| SwankiVY's Life Story! |
SwankiVY's Post-College Years! Be sure and click links and thumbnails while reading for the multimedia swankivy experience! Or see them all in one place here: A brief time of uncertainty shadowed the beginning of my post-college years. I knew I wasn't ready to leave Gainesville yet--largely because the alternative was pretty much limited to moving back in with my parents, and I didn't want to--so my plan was to get a job and get my own apartment, alone. Unfortunately, the job market being saturated with unskilled workers was making this a bit difficult. I rode my bicycle around town applying at restaurant chains, retail stores, and service shops, and in the meantime I was slowly readying myself to move out of my college apartment. It was an emotional time because I was going to be actually closing out the lease, which was weird since Meg's old pals John and Dena had opened it before I'd even been there. I've always developed a lot of attachment to my residences, and the idea that I'd have to pack, clean everything, move out, and never come back was bothering me. But it wasn't like I really had a choice. Getting new roomies and continuing to live in an expensive apartment didn't seem like a very good idea. I was really surprised when I just kept getting NO callbacks for interviews, and my friends Jeaux and Scott got to listen to me whine. I did get one place in the mall that was a sales kiosk asking if I wanted to do a website for them, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in my abilities to do such a thing for running a business, and they were really sketchy about contacting me, so I gave up. I was also still dealing with my copycat issues, which had now mutated from a simple theft of my writing to the copycat's attempt to make it look like I'd stolen said writing from HER, followed by a large-scale silly "attack" on me. (In case you're wondering, her "attacks" involved signing my online guestbook with fake names pretending to be a whole bunch of different people who were all so offended that I'd dared to copy poor Elizabeth. She also filled her own guestbook with people pretending to be sympathetic or people who claimed I'd copied them too. It was all pretty hilarious since both of us knew she was the copycat and both of us knew that up until this point the only people in her guestbook were herself and her husband, so who were all these random people who had suddenly crawled out of the woodwork and become vigilant readers of her page? HA HA HA.) The attacks were pretty irritating, and documenting her crap distracted me when I should have been looking for a job. But as I was to find out over the years, having a large and well-known Web presence does attract terrible people, and she was just one of the first--sadly, not the last--to attack it obsessively. Finally I got an interview call from a bookstore called Books-A-Million, and I scheduled my interview for July 12 with Luke, a manager. I rode my bike to the interview, ended up browsing books forever because Luke was busy when I got there, and finally I got to discuss my application with this guy. He offered me the customer service position with a weird cautionary tone in his voice, as if he was warning me about it instead of offering me a job. In any case, I passed the test they administered and they liked me enough to put me on the team, so July 13, 2000 was my first day at Books-A-Million. I would be working there for the next six years, little did I know at the time.
I fiddled with my website here and there and discovered a surprising "cause" on the Internet: someone had started an Internet club called the "Organization for Antisexualism," and the way they described "antisexualism" was pretty much the same as the term "asexual" is defined today. I was pleased about this and contacted the owner, and we had some nice chats. It was nice to know there were quite a few other people who felt like I did about sex. While cleaning up and organizing my apartment to get ready to move, I came across some stuff that belonged to my old roomie/friend Mia that she'd left behind, and while trying to get in touch with her she kept promising to call me back and not doing so. Finally I was like "Hmm, okay, if she wants me to keep her stuff. . . ." Work was a change of pace. I didn't like working a full-time job and I didn't like having to use the bus or my bike to get there, and I hated early-morning meals and not getting free coffee and having people talk to me like I was a slave just because my name was on my chest. I was able to learn quickly when the other employees bothered to teach me anything, but mostly their training was sink or swim. I found myself actively pursuing training sometimes, asking people to teach me how to do things that I knew I didn't know how to do. They had a frustrating tendency to roll their eyes and do it themselves if I didn't know how to do it, and believe me when I say that got old VERY quickly. I got REALLY mad at this one manager who was always talking down to me. One day he told me to go through a teacher's large order and "make sure all the books she ordered are there," but there appeared to be no master list detailing the order. I could only find lists of what had come in, randomly stuck in books in the stack. So I told him why I wasn't able to do the task, and he replied, "Well ALL you have to do is LOOK!" I got a phone call at that point so he made a big sulk-show of going over to do it himself since I'm so incompetent, but then I saw him drag the phone off into the corner and he called the teacher and left a message about how there didn't appear to be a master list of what she'd ordered and could she please fax it to us. Gee, I think you just described my problem, Mr. Manager. But did he apologize? Of course not. After all, he'd dragged the phone into the corner hoping that I wouldn't overhear what he was saying, because he didn't want to admit that he'd wrongly accused me of being an airhead. Yes, this was what I dealt with regularly from my bosses. Well, at least I got an employee discount with that.
My main hang-out friends were Jeaux, Scott, and Ammy, and every once in a while my online friend Steve and I would hang out and have dinner and talk about my writing (of which he was a big fan). Scott and Ammy were still in school because they had education programs that were longer than four years, so I got to keep them around a bit longer. Jeaux and I had weekly Jeaux-Day on Wednesdays, which generally included the anime club and him sleeping over while I hosted my Hecklers chat room, and Scott and I regularly ate at a Chinese restaurant called August Moon. And once in a while I got to see my sister Lindsay because she traveled between cities to shows for her boyfriend or whatever and she used my place as a free hotel so she wouldn't get too tired driving back. It was nice to see her here and there but kind of disappointing when I'd been looking forward to a visit and all she wanted to do when she got to my place was sleep, but I dealt with it. Besides hanging out with friends, I studied about Paganism and tried out various rituals, regularly making crescent cakes on the full moon nights and trying to make time for the holidays. Beyond that, I regularly worked on writing and editing my books and adding stuff to my website. I always had tons of e-mail by this point, though not all of it was nice. (I seem to recall an uppity Wiccan priestess hitting me with judgments and misconceptions which escalated to an e-mail war around this time, and I documented it like I do with most things. Usually the Internet jerks did mainly harmless things like e-mailing me just to tell me my drawings are awful, or signing my guestbook 92 times pretending to be rock stars, and I'd just delete the messages and they'd piss off.) My long-distance friends punctuated my existence with occasional visits, and toward the end of August Fred visited me and saw my apartment for the first time. And my sister returned to the United States from Japan and went back to school at New College. The phone company screwed up my Internet connection (yup, during those days I was on dial-up, as were most people), turning it off instead of switching it to my new address, and I had a really terrible time getting it turned on. But once everything was worked out and I had really settled into my new place (complete with putting eyeballs on the border of the mirror and putting ivy-printed contact paper in the bookshelves), I started getting comfortable with my existence. My grandparents actually came from Sarasota to see the new place, and it looked ready in time. I added new decorations here and there after that, though, doing cute things like adding a bead curtain to the closet and putting up a canopy over the bed. And, of course, the knickknacks multiplied. I'm a packrat.
In early September I got a visit from Meghan, who brought Anthony (Phil's brother/her boyfriend) and little Katelyn to visit. My apartment was not very baby-proofed, but we had a good time. I remember that was the first time I heard her say my name, and she kissed me. :) I loved watching her learning how to use her hands as she tried to put clip-on earrings on herself VERY CAREFULLY. Kids at that age are so cute. Jeaux and I continued our weekly meetings, and we attempted to go to a different restaurant each week. When we started to run out of them, sometimes we got desperate and ate at some pretty horrible places. We became very, very close friends, though apparently his parents were assuming he was dating me because why else would he sleep over a girl's house? Argh. (That bugged me--that people seemed to think a guy and a girl couldn't actually be friends without secretly having sex. Jeaux had always easily understood and accepted my lack of interest, and never acted like it disappointed him.) Jeaux got a job at the Books-A-Million near his own town, so we ended up including work-related conversations in a lot of our activity. Upheavals continued at work. Our general manager quit in September (and her reason was "I'm sick of the bullshit!"; so am I, Helen, so am I), and my least favorite manager got her job. A woman who'd been hired the same day I'd been hired had already quit, and she'd been in charge of the kids' section, so they were trying to force me into that position and I really didn't want to go because the kids' section was a HUGE WRECK, and it was also huge, period. It was one of the largest sections in the store and obviously one of the hardest to keep organized. I got roped into doing storytime for kids or handling the Pokémon League from time to time, but I avoided being named the department head for the time being. My family was having issues. Sister P was in her last year of college and Sister L was hardly ever home--she'd started working when she was like fifteen--and my dad was doing his own thing while my mom worried and tried to hold everything together. I'm not gonna go into detail on that because it involves some things that aren't other people's business, and since it's not just MY life I'd be talking about there, I think I'll stay silent on this subject (for once), but things were not so rosy at home and I couldn't do much besides talk to my mom about it on the phone once in a while. Mom came to visit me for her birthday that year and I made her an angel food cake, which is her favorite. I remember that we also watched Monty Python on the TV and my mom laughed so hard at the "Silly Walks" sketch that she fell off the couch! Living on the other side of town made going to Poetry Jam difficult. I still loved it and was willing to ride my bike for forty-five minutes to get there, but it was the ride back at 2 AM that scared me. I had to ride past a string of frat houses, and getting stopped and harassed by assholes made me reconsider the intelligence of trekking out there just for some good poetry reading. I mostly stopped going after a while unless someone was driving me. It was sad. Florida got a wimpy hurricane that didn't pose any danger to my area but sure left plenty of rain, and lots of people freaked out over it like the world was going to end. In late September I found out my friend Michael-Thomas had cancer. He had an operation and got through it, though. I incorporated well-wishes for him into one of my holiday rituals for that time. I also started getting seriously into seasonal baking, which became huge for me over the next few years. At Mabon (September 22 that year) I made an apple dessert as one of my first good holiday baking experiments. I also invented a crafty idea called a "wish tree," which I made out of wire, floral tape, and dried or fake florals, and I decided how each holiday would be represented on the tree on my coffee table, which also had candles and some cool stuff on it, making it what passed for an altar in my small apartment. I mostly spent my money on crafts and baking supplies to keep up with my hobby of making the holidays special. Shortly after Mabon I got sick with my first cold in about four years. I was so unaccustomed to being sick by that point that I'd forgotten how bad it was, and I ended up writing a letter of appreciation to the Kleenex company for making such nice tissues. I'm weird. Finally at the beginning of October I basically got pushed into becoming the Kids' Department Head and ended up letting my perfectionism take over. I organized the crap out of that place and really impressed some manager types, though it was hard to keep straight because people had been used to it being a wreck for so long that they sometimes didn't even realize it was in order and didn't bother to put books back correctly. I soon rid them of that habit. It sort of became a joke at the store that I ruled the kids' section with an iron fist. A few people were actually afraid to shelve books in my section because they feared my wrath. Haha. At work I made friends with a customer named Emerald who came in wanting books on Paganism, and we ended up talking a long time about Craft stuff. For the rest of my time in Gainesville we would communicate once in a while about these things, though she couldn't come into town often because she had a disability and lived out of town, so it was only when she got a ride in to see her doctor that she could visit me at the bookstore. Oh, and then Scott invited me to see Weird Al with him on October 4. It was a great concert.
