait for help. Well, I called and they said it would be TWO HOURS. WTF, AAA? So I thought, since I had some time to wait, I should at least TRY to change the tire myself. I mean, seriously, how hard could it be? I changed a taillight earlier in the year. That was a piece of cake.

I dug around in the trunk, found the donut tire, the tire iron and went about loosening the bolts and working on getting the jack out of the trunk. The bolts are always what put me off. They are tightened by a big machine and I have tried to loosen bolts on other cars in other tire emergencies, to no avail. But this time, after standing on the tire iron, while passersby in cars and truck yelled helpful advice and meditations on my butt-thrust-out, squatty position, I got all the bolts loosened.

I had the jack up under the car and was pumping it to raise the car up, when the IDOT guy pulled up in his giant magical truck of help-you-on-the-side-of-the-road stuff. While he situated his truck, I removed the tire and had the donut in place. He came up laughing, told me he was impressed, I was doing better than most men who tried to do this because at least I hadn’t put the jack in upside-down. He replaced the little jack for his big pneumatic jack and finished the job for me, thankfully. He got the bolts good and tight.

My tire was shredded. As I rolled it to the trunk, bits of it fell off. Oops.

Anyway, me and the IDOT guy chatted a while, he showed me, should I ever have to do this again, where I should put the jack (I was a little off) and we shook hands and parted ways.

I was immensely proud of myself.  I changed a tire.

When I was in Iowa, I had a flat in my old Toyota. I panicked. I called my bf who called the tire people and then came to rescue me. I was on the highway, just out of town. A whole bunch of truckers stopped, one after another,(this was before EVERYONE had a cell phone) and when I told them I had called for help, they went on there merry way, except one guy. He tried to get me to get in the truck with him. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and even made a weird grab at my arm. I got back in my car and locked the doors.  A state trooper pulled up and the trucker hightailed it out of there.  The state trooper was uninterested in my slightly hysterical rendition of what had just happened so I let it drop. Since then, if something happens to my car, I stay in the car and wait to be rescued.

But being a single woman for as long as I was, I didn’t have that luxury of being rescued in other aspects of my life. I fix toilets and sinks, devise levers pulleys to get heavy things up and down the stairs by myself, jerry-rig fixes for things, install my own electronics, and other things that Big A seems to find amazing that I can do. I don’t mean that this makes me better than a woman who has a partner, just someone with a broader skill set. I think in a relationship, you get assigned or choose roles based on your strengths. If I had any choice about this incident, I would have let Big A handle the car stuff, because he is better at it than I. He was surprised, the other day, when I fixed our toilet (it was running constantly) and unclogged the dishwasher. I’m sure he could have done these things, but why would I wait for him to when I could. So, though both of us have the skills to unclog the dishwasher, these kind of tasks now fall to me, generally, because I am more willing to do them right away, and he is a procrastinator.

So now, I am undaunted in all aspects of my life!  I can fix a flat! I can change a taillight! I can do other stuff I was unwilling to do back in the day! Hooray for me!

My life is slowly getting back to normal. Dad is doing better (mostly). The court case is over. My performances at 2nd Story are over. A friend who came to the Monday performance asked me what was going on…and I couldn’t think of a thing to tell him. I know this is not the case. I’m kinda busy, but I don’t feel like I am busy for me but rather for other obligations.

I have a number of plans in the works. A new bootcamp starts again on May 24th. I will be there! I have let bootcamp slide a lot because I have been busy, I was out of town, the weather was sucktastic, I’m a lazy bastard, I haven’t been sleeping well, yadda yadda. So I will recommit to that and to WW. Also, there is this thing on Facebook that my friend Merry talked me into: The Summer Novelists Club. God help me, I need to finish my thesis. My mom has this GIANT diamond ring that was my grandmothers and she said she would give it to me for my graduation present and I told her that might not happen (in a fit of depression) and she said she would sell it then AND I CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN. Nothing like bribery, greed, and diamonds to motivate a girl. That ring should be mine! So I am committing to 500 words a day. It can’t be that hard, right? Or WRITE? HA HA ha…yeah whatever.