On November 5 I got a bizarre "away" instant message from my friend Steve's AOL name. It was from someone saying they were Steve's son, and that he had died. By the time I got back to the computer and saw the message, the son had signed off his dad's name, and even though I wrote back, I never found out what happened to Steve because no one answered the message and I hadn't known his last name even though we'd hung out a bunch of times. I was very sad, but also disappointed in myself because he used to really like my writing and always said that he "knew" one day he'd sit in an armchair reading one of my published novels, and it never happened because I was too slow in getting published. :( He'd also been waiting to read my fourth The House That Ivy Built book, and I hadn't finished writing it, so to make myself feel better I read it out loud to myself and pretended I was reading it to him. It didn't help much but I guess it was a little cathartic. I still wish I knew what killed him, though sometimes when I talked to him he was really high on the painkillers he took for his injured foot so if I had to guess I would think maybe he overdosed on the medicine or got an infection or something. . . . I worked sporadically on a conflict resolution website for a couple teachers at the University of Florida, so here and there I had to meet with them and receive new instructions. I met new friends from online and hung out with them here and there. On November 7, 2000, I actually finally got Mia to come over and see my new place, but she didn't hang out long and it turned out that was the last time I saw her. I tried to get in touch with her multiple times toward Christmas, but when I told her I had a holiday present for her and asked her if she'd be in the neighborhood sometime to come get it, she told me I'd need to give her gas money since she couldn't afford to put any gas in her truck. At that point I decided I couldn't handle the idea of someone who expected me to pay for her trip to my house to pick up her own Christmas present, so I kept it and I never called her again, assuming if she wanted to be in touch she'd make the first move. She never did. (Well, she did contact me by e-mail much further in the future, but that's a story for later.) I made the mistake of not voting that year, and got to watch my state screw up the Presidential election which had us undecided between George W. Bush and Al Gore for a ridiculous amount of time. I wasn't too excited about having Dubya as a president. Thppt.
2001
Jeaux and I kept up our tradition of eating at different restaurants, watching anime with our friends at the local bookstore, and hanging out afterwards. He started taping the show Digimon and he and I would watch it each week. Various people in our lives began being ever more insistent that we must be dating. Some people had even misinterpreted us as being married. It annoyed us. Another continuing issue was that I got ANOTHER eye infection and had to take a couple different medicines before we figured out which one was going to cure me. I had trouble paying for my medicine because I made so little money. I was making a little on the side by editing a local author's writing, but it really wasn't regularly enough to make ends meet easily. Our store switched general managers again--we got some guy whose name was Dave, but he wanted to go by his middle name which was Armon, and we found out right away that he was the type of manager who loved to delegate most of the work and then take credit for what his underlings did (while, of course, blaming them and not himself if anything went wrong). Our district manager thought he was a golden boy at first, but after a while of listening to his excuses she saw right through him. I, unfortunately, had to deal with his crap on a daily basis while working for him. On February 28, 2001, I wrote my first writeup on Everything2.com, a site that Jessica had gotten me interested in during her last visit. The site allowed users to write articles, link them to other related articles, and receive votes and points to advance in levels. I was pleased that my first article was not deleted by moderators and was in fact actually given a "ching" by a more advanced user, which was a big honor for me. Within the next month I wrote about a hundred and fifty articles for the site, mostly consisting of Pagan terminology/herbalism and writeups on Ween songs, with a few opinion pieces thrown in. My writing was largely well received, and I made sure to achieve point bonuses by using up the votes I was allotted on other people's writing. It sucked a lot of my time away, but I had a lot of fun doing it. In early March the jerky children who liked to regularly harass me about my site decided it'd be funny to copy it and parody it, which they did while linking to my pictures and reprinting a bunch of my words. Then they invited me to look at it while CCing a bunch of fake addresses, presumably so I'd think OH MY GOD ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO SEE THIS HOW EMBARRASSING! Yeah right. Since I a) knew it was only these teenagers e-mailing themselves and b) wasn't in any way embarrassed by liesother people wrote about me, I certainly wasn't alarmed, but I did them the courtesy of writing them a message that basically said "Ha, ha, very funny; you now have three days to remove my copyrighted material before I report your infringement to your service provider. Have a great day." They complied quickly (though they left a message saying "You really §uck! You know who you are!" on the remains of the page), and then they for some reason tried to get me to call them and listen to an "apology" message on their answering machine. I didn't do it and it made them very angry for some reason. Gee. Also in March I did my own taxes for the first time (with help from my dad), and was inordinately pleased to no longer be claimed as a dependent on my parents. It was nice to be a grown-up. Kari from online visited me halfway through the month and we had a great time talking and going to Poetry Jam. In April I went to the dentist and had difficulty getting X-rays taken because my mouth was too small. (It was annoying because they used the child-sized ones and still they were large enough to make me almost throw up, and the assistant made fun of me and suggested I was a baby because even most CHILDREN handle it better than I did. Oh, that's a helpful comment. Thank you so much!) Halfway through April I had a parade of visitors--first Phil, then Meg came with Anthony and Katelyn and Anthony's friend Mike, and we got to eat Japanese food. I visited my parents in Tampa shortly after that, and introduced my mother to Tenacious D (which I'd just learned about from my manager at work). We went to Sarasota for my grandfather's eightieth birthday. Patricia and her boyfriend met us there and we all had dinner. Toward the end of April I started getting regularly harassed by a customer who was later (unfortunately) dubbed "Retarded Wiccan Boy" by my co-workers. It was annoying but still sort of entertaining, and I started a log about the experience. Other ongoing activities included Jeaux and I enjoying the Invader Zim cartoon and learning some basic Japanese from learning tapes, and my continued obsession with Everything2. I got visited by Michael-Thomas on April 24, and while we were eating at a restaurant his car got towed. Gainesville's famous for that. Our walk to the towing place was long but relaxing. Scott brought his friends over on April 28 and we had a rather amusing night of watching his brother get drunk and accidentally hit himself in the face rather hard during the process. (I was IMing with Victor while they all watched the Clerks animated series, narrating the weirdness that was going on my home. Victor always seemed to be the person who got the full story on everything.) May 11th through the 13th, I went to an anime convention called JACON with my friend Kari and her friends. We had to go out of town to attend it, and ended up staying with her friend Allison. I had a great time watching Japanese shows, talking to people who liked a lot of the same things I did, and seeing all the costumes. Allison and her friend Lauren were actually people I'd very briefly met before the time I'd gone to a convention dressed as the character Washu; they were dressed as characters from the same show and we were in a photo together years before we actually met. Small world. . . . Allison entered a competition for a video game called Dance Dance Revolution, and what little I saw of it I enjoyed, and found myself thinking "I want to learn that someday." We watched a show called DiGi Charat at Ally's house and I ended up liking it quite a lot. On May 25 I finally finished my fourth The House That Ivy Built book, which was kind of a record for me as this book had been in progress for a couple of years. I usually write novels very quickly, but this one was a straggler. It ended up at about 235,000 words, which is way too huge, but I didn't care. Meghan and Anthony decided to split up, so Meg ended up a single mom. She was living in Tampa and moved into the "mother-in-law suite" her parents had at their house. I got to hear a lot of lovely stuff about that, and tried my best to be there for her. My sister Patricia, living temporarily at my parents' house in Tampa, kidnapped me in late May so we could go to our sister Lindsay's high school graduation, which was inspiring. Hooray for her. Patricia drove me back to Gainesville and stayed another day or so to hang out with me and my friends, and she seemed to get along with them. I started doing some secretary-like work for one of the writers I worked for, just for some extra money, but I wasn't a big fan of it because I really preferred doing editing instead of busywork. I didn't do it for long. At work, I started picking up books from the Animorphs series to read while working at the register, and was surprised to find they weren't crappy at all. I got Jeaux into reading them too and we got obsessed with them and loved to discuss the characters and plots. We didn't expect books for children to be so involved and so unafraid to portray shades of gray. I was also still hanging out with Scott and Ammy fairly often, with an occasional visit from Kari.
Unpleasantness continued with the annoying children online who kept IMing me, writing things in my guestbook, copying my website, and sending me obscene newsletters they'd made to look like I'd written them. I was really quite perplexed by how unrelenting they were--especially considering their main message to me was that I waste too much time on my site and am therefore a good target to mock. It was like "bug swankivy" was their hobby, and they had a lot of fun claiming to be each other or each other's family members or posing as a fan of my page before saying something ridiculous. To this day I have no idea what they were getting out of that or whether they thought it hurt my feelings or something, but their harassment was definitely a regular occurrence in my life at this time. I came very close to writing a letter to one of their mothers, because one of them had accidentally given me enough information once to track her down. I ended up not having to use it, but I was definitely tempted. Toward the end of the month I got a visit from my mom and sister P, and right after that I got visited by Jessica and Seth. We took a nature walk, attended Poetry Jam, and indoctrinated Seth by making him watch The Forbidden Zone. We did what I usually do with visitors: baked and cooked a lot, watched anime and silly shows, and had long chats. The frequent visits from out-of-town guests took up time and attention, but my regular guests like Jeaux and Scott and Ammy were never in short supply. I also sometimes hung out with Mike P, who was always good for a philosophical conversation or a discussion of my novels. He sometimes came into my workplace and entertained me while I put books on the shelves from the weekly shipments. I really didn't get to see much of my sister Lindsay even though she had moved to Gainesville because of getting into the college. I did get to see her dorm once, but even though we lived in the same town that summer I really didn't get to see her. I wrote a new short story called "The Escape" and put it on my website. I also did some Round Robin writing with a girl named Charity who I'd met at the bookstore and seemed really into writing. The experience reminded me of why I generally don't agree to things like this; I'd churn out an in-depth, well-thought-out segment of the story and then she'd come back with a weird sort of half-written, short continuation that made no sense. I had no idea why she'd requested I do this with her if she wasn't going to care about it. She just stopped replying one day and never continued the story, and I never found out why but considered it a relief.
I made a folklore-related page about faeries after doing some research, and I entertained my various friends and family with regular phone conversations when visits weren't possible. I bought a pair of sneakers that had small wheels in them--this fad had hit about that time--and I was pleased to find them in my size and sometimes wore them to work. They were kind of uncomfortable though. To keep my apartment in order, I had a stack of index cards outlining chores, and I did my best to do one every day so the cleaning tasks never overwhelmed me. I wasn't exactly religious about it but I did stick to it pretty often. I spent a good deal of time putting together a "Book of Shadows" for my own use based on some ritual material I'd written, some recipes, some song lyrics, and a bunch of herbal reference material. I organized it in a three-ring binder. I sort of went on a diet part-way through August that year because I felt like I ate too much crap, so I made an effort to make my diet healthier and tried to eat less often when I wasn't hungry. At work we got a new manager named John, because Armon was being sent to another district. It didn't work out very well because he was like the Missing-In-Action Manager, and soon enough it was discovered that he was stealing from the company so he was let go. But while he was still there, I got a promotion; I was given what they called a "red badge" (even though there was no badge to speak of), also known as a Customer Service Specialist position, and it meant I could be responsible for some of the duties that managers handled, like doing returns and signing things that needed an authority's signature. It came with a raise, but despite that it still didn't help me much when it came to keeping up with the standard of living. On September 10, Hermetic, one of the well-known members of the Everything2 community, committed suicide and the whole site was incredibly sad over it. And of course, the next day was September 11 and the disbelief/sorrow/anger was multiplied by millions. I had to work that day, and nobody really talked about anything else except for the World Trade Center getting attacked by terrorists. It was an incredibly surreal day, and as was my way I wrote about it (as well as having written about Hermetic the day before). I had dinner at Sonny's with Scott that night. It was weird how normal everything seemed even though at the same time the world had been rocked. The next day was my mom's birthday, and I had to work and deal with scads of people who wanted to buy newspapers immortalizing the bombing. (The papers were bought out in about 45 minutes, but we had some lady three hours later who was being a huge brat about why we didn't have any for her and must not "realize what happened." Everybody ELSE who "realized what happened" got their asses out of bed in time to buy newspapers, lady.)
After my vacation I had to go back to work, and we had an annoying manager there named Matthew who was always being self-righteous and condescending on pretty much every subject from work-related matters to religious issues. He broke rules when it suited him but insisted other people go by the book depending on what was convenient for him, and he frequently brought up how much of a genius he supposed himself to be. (I'm not exaggerating. He would point-blank inform you that he was very intelligent so he could launch into an oft-told story about how he'd bucked the system by applying to colleges straight out of middle school. It was weird.) He made terrible decisions all the time and screwed up his paperwork so often that the district manager was always on his case, and one of the managers at the other store once said "I'd rather piss glass shards than talk to Matthew." He accused one of the other managers of stealing once because she accidentally left a cash drawer on top of the safe instead of in it, and he would do things like accuse me of "nagging" if I requested that he bring discount cards to me for selling to customers, but then still get on my case if I did not sell enough of them due to not HAVING any. He was also later fired--that was because he again accused one of the other managers of stealing for no reason and the higher-ups were irritated that his suspicions were being repeatedly discussed with the associates. I basically was instrumental in getting him fired for that because I told the other managers what he was saying, and combined with the fact that his decision-making was always terrible, that was enough to toss him out. We had so many winners at that place.
Also in work news, I was having to run a Pokémon League at the store on Saturdays, and sometimes an older sister of one of the players would help me out a little or just talk to me while I watched them and rewarded them with stamps if they won their games. (I stayed in touch with the girl, Allison, as she grew up.) Usually I didn't have to do much but stamp their books and give them prizes, so I did a lot of doodling. On October 12 I wrote a new short story called "Uncle Avery's Garden." It was also around this time that I started hanging out with Mike at my apartment more often. He would come over and make cakes or dinner with me and we'd watch anime or chat. At the time he lived rather far away and had to ride his bike a fair distance to see me, though. I started drawing pictures for the Ivy calendar I was making for the holidays, but it was slow going. John, my old roommate, came into town on October 20 and we got to go have coffee like old times. A couple days later I had my first Instant Message conversation with a guy named Ian who was friends with Kari, and ended up getting to meet him in person because he lived in my area. We were pretty good friends for a while, seeing each other regularly and eating fun food and consuming silly entertainment. Soon Halloween was upon us, and I went to an early Halloween gathering thrown by my apartment complex; I dressed as a fairy and ended up winning some kind of prize that took money off my rent. The actual night of Halloween was spent trick-or-treating with Ammy, Jeaux, and Brendon. (Ammy and I wore our costumes from the anime convention.) I visited my parents in November and got to see my Aunt Diane--we all went to karaoke--and then my friend Kari drove me back to Gainesville. I got hired by a cowboy named Woody who wanted me to type information about horse farms into his database since he was not good at typing, so I made a little extra money from that. Woody was odd and took great pleasure in buying me stuff to eat while I did my work. I'd type on his laptop while he went to sleep in the other room. We never did finish the project though, because he hit some snag and ended up not needing my services. And at my day job, we got a new general manager named Linda. I had high hopes for her because we'd really had quite a string of terrible managers, but sadly I was not to get my wish. I think actually Linda was the worst manager I had the whole time I worked there because she had an anger management problem (some said it was because she was always coming to work drunk or hung over), and she used to scream at me with no provocation or make scary threats like suggesting one of these days she was going to grab me by the hair and throw me across the room. Lovely woman, really! I had a good relationship with my co-workers, though. They helped me contribute to my rant about working in retail.