But the truth is that I need to finish my degree so I can move forward in my life. The fact that my job may or may not be on the chopping block…AGAIN has got me thinking that I have made some poor career choices and perhaps I need to re-think this whole thing. My dad, an HR professional, was out of work so much at the end of his career and it caused him so much anxiety, I would really like a way to avoid that.

Project management is something I am good at, but these positions are not being filled right now. PR either. I really don’t see myself making a living as a novelist. So few people really can. So, what? Massage therapist? Interior designer (this was the choice I always got on those aptitude tests people took in high school, but since my personal design style is arrested at about…high school, it might not be such a good idea). I used to think of teaching, but then I would have to, you know, teach. I can’t abide sick people so all health care is out. I have been told that I  should be a therapist but I have my dad’s lack of patience with people who can’t figure out their shit after I figure it out. Am I playing, “Why don’t you…? Yes, but…” with myself? I envy people with job security. I envy those people who adore what they do. I like my job very much, but it doesn’t fill my heart and soul with fire. I am fully aware that that may be too much to ask and most people don’t have that. Does anyone have a suggestion or advice?

Hey there! It’s been a minute, right? I know, but as I said before, April kicked my ass and May is starting off with a bang.

First off, my dad got released from the hospital and I had to hightail it down to NM in a hurry. Luckily I had a free ticket on Southwest or Dad might have been SOL. Dad getting released from the hospital is a good news/bad news kind of a thing. I am glad he is home, where he feels more comfortable, can rest well, and has resources…like a phone. On the other hand, he is still really wobbly and not entirely with it, making me nervous. I don’t need to air my dad’s dirty laundry on the interwebs, but his condition is entirely of his making and has given a 67 year-old man the health and stamina of an 80 year-old. It was really hard to watch him struggle to remember, struggle to walk, be uninterested in everything, and try and concoct a story in his mind to make all of these now permanent changes okay. And, selfish daughter that I am, I was happy to help him, but happier to get home.

Okay and New Mexico? I know it is beautiful but I really have no idea why he moved there. It was freezing and he is always cold. Everything is 45 minutes away by car at least, and he hates driving, they are a vastly under-served population medically and he needs some really good medical care, and there is not much to do (especially for an old dude with a hip replacement and no athletic ability or a young lady in her 30’s, for that matter). I had to go to Walmart to buy a shower stool and some stuff for dad (I know, Walmart=evil. I am totally with you on that.) and the “greeter” referred to me as Mrs., as in “Good-bye, Mrs.!” with a big friendly wave while I was exiting the store. WTF? What happened to Ma’am? I am used to that at least. The feminist first second or third waves haven’t reached NM I guess.

I had to come home after only a few days because my trial for my taxi accident was yesterday. It was much sound and fury, signifying not a whole heck of a lot. They settled. They could have f-ing settled in 2008 and I wouldn’t have had to pay for two taped depositions and a bunch of lawyer stuff. But I will get a little less than half of what they settled for (after my lawyer takes 30%, I cover his fees, and we pay back my insurance company some of what they paid out) and that may cover my high interest debt, a laptop, and a small vacation. Yeah! I had to adjust my expectations because we started the day talking about $137,000 and I got nothing near that.

And then, last night! My cousin Brian came to town with his band Luce. He is the drummer. He is by far the coolest family I have and one of the nicest and coolest people I have ever met. He lives in San Fran and we don’t see each other much but it was great. And the band was awesome. They are very tight. Go to the website and download their new acoustic album. It’s one of those pay what you want, things, like Radiohead. He is getting married in 2011 in Tahoe and I JUST CAN’T WAIT! I offered him to Big A like a prize because after all the kerfuffle with my father, I wanted to show that I had some really fun and not sickly family. They seemed to dig each other.

My reading is this Sunday and Monday. I am excited but way behind on my responsibilities. I have two rehearsals and tech this week and then two readings. If you see me, offer me an espresso. I will need it.