Victor and I talked in IMs all the time, and we fooled around coming up with our own Digimon characters. (I drew the characters and put them online.) My Saturdays usually involved Mike coming over for dinner, and Jeaux Day was still going on weekly. Ian was coming over for random hangout times and we got to hit Poetry Jam once or twice. And Scott was still around, though we didn't see each other as often as before. I got very busy having to put up with the Christmas season at work; that time of year in retail is hellacious, and that combined with creating holiday presents for friends and shopping pretty much took away my will to live for the month. While looking for a log to use for making a Yule Log for Meghan, I found a neat path through the woods and had fun riding through it, but never did find a log and had to buy a crappy fake one that didn't work out well. And while shopping for presents at Wal-Mart, I ran into a rather annoying preacher outside the store--an experience I wrote about later. That holiday season I saw the Lord of the Rings movie with my dad and visited my family, including the grandparents. When I got back to Gainesville I did a ritual for the Solstice, and the next day I had a really awful day at work (cue the GM screaming at me in front of customers and whatnot), followed by getting the news that my Hecklers Online forum was closing and therefore I'd be losing my Community Leader status unless I got another hosting job. (Since most of my website was hosted with the extra space I received for having privileged status on AOL, I was pretty screwed.) I applied to be a host for a place called Book Chat and hoped for the best. On Everything2, I entered the Secret Santa program, and the person I had to buy for was someone I didn't know at all. I read her profile and got her a bunch of trinkets I thought she'd like, and the package was well received. My Secret Santa did not get me anything until almost two months later, and when it actually came, it was a pair of CDs containing religious music. The person who sent it also put in an accompanying note that he was aware I was a Pagan and had thought about getting me a book but didn't know what focus or level I would want, so . . . here ya go, music about Jesus! Gee.
I didn't finish the calendar of my book-related drawings until after Christmas, but I put it together and sent it to friends. I didn't do anything special on Christmas Day or New Year's Eve; I was pleased to get those days to myself. 2002
Inspired by the Grinch movie, I started a new style of wearing long fake eyelashes on the corners of my eyes. It was amusing. Fred, who came to visit in January, liked them. He stayed with me for four days and we did our usual shopping and eating and fooling around. Jeaux and I looked around for science fiction-related magazines to submit our short stories to, but even though we found a few magazines that were accepting our kind of things, I submitted and only got rejections or no response. Ammy visited me and brought along our high school friend Jamie, with whom she'd kept in touch while I hadn't. Jamie was a big fan of Jhonen Vasquez but hadn't seen Invader Zim, so I introduced her to it and she enjoyed it.
Website projects were always in the works, and this time I was working on a books page and making it more comprehensive. I tried to do a good job getting lists together of my favorite media and highlighting what I liked about it. I got a visit from my sister Lindsay and we had a great talk about annoying customers. On my birthday that year, I got to have a bunch of friends over--Meghan, Steve, Ian, and Jeaux--and some of them were meeting each other for the first time. It was kind of neat to have old friends meet new friends, and to realize that the Internet made this sort of thing possible. :) Ian got me into some of the new Adult Swim shows, so that was how I became a fan of Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Home Movies. I copied a tape and started trying to show them to everyone I knew. At a meeting at work, my company revealed their full ridiculousness: our store kept coming up short on inventory days, so if we came up too short again next time they had decided they would fire everyone in the store who'd been there since the messed up inventories started. Why? Because they suspected internal theft. Great philosophy, BAM; why don't you just ditch all your most loyal employees because you suck at monitoring shrink and won't pony up the money for cameras that work? (We only had dummy ones, as a deterrent.) Luckily it didn't work out that way, but I think that was my first inkling as to exactly how shitty my company was. Businesses should reward loyalty, not immediately accuse them of ripping off the company. :P In any case, this situation required a lot of nice privacy-invading requirements, like bag searches for employees, as well as ridiculous things like being required to keep the receipt for any and all café purchases until they were consumed or else we'd be accused of stealing. ::sigh:: Some other new regulations required some overnight shifts, and I volunteered because I hate customers. It was pretty awesome to just put away books all night and straighten up the store, and then go home before anyone came in to shop! I balanced some overnight shifts, some daytime shifts, and a bunch of social events and Pagan holiday celebrations, somehow managing to do that and also submit a few short stories for publication in magazines. I never got an acceptance, though I did get a couple of "nice" rejection letters that had real feedback. The Book Chat thing I'd applied for, for hosting, didn't pan out, but a previous co-worker gave me a lead on a chat room called SpeakEZ. I still needed to get a hosting position or I'd have to start paying for my AOL, and I made so little money that this was a significant source of stress. So I applied for this chat room and found that it was a gaming chat, mainly trivia and whatnot. Most people had to start as scorekeepers, so I learned about that, but after actually doing a trial in the room and supposedly getting hired, people kept not replying to my mails about getting me on non-paying status and just kept either not replying or jerking me around, so I just stopped pursuing it and had to suck it up and pay for an account for the first time in my life. I was kinda sad to not be an AOL host anymore, but I guess all chapters of life have to close the door sometime. . . .
Sometime in January I attended the Renaissance Faire with my friend Daniel (the guy who ran the anime club I went to). In February of this year, my old friend Mark--the kid from the WB! chat room who'd disappeared and stopped communicating with me for religious reasons--popped back up in my life and we got reacquainted. He said he'd just finished Lord of the Rings and was thinking of me because my books had been responsible for the last time he'd felt the way he did while reading LOTR. (Ooh, high compliment.) He'd re-evaluated a few things, apparently, because it wasn't long before he wanted to read the next book in my series where he'd left off, and eventually I let him, resulting in some interesting feedback. We never did get back in "regular" contact, but it was nice to know he hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth. We got a new co-manager named Pat at work, and she continued to be a manager at the store until the time I finally left the job. Most of the people who worked there didn't get along with her because she hated stupid people. And a lot of the goofy college kids we hired were stupid people. Imagine that. Pat was a Pagan writer who had a lot in common with me even though she was seen as brusque and ornery while I was mostly seen as sweet and nice (unless you touched something in my Kids' section, of course). Shortly after, a change in the store policy that seemed fairly major to me at the time was implemented: we were told to rearrange our store to be "alpha-perfect." It sounds kind of stupid that the store's policy was NOT to have the books in alphabetical order; they had them basically so that the A's were together, B's were together (etc.) within their categories, but they were organized so they LOOKED PRETTY ON SHELVES. The store policy changed so that we could actually put them in order, and the library gods sang in glee.
A new girl named Stacy started at work in March, and she was given to me to train. She turned out to be a very cool person and ended up in charge of the paperbacks section eventually. We learned that we could trust each other to whine to about customers and management alike. She didn't stay at the store long, but I liked having her around and we decided to keep in touch after she quit. Linda was still running the store at that point and she always had oddball requests or accused me of doing things I wasn't supposed to do or not doing things I was supposed to do. It was almost like being on Candid Camera sometimes. She also talked about me behind my back, but didn't seem to realize that was a bad idea since most of the people at the store had been burned by her and were more loyal to me. My friend Mike sometimes visited me there to talk to me. (We also hung out weekly at my house, still, and he was beginning to learn Paganism stuff from me during that time, but the store visits were still appreciated.) Once he teased me about my characters while I was at work and I pulled a children's toy called the Phonics Bus off the shelf and started chasing him, threatening to beat him with it. Linda made me kick him out of the store after that. :/
In late March, Jeaux and I got invited to go to Sarasota and have Passover with my grandparents. They didn't mind inviting my non-Jewish friends to our rituals, and Jeaux seemed interested, my dad picked us up and drove us their place and we had fun. After that we even had a karaoke adventure in Tampa before getting dropped off at my parents' old house to stay with my mom and Lindsay. I got to show Jeaux my old bedroom and stuff. It was a little sad, though, because my mom was in the process of trying to sell the house since she and my dad were splitting up. Dad was taking a job in Orlando. I planted some seeds in my sorry excuse for a garden in front of my apartment, hoping to be able to use some of their flowers for candied flower recipes. (It never happened.) Some of the flowers and plants did flourish, though--not the edible flowers, but some other ones did well. Especially one called a moonflower, which inspired me to write a prose poem of the same name. I had fun studying the plants for herbalism purposes too, though I was more interested in the symbolism than the application. A guy at work named Javier told me he wanted to "stay friends" even though he was quitting, so he joined the ranks of people I sometimes made time for outside of work. In April, I got one of my few and far-between visits from my friend whom I was still calling Squirrel, but he preferred to be called Michael (or Michael-Thomas, for clarity's sake) by that time. I watched the movie Brazil and baked a cake with him during that visit. He likes strange movies! I bought a new computer on April 18 of 2002, which was a big step for me, but it really had to be done because my computer was just lagging so much. (And this was still during the days of dial-up Internet for me, so imagine a terribly slow computer on top of dial-up. Yeah.) I bought the computer on eBay under Jeaux's advice and got a good deal. This was also around the time that my friend Ronni told me she was pregnant a day after I had a daydream that she was. Weird!
In early May I started writing a prequel to my The House That Ivy Built series, and on May 12 of that year I started writing my fifth The House That Ivy Built book! It came as a bit of a surprise since I really hadn't been gearing up to write it, but that's how writing is sometimes. But since the Ivy books were sort of a hopeless prospect for publication, I wasn't super excited about charging through writing the book, and I just did it when I felt like it. My dad solidified his plans to move to Orlando, even though he was married to my mom and my mom wasn't planning to move there. He'd gotten offered a job that seemed like a good deal and this was when he told me it was a distinct possibility. Later that month, my mom moved to a new house, and pretty much had to do all the moving setup and execution alone because there wasn't anyone to help her. Too much upheaval. And speaking of unpleasant, I received what turned out to be my last communication with the girls who had been making a hobby out of harassing me. (Well, the fact that it was the last communication wasn't a bad thing, but the communication itself was really stupid.) Turned out one of the silly children had run into a rant I'd put up about a different online harasser--Liz, the person who'd copied my website--and she thought it was an embellished story about what she and her friend did. It wasn't similar at all, of course, so her crazy rant-mail about how they NEVER DID ANYTHING LIKE THAT, STOP LYING SWANKIVY YOU NASTY UGLY FAT BITCH THAT NO MAN WILL EVER TOUCH!!!! was actually pretty right-on. Heh, just goes to show what happens if you think EVERYTHING revolves around you. . . . (To punish me for "lying," though, they filled my guestbook with more rubbish about what a loser I am. At least that was the last time they tried it, and at least they probably felt very stupid when I told them the page wasn't about them.) A guy at work named Neil began to show some interest in me and we went to dinner once, but he had a VERY hard time processing the idea of a non-sexual person, and he periodically tried to figure me out. He was a total horndog himself and was always telling the other workers about his drunken exploits. And even though I made it very clear that I didn't care whose future parties he'd gotten himself banned from for taking a drunken pee in the sink, he continued to tell the stories as if they were impressive. There were also a few times we had plans to hang out and do something, but then he'd promise to call and never call, or give me a time he'd come by and then never come. A theory developed amongst those who knew him that he probably just liked to make several sets of plans and then only keep the dates with the girls who were likely to have sex with him. We still had a few good conversations, but at one point he told me he'd only heard of people being asexual if they were unattractive themselves, and since I could clearly get laid if I wanted to then it made no sense for me to not want to. Yes, fantastic logic, isn't it? Suffice it to say I refused to give him any more of my social time, since my apparent misconceptions about sexuality were something he wanted to fix. I had been keeping a written diary of daily activities since the beginning of 2000, but I decided I wanted a place to reflect more publicly and joined the online diary site of Open Diary in June of 2002. I met some interesting people who commented on my public entries, and some of my friends were on the site as well. I'd never had an online diary before and I enjoyed the experience, though it wasn't long before Open Diary started putting obnoxious pop-ups on the page, which really irritated me.
In August one of the many queries I'd sent out was answered positively: a company called HCI was interested in giving me a test to see if I was a good enough editor to become one of their freelance copyeditors/proofreaders. I was excited and completed the tests. The proofreading one was pretty simple but the copyediting one took a lot of thought to figure out how to suggest the changes I'd want to see. Some of the glitches were very subtle on the proofing, though; I found one where the title was just slightly different on the outer cover page when compared to the inside cover page. Most people probably wouldn't think of checking that kind of stuff . . . which is probably why not too long after that, the company wrote me back and accepted me as a freelance reader. The excitement over that was a bit silly, eventually, because even though they proposed rates and made it official, they never once sent me a single piece of work. Gee, sure am glad I bothered to take the tests!
Jeaux and I sometimes started going skating for entertainment during our weekly fun times. He was only learning to skate so it was an adventure. And Mike and I sometimes went bowling. On August 15, he dared me to get on a Dance Dance Revolution machine, offering to pay for the game if I'd play. DDR is a dancing-related video game that gives its player quite a workout by requiring that arrows on a pad be hit in a certain rhythm based on arrows on the screen. I fell in love pretty much immediately, and soon afterwards I downloaded an emulator and tried to practice playing the game even though I had no pad and no system. I also played in a local arcade at the mall across from my work when I could. After Jeaux found me an adapter that could help me attach a dance pad to my computer, I began to learn to play in earnest, and quickly became pretty good.
On August 24, I took some online friends up on an offer to join them at a sort of mini-convention for Everything2.com users. (They call it a "nodermeet.") I got a ride with one of the noders whom I knew vaguely online, and we all met up in Celebration, Florida. There we had a drawn-out meal, hung out at one of their houses all night, and chilled the next morning before dispersing. I didn't really make any significant connections with anyone, and didn't have a huge blast, but it was still a valuable experience. I was still pretty active on the E2 site, after all, and regularly wrote nodes and voted on other writeups. The next months involved an asshole dentist, occasional karaoke, addiction to DDR and online TextTwist, and baking treats for friends and co-workers. I also went through a short phase of renting kids' movies from Blockbuster and watching them by myself while eating tater tots. On September 15 I started writing a short story called "The Curse," and finished it a few days later. I also hung out sometimes with Javier who used to work at the bookstore but gave me his contact info when he quit because he wanted to stay friends. Our new manager at the bookstore was Stephen, and he was a very young guy who ended up pissing me off all the time. I was very established in my section and knew what I was doing, so when this new guy came in and did things wrong I'd occasionally have to explain to him why what he wanted was against policy and therefore I earned his scorn. For example, he'd harass me about why all my kids' books weren't out on the floor, and I'd explain to him that I was supposed to refrain from shelving certain holiday books until the holiday was closer. He'd insist that they were supposed to be out anyway, I'd find a directive that said we weren't supposed to put those out until X date, and then he'd refuse to acknowledge that I was right and still walk away from the conversation remembering--and telling others--that I had failed to get all my books out. It didn't matter if I corrected his misconception; he'd walk away saying nothing, then continue to believe his original misconception anyway. He called me a "know-it-all" behind my back all the time--which showed how insecure he was about his knowledge. He developed a habit of checking on me regularly and asking me whether I was done with whatever I was doing, even though most of my projects were several-day procedures and he knew it. Once when he asked me every hour whether I was done with a project I'd been given two weeks to do, I asked him why he was doing that, and he replied, "If I don't keep asking you if you're done, you won't do it." Apparently he was under the impression that there is no such thing as having a work ethic, and believed his job as a manager was to micromanage and hound people while not getting his own work done. He regularly had to walk away from discussions with me to avoid having to admit I was right about something, so to get me back he was always telling the other managers that I was a slacker and needed to be monitored. (Pretty funny since I had the reputation for being one of the most dedicated associates and no one else thought those things about me. I always got my work done and the upper management was forever impressed with my Kids' section.) Stephen summarily fired two men who worked for him--one a manager who was fired for doing something Stephen himself had done--and another male manager quit during his reign, and Stephen replaced them with women. We had an almost all-female staff, and the people who worked most closely with Stephen suggested that he was threatened by other men and preferred to "feel big about himself" when he was the boss of a bunch of girls. Of course, even his boss was a girl, and at his first meeting with the higher-ups he literally ended up in tears because they were so hard on him (so one of the female managers in attendance gleefully reported the next day). But he continued to do a lot of counterproductive things, like alienating his best workers by riding their asses and coming up behind our cashier and unexpectedly showing her pornographic pictures in books (which almost made her quit, even though she'd been at the store for like seven years at that point). In retrospect Stephen didn't actually last all that long at our store, but it sure seemed like he was there for a long time when we were stuck with him. On November 5, 2002, I started writing my novel Joint Custody after getting annoyed at how many Newbery Award-winning books actually kind of sucked. It was a book about a kid whose parents have joint custody of him, and his experience being a kid who thinks a little too much about things. It was unusual because it was my only kids' book, my only novel from a male point of view, and it wasn't something I dove right into. Definitely a back-burner book. I met a girl named Laura when she started working at the bookstore and we had some good conversations and a couple hang-out sessions. She'd often IM me or chat with me at the store, and we kept in touch after she stopped working there. But our friendship was kinda short-lived because at one point we scheduled plans and then she stood me up, and after we talked about it she said she didn't remember making those plans but set a second date and then stood me up again. I figured either I wasn't very important to her or she was really trying to tell me something, so I didn't contact her again and she disappeared from my life. I was also working with a girl named Sarah who usually babysat the register, and she and I had some pretty good talks. And my favorite manager Scott quit because he was depressed, which depressed me. But at least a cool guy named Tyler introduced me to some Pagan music, which led to the discovery that rock music existed that was Pagan in nature. Research and gathering on that amused me for a long time. I got to meet more of Jeaux's family that year because I was invited to their Thanksgiving, though it seemed quite a few of them were determined to think we were dating no matter what we told them. It was a nice celebration with good food. I usually had to work Thanksgiving but that time I got it off. And when I went back, one of my co-workers who was English told me I only thought I didn't like tea because I'd never had a proper cup, and proceeded to fix me one. (I did like it, but that was because it was mostly milk.) Diana from work was frequently coming to my house to order stuff on the Internet and then pick up packages that were ordered to my house. It seemed like a lot of the people I interacted with in person were related to work somehow, while the phone calls I got were from people outside the city. (I met a cool guy I called Stranger Steve who played the piano and liked Kate Bush, but our communication was short-lived too.)
Christmas that year involved going to my mom's and hanging out, then getting to see my dad's new house. He'd moved to Orlando with his girlfriend Connie. I saw the next Lord of the Rings movie with my dad and that was pretty awesome. I also did a Solstice ritual on my own, and did a different kind of ritual with Mike but felt uncomfortable with someone else involved. On Christmas Eve I found out that a bladder polyp my mom had had removed had actually been cancerous, so that was pretty scary. My mom and I had a Christmas tree and decorated cookies with Lindsay. And in late December, my online friend Ronni had her baby and named him Aidan. I sent him surprises in the mail. I finished my The House That Ivy Built calendar for 2003 and sent it to some friends. 2003
I got an early January visit from my old roomie John, and he got to meet my friend Mike. Jeaux and I did research on places to submit short stories to magazines, and we submitted stories on the same day, but nothing ever came of it. My birthday consisted of a visit from Meghan and Katelyn, and they got to hang out with my friend Ian. I had a lot of visits throughout the early part of the year, including one from my sister Patricia and the usual weekly ones from Mike and Jeaux. Wednesdays consisted of Jeaux visits and anime with Dan, and sometimes we'd discuss our writing. Jeaux came up with a character named Avry and wrote fanfiction about him meeting my character Ivy. It was kinda fun. At the end of the month Mike and I went and saw Les Misérables live, and I mouthed along to all the songs.
As the summer approached, some interesting things happened. Victor sent me a cool comic that featured himself and me as Digimon characters, which was neat. My boss at work changed stores, so that meant I didn't have to deal with Stephen anymore. We had the new guy, Phil, who used to be a carny and who didn't mind pretty much letting the assistant manager run the store. Jeaux decided to move to Gainesville, and he got a roommate in the city and took a position at the bookstore across town from me--so we lived closer together and could hang out more conveniently. And I got offered a management position at the Everything2 site but I turned it down since I didn't really have the time. At the end of May I wrote a poem for the first time in a long time: "Clockwork."
On June 8, 2003, I wrote the prologue and first chapter of my novel Bad Fairy. It had already been a short story, but my friend Dan had reviewed my stories and suggested this one would make a good book, and I happened to agree with him when I thought about it. At first I'd thought it would only take a couple days to expand it to a short novel, but it got a lot thicker as far as plot and personality went, and it ended up taking me five weeks to write. (Of course, it was also 255,000 words--my longest book up to that point.) Later that month my mom had a flood in her garage because of a burst hose and it ruined some of her keepsakes and a lot of her material possessions that were in the garage, so that was some stress for our family, but she had insurance so some of it was replaceable. In late June some jerk hacked into the guestbook on my website (because of a security hole in the service) and changed all the entries to say dirty things. After I reversed the damage, the hacker went back in and deleted all my guestbooks, and when I reported the incident and documented the hacker's behavior publicly, I received personal messages advising me that the hacker was attacking me because I clearly needed help living in the real world if this sort of stuff was important to me--that actually this hacker was doing me a favor. Followed by explanations of how my life was obviously miserable and these attempts to destroy my intellectual property were designed to teach me a much-needed life lesson. Yep, I'm the one who needs a life, but you're a two-bit guestbook hacker who pasted hundreds of messages about incestuous sex acts into my message box. That wasn't the first or last time that someone attacked me for unknown reasons and then tried to play it off like having a negative reaction of any kind was somehow inappropriate, but it was definitely one of the more amusingly hypocritical incidents of online harassment I ever went through.
Fred visited me in summer. We met up with my mom, went canoeing, played DDR, and hung out with Tampa friends at karaoke. In August, I met a guy who went by Dieter online, and though he lived in Georgia, we hoped we could hang out and meet one day. We mostly talked online and on the phone, and he was a great new addition to my tally of long-term friends built from online relationships. Also in August my mother had a random hospitalization for something she probably didn't need, which freaked me out because I couldn't be there, but my sister Lindsay told me she was okay. It just seemed to come out of nowhere. At work, my new boss Phil started letting his kids come to the store and stay in there unsupervised for hours at a time, which was hell on me because of course their favorite was the kids' section and they often damaged (or even stole) the products. I guessed he must not have access to daycare because this was a regular thing, and it quickly became one of the things I hated most about going to work--especially since one of their games was hiding toys around the section for each other to find. (They sometimes bothered customers or asked them for money, too, which was weird . . . but it's kind of hard to get this kind of behavior to stop in a store if the kids belong to the store's highest authority.) I just lived with it.
During the fall I spent a bunch of time just working, hanging out with friends, editing my Bad Fairy book, and working on my website (which had more space issues that required huge rewrites of the code). My friend Scott came over with his girlfriend and we played DDR a little bit. I read the book Eragon and was appalled, and wrote an essay on how much it sucked. (Little did I know how much attention that essay would get and how many friends I would make because of it, ha!) I also got my photo taken for a passport because I was planning to go to Japan to visit Patricia, with my mom. In September I finally met Jeremy of MuMu Land when he and his wife and mother-in-law came through my town, so we ate and went bowling. We had a great time finally seeing each other and talking about writing!
I had a little Halloween party at the end of October that year (and went trick-or-treating with my friends, who were all also adults!). And then in early November I took my first international trip: JAPAN! My mom and I went to see my sister Patricia in her little close-to-Tokyo apartment, and we had some adventures in another country. We went to the school where my sister was teaching English. We got to try an onsen, which is one of those hot springs where men and women bathe separately because they're all naked. We visited shrines and had unfamiliar food and got to try real Japanese karaoke. There was a lot of walking and a lot of train-riding, and at one point our mom got lost and twisted her ankle so that was a bit of an adventure. I got to meet a bunch of the people in my sister's life and overall it was a really fun experience, but I felt pretty disoriented most of the time I was there, especially since I couldn't speak much Japanese and couldn't read it at all so I was functionally illiterate. I was ready to be home in my native country again by the time the trip was over.
During December of 2003 I made the Christmas in retail less dreary by dressing up like an elf at work and recording people's ridiculous comments. I also did a Christmas cookie experiment involving making a different cookie every day leading up to Christmas and bringing them in to share with co-workers. It was pretty nuts, and I saved some for my family. I completed drawings for another The House That Ivy Built calendar for my friends. I got to hang out with my dad for Christmas and saw the Lord of the Rings movie with him, and attended a rather humdrum New Year's celebration with his friends. 2004
I got to visit with my family for New Year's. I visited with my sisters, dad, and grandparents, and then came back to spend time with my mom. As it turned out, this was the last time I saw my parents speak to each other. We had a rather amiable little gathering and ate Chinese food and watched my sister's dog Pork Chop being silly. Little did I know we wouldn't be under the same roof again for years (and even then not all of us on good terms), but that's the way stuff goes sometimes.
I started editing projects for my friends Jeremy and Ronni, who had both written books and wanted my feedback, and I continued to edit my Bad Fairy book. I got various visitors, notably John and Meghan, both around my birthday. February was full of visitors too: Dieter came to visit for the first time, and I also got to have my Internet friend Derek over, followed by a visit from Fred. During the Fred visit, I got my hair cut because my mom had been saying it looked ratty. The stylist cut it significantly shorter than I said I wanted it and I was kind of upset about it. It's disorienting to have your hair cut so it doesn't even reach your elbows when you're used to having it past your butt. :P In March I started planning and planting a garden. Jeaux and I decided to go to an anime convention in Orlando and began preparing and making costumes for it, and I also found myself sewing a little plushie of one of my characters as a gift for Mike. The gift ended up being sort of significant because Brendon came over one day while I was sewing it and offered to help me find a small sword to go with it as a prop that the character was supposed to carry, and that became important not too far in the future. Meg and Katelyn visited me toward the end of the month, and I also got to go visit my old co-worker Stacy at her house. We made dinner and baked, and hung out with her family as well as had some good talks about writing and stupid customers. In May, I was having a visit with Meghan and Brendon came to the store to give me the sword he'd found for my plushie, but it was ridiculously oversized and I couldn't use it. However, he ended up hanging out with Meghan while both of them waited for me to get off work, and they connected over fan stuff and wrestling and whatnot. Brendon ended up following us back to my place, where I just kinda let them interact with each other even though they'd both come to visit me (Brendon's visit being unplanned, while Meg's was on the calendar). Apparently that day kicked off a courtship that would have long-term consequences!
Jeaux and I went to JACON, the Anime convention, from May 21 to May 23. We were dressed up like anime characters from the cartoon Maho Tsukai Tai--I was Sae and he was Takeo. :) We even entered the costume contest, but didn't win anything because I'm no genius at sewing. But my hair was made of sponges and that was pretty cool. We got to see my dad in Orlando as well. I had to take special time off for the convention because I usually worked weekends, and when I came back I did a lot of work on a big reset of merchandise that was happening in my area. Since I was very possessive of my section and didn't want other people to do anything to it, it was rather slow going. But I got through it.
Over the summer I got to go blueberry picking and picnicking with my friend Stacy and her daughter Sam, which was great fun--one of the best times I've ever had. We just had a grand old time chatting and eating our picnic while Sam played. I was glad I'd kept in touch with her after she stopped working at the bookstore! Then in July I got to go to Phoenix to visit Fred. Usually our visits involved him coming to me, so this was a treat. I got to see Penn & Teller and go to Las Vegas, and we also saw the Hoover Dam, played some of the games, went on a cool desert hike, had a lot of great food, and saw the Star Trek Experience. I had a really awesome time lounging by the pool at our Las Vegas hotel, where I got some writing done instead of swimming. In July I had Meg and Brendon over, and they had started a nice little relationship with phone calls but infrequent visits. My apartment was a good meeting place, so I ended up getting to see them as they went to see each other sometimes and stopped to see me too. Katelyn was with them this time and we had some good food and watched a musical. At the tail end of July Dieter came for his second visit and we had a good time eating enchiladas, introducing each other to music, buying random butterfly nets, and swimming. My online friend Jeremy had a baby for the first time and I was pretty excited that he finally had a son. ;) I sent him a handmade present in August. I was continuously working on revising my book during this time, incorporating others' comments and streamlining it. I had time in all this to have another visit from Jessica. We're always pretty silly when we're together. We went to cool Gainesville stores and enjoyed songs from musicals, made our own pizza, and had famous conversation. The visits over the summer were all pretty good (though there were things that aggravated me, and I was starting to get antsy about how little time I got to spend on my creative projects), but mostly all my friendships were in a good spot. I was dealing with having no money and my computer suddenly dying (and it was eventually sort of fixed by Jeaux, but for over a week I had to use an old computer to get online), and work annoyances were really getting to me. Especially since my boss's kids were repeatedly stealing from the store, mostly in my section, but eventually someone put a stop to that. At the tail end of August, I joined Nielsen's homescan program, which required me to scan the barcodes of items I bought and transmit them to the organization once a week for market research, in exchange for points that I could use to buy cool stuff from a catalog. Just one more thing to keep track of.
I started growing my fingernails for the first time in my life. I was always a nail-biter and just randomly one day decided I wanted to see if I could stop. I was able to do so pretty easily, and put clear nail polish on them so it would help me remember not to eat them. When they got long enough I liked painting them and decorating them with shiny stickers and cheap sticky stones. However, they definitely got in the way of my typing. I didn't like that, but I tolerated it for a while. In early September we got a hurricane. In Florida we were pretty used to hurricanes, but this was a strong one and my bookstore decided to close early the night it was supposed to hit. I helped close the store down, then went to hide at my apartment after bringing in stuff that might blow away. Phil had scheduled a visit to hang out with me during this time, and shortly after I'd made some brandysnaps the power went out for the whole night. Phil started behaving like a bastard somewhere in there, because he had observed due to noticing feminine product wrappers in the trash that I was having my period, and kept mentioning it and asking me weird questions about how long I "stay bloated" during my period. (I don't think I've ever had that problem, and him acting like he knew about it and was trying to be sensitive to it really annoyed me.) We spent the night by candlelight reading jokes to each other and playing cards, and I was kinda annoyed that the dinner I'd planned was not possible because my stove had no power. I also tried to burn the house down with a candle, but that was quickly contained. In the morning the power came back on, and Phil wanted to know if he could have a brandysnap before he left. I told him of course he could--we'd already planned to eat them together the day before--but he said he figured he needed to ask again because I, as a woman, am hormonal during my period and might have changed my mind. When I expressed the indignation that would usually come with such a ridiculous sexist comment, he replied, "Well, right NOW you're getting irrational over a little brandysnap." Yeah. That kinda soured me on having him over anymore, though I continued to basically keep in touch with him. Apparently I'm a sucker. (I did date this guy in high school, after all.)
During the last week of September I took my first Greyhound bus trip all the way up to see my friend Ronni in Ohio. I had never been to see her place before, where she lived with her husband Chris and her son Aidan. After a very long time on a bus listening to music and copying favorite recipes onto index cards, I got to have a grand old time trying food, checking out the Amish store, going to parties and gatherings and meeting her church group/prayer group, and of course, hanging out with a great friend. We made cakes and had recipe experiments, and played games, and of course chatted a lot. I went a little nuts in a kitchen gadget store because I was very into recipes at the time. The bus ride home wasn't as comfortable as the ride there had been, but I managed. Sometime in September, my online journal company, Open Diary, got a site-wide hack, and about three months' worth of entries disappeared for many users. For a while we thought the entries would be recovered, but that proved impossible. I was still using the site all the way up through blogging about my trip to Ronni's, but I had gotten increasingly irritated with the insecurity and the popups on the site.
In October my sister Patricia and my mother came to visit, and Patricia stayed with me for a few days. At one point she rode a bike to work with me and hung out in the café while I did my job for the day. We also made pumpkin brownies and bought a feather boa, and got to go to poetry jam with Mike and his wife. My sister encouraged me to start a blog on LiveJournal, where she and some of my friends were doing their blogging, and I decided to go ahead and do so, making the switch from Open Diary and archiving my posts. I made my first post on LiveJournal on October 13. I got drafted to help another branch of my bookstore do a massive reset in a nearby city, and Jeaux and I had to go there for a few days to set and organize their kids' section. That was an adventure--kind of nice to be solidly assigned to a project and NOT have to help customers while working. In mid-October I did something dumb while trying to open a tube of superglue with my teeth and ended up accidentally almost gluing my face shut. It was kind of annoying cleaning the glue off my teeth. Shortly afterwards, Meghan visited me again, and we explored some music by Pagan artists; I was familiarizing myself with them and incorporating some of their music into my favorites. On October 24, my friend Sarah (who I was still in touch with after becoming friends at work) invited me to come to a strange lingerie party. I obviously wasn't interested in the sexy-clothes-and-sex-toys theme, but it turned out she was having several of these parties (which worked like Tupperware parties in that a representative would come to the host's home), and her RSVPing guests had spread themselves too thin for her to make the quota for a party, so if I didn't come her party wouldn't meet minimum. On short notice I scurried over to her house and participated. And then of course I ended up winning the door prize and got a free piece of lingerie. It was an interesting experience, for sure. . . .
Then on October 27 my family made a visit and I got to go to Sarasota to see my grandparents' new house. I rode with my dad and sister P to see them, and later my mom and sister L met up with the other three immediate family members and we all hung out together for the last time. Patricia took pictures.
Jeaux and I went out for Halloween, trick-or-treating, and I got a small haul of candy. I also wore a fairy costume to work and got compliments. Then in early November I voted in a national election for the first time, casting a vote for John Kerry but watching my country again elect George W. Bush. I was kinda depressed about that. November 2 was also the day I met a guy named Mikey. He was an interesting sort of guy who liked science fiction and Paganism and coffee, and we started having little chats at the bookstore on Sunday mornings. At one point I tried to give him my e-mail address and he said he didn't have e-mail, but ended up getting on America Online to be able to message me. We started hanging out sometimes after that, going for coffee and talking.
My sister Patricia came to visit again and carted me off to my grandparents' house, where we visited them, then hung out in my town together. After she split, it was back to work as usual, and I started working on making an encyclopedia relating to my The House That Ivy Built novels, intending to give hard copies as presents to Fred and Mike. My family visited me again, this time with Patricia and my mom, and we had some brief visit time but a lot of it was business . . . because Patricia was getting ready to move to Japan and needed to go shopping various places. I started working on editing projects for another client and that boosted my income just a little. Phil visited me in late November and we went to see the local attraction Devil's Millhopper (a sinkhole, basically, with lots of cool nature trails). And then in December I spent a lot of time on my holiday gifts and had a surreal experience in the mall where someone who recognized me from poetry jam ran up to me and treated me like a celebrity by rambling about how much she loved my work and how cool she thought I was. I guess that was one of the first times I was recognized out of context by someone who liked some creative material of mine. 2005
January involved more visits and a "Megstravaganza" (visit from Meg and the crew), and I also wrote a letter to my favorite author Joan Vinge and got into a conversation with a guy who edited for her. He asked me to send him a story after realizing I was a writer too, but after I did so he never answered me, so I guess he must not have liked it. At the end of January I got a visit from Jessica and her then-boyfriend Laurent, and I got to go to the Renaissance Faire with Mikey, where we played games and he bought me a cloak.
At the beginning of February, I started something called the Uberman's Sleep Program, or rather, polyphasic sleep. It involved sleeping for twenty minutes at a time at various points throughout the day in order to minimize sleep, and though there were several schedules to pick from, I chose the most hardcore, which resulted in a total of two hours' sleep per twenty-four hours. It was easy to maintain at first, but resulted in pretty frequent mistakes and inconveniences in my social life when I would have to nap. The biggest problem was CRASHING when it was time for a nap, and if it wasn't convenient to sleep when I was supposed to, I'd get really lightheaded and useless. It was pretty extreme, but at the same time I was starting to feel like I never had enough time to do everything I wanted to do, and this was my way of trying to reclaim my creative life. I continued this schedule in some capacity for the rest of my job at Books-A-Million--taking naps during my lunch break--and continued it until I finally moved from Gainesville. As a result of all this, I wrote a poem called "Up All Night."
Also in February, a frustrating situation developed: my website on AOL started having consistent access issues with the FTP, and my repeated calls to techs didn't fix it. It didn't get fixed until more than a month later, and as someone who was practically religious about updating my site, this was really frustrating. (Especially with the extra time I had to work on it with my minimized sleep!) I took a bunch of my short stories and made a special small book out of them, had it perfect-bound at the local copy shop, and gave a copy to Mikey for his birthday. He was really touched by the gift. I came across a website called 43things.com and ended up having fun adding goals and wishes to the site and explaining them.
March 24 was one of the worst days of my life. I had a doctor's appointment for a skin lesion that mysteriously wasn't healing, so I biked to the office and got a flat tire on the way. I was fifteen minutes late getting there because I had to walk. I got a prescription, and started to worry when the bus was late to pick me up because it was my time of the month and I didn't have any extra protection with me. But when the bus finally came, the bike rack was broken (which we only found out after I got harassed by the bus driver and another passenger and mocked for not knowing how to use it; I'd used bike racks on the bus plenty of times before and this one appeared to be jammed, but it was easier for them to badger me to hurry up than it was to realize something was wrong--the driver finally came out and tried to unstick it and was unsuccessful). I had to wait another HOUR for the next bus. When I finally got home and dealt with my protection, I went back out to get the bike repaired, but it wasn't just a flat tire; I needed a whole new wheel. While waiting for it to be fixed, I went to the store to get my prescription filled. Then, after I picked up my bike and started going home, my brakes failed when I was trying to stop before a driveway on a hill, and I ended up getting hit by a car. Such a fun day! (I wasn't hurt though.) I had to deal with an annoying inventory at work (though I made it more fun in the following days by doing silly things with the tags the specialists left behind). At the end of March, I wrote a short story called "Just Like Stephen." And in April I got interviewed by two separate people on the subject of asexuality. One of my interviews was published in Salon, and I started getting a ton of mail and comments about it, especially from other asexual people. I continued to keep in touch with Stacy and hung out at her house and made calzones one day, and I met a new friend who went by the name Aoi--a guy I talked to online only, discussing polyphasic sleep and other things. And Mikey read one of my novels and gave me a piece of framed art depicting a "storyteller faerie" as a compliment for writing a good book. :)
Toward the end of April I had a visit from Fred. He came to Gainesville, then took me to Tampa the next day, where I got to have a picnic with my mom and sister, and then a party with Meghan, Katelyn, Brendon, Bryan, Steve, and Meg's friend Jennifer. We had some homemade enchiladas at our party. Then Fred and I went to Sarasota to have Passover with my grandparents and my dad, and stayed overnight, then ended up back in Gainesville for a few more days. It was quite a Florida tour we did! I went to see a film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--once with Mike and once with Jeaux--which was significant since I'd been a fan of the books since high school. Then on May 13, 2005, I got word that my parents were officially divorced. I wasn't too sad about it because I hoped they would both be happier; it would have affected me a lot more if I'd been a kid still living at home, I'm sure. I tried to be supportive but overall no one was really sharing details with me. Around that time Jeaux introduced me to some of his favorite webcomics. I liked them and wished I could do a comic, but always thought my writing was too long-winded to survive well in a comic format. My attitude toward that changed when I started reading a wordy comic called The Midlands. I was pleased to see that this webcomic artist put a lot of extra text outside the frames, and I decided to try my hand at writing a webcomic based on the ancient history of The House That Ivy Built. I wanted it to not be a joke as far as the art went, though, so I spent some time collecting references for people's faces and looking at art books. Finally, I made a plan and on May 20 I released my first issue of Negative One. Not wanting to be one of those people who starts a comic and disappoints the following audience, I vowed to keep it up, and began faithfully writing storyboards, drawing panels, and posting it online every Friday.
My friend Mikey and I started going out to the pool area of my apartment complex at night and "moonbathing" on the lawn chairs, usually aiming at doing so under the full moon. We usually had special foods and drinks and sometimes music and a candle. I was always very busy and this was a nice chance to just relax. In June I got to go visit friends in Tampa again with Phil and Ammy, and I went to the beach and played DDR and watched movies. Then at the end of the month I got to go to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie with my friend Sarah--it was cool to have a friend who was sort of girly so I could have someone to cry at touching movies with.
In July I got to go to visit my grandparents with my dad and saw my Aunt Elisa too, and we got some good family time in. And the next Harry Potter book came out, so there was a lot of hullabaloo at my workplace. (I read the book too.) And my longtime co-worker Diana, who'd been at the store longer than I had, announced her intention to move to another store, so we had to have a little party for her. It was sad to see her go because we had such a great working relationship and could make fun of customers together. But off she went to work in Ocala. In mid-July I found out my sister had broken up with her boyfriend Yuichi and had ended up dating a guy she'd known for over a year from the Food Bank--a nice fellow named Yusuke. And on July 31, I celebrated the ninth anniversary of writing The House That Ivy Built books--something I usually simplified by calling it "Ivy's birthday"; I made a tee shirt with a reference to the story on it, and Mikey was nice enough to get me a cake to help celebrate.
In August 2005 Mikey and I went on a little road trip: Day 1, St. Petersburg; Day 2, Tampa; Day 3, Orlando; and Day 4, Gainesville. We toured cool things in Mikey's old home town, stopped in to see Meghan and Katelyn and Brendon, visited my dad, met up with Jessica for mischief, and saw the butterfly exhibit in Gainesville. There was a lot of eating and a lot of singing and a lot of fun.
In late August I got a phone call from CNN trying to arrange a human interest story on asexuality, and they'd picked me for a representative. During the last couple weeks of August and the first week of September we were planning the schedule for that, but it didn't pan out because Mikey got really upset over the risks involved in being on national television and his mistrust of the media, and he ended up talking me into canceling the arrangement. (I later regretted that--letting someone else tell me what to do--but I guess it seemed like the best option at the time. Who knows if it ended up being for the best?)
The sequel to Eragon, titled Eldest, came out and I read it (partly because fans were bothering me to give it a chance, and partly because anti-fans wanted to hear what terrible things I might have to say about it). It was pretty bad, but I didn't get around to writing a review for it until more than a year later. But some friends at the bookstore looked into reading the first one because I was so vocal about hating it, and quickly joined me in the club of people who were appalled it had been published. Fred came to visit in early September. We didn't do a whole heck of a lot--just had some fun, went to see the botanical gardens, talked to our friends. Then my mom came to visit around her birthday and got to meet Mikey. We saw the butterfly exhibit in town and it was pretty cool.
And in October, my mother told me that my sister Lindsay was missing. No one knew where she was for a while because she hadn't been at her job and had disappeared from her apartment. But it all turned out okay because my mom helped her get out of a bad situation and she moved back into my mother's house. Obviously, I was very relieved she was safe and sound. On October 9 I received an award recognizing my five years of service at the bookstore. And then at the end of October I had a small trick-or-treating party with my friends Mikey, Jeaux, and Brendon, and got lots of candy.
Since I didn't have a lot of money, I made CDs of me singing for my parents' holiday gifts. One of the CDs was all pop songs, including "Criminal" by Fiona Apple, "My Immortal" by Evanescence, "Standing Still" by Jewel, "Adia" by Sarah McLachlan, and "Uninvited" by Alanis Morissette. The other CD was all show tunes, including "Think of Me" from Phantom of the Opera, "Journey to the Past" from Anastasia, "Popular" from Wicked, and a duet with myself in "For Good" from Wicked. They were well received even though my recording equipment was still pretty terrible at this point.
One of my time-consuming handmade gifts this year was a planner-type calendar I gave to friends who liked my fiction. I decorated every week's page with a drawing of characters, and some of them were new for the collection. Producing it was time-consuming and expensive, but it was neat to see characters I'd never drawn before. I ended up being pretty late delivering the final product to friends. New Year's that year was spent with Mikey playing Lord of the Rings trivia and drinking homemade milkshakes. One of my holiday gifts for Mikey was late, too, and I had to work on it through the first week of January, but it ended up being very well received: I made a Tarot card set from scratch based on drawings from my book Bad Fairy. I later made my own set of the cards because I thought they looked really cool. 2006 My twenty-eighth birthday was low-key, with Mikey giving me a PDA for my gift, which helped with some organization of my time. I started writing a short story called "Wind." On January 20 as part of my birthday celebration, I got to go see Wicked with Jeaux, Meghan, Brendon, and Katelyn. Katelyn, age seven at the time, had slightly outgrown her dressy dress snce they'd bought it, and it wasn't long before she was complaining that she couldn't breathe, so I ended up giving her the dress I was wearing for the rest of the evening. (I was wearing a tight shirt and black leggings under the dress, so I was still wearing clothes without it, but it was still kind of hilarious that I was sharing clothes with a seven-year-old.) The show was pretty cool, though different in some ways from the Broadway version we knew.
Work continued to be annoying at times; as the Kids' Specialist, I was sometimes expected to try to drum up enthusiasm for storytime, so I'd make announcements over the intercom and then no kids would show up to listen. So sometimes I'd just read to grownups to be goofy. In February of this year I dyed part of my hair pink. I'd never dyed my hair before in my life, and this was only a semi-permanent dye (which didn't last long at ALL), but it was kind of significant to me since my hair was so long and if it looked bad it would take a long time to grow out if I damaged it. But that ended up not being a concern. My biggest project around this time was that I began to query literary agents looking for someone to represent my novel Bad Fairy, and I began to get my first positive responses. I queried four agents in February, and while two of them just ignored me, two of them wrote me back asking me for partial manuscripts. One of them rejected me quickly. The other waited several months before rejecting me. I then had to put my writing submissions on pause because of another big event in my life.
Mikey and I had begun talking about being dissatisfied with our work conditions, and we ultimately decided to help each other out in moving to another city. We didn't have specific plans, but began to lay groundwork on how to find a new city and what to look for, but Mikey and I had kind of different ideas of how that research should be done. I was more comfortable with the idea of finding a job and moving to a place where I could do the job, whereas he was more comfortable with moving to a town he liked for other reasons and getting a job where that happened to be. (It helps that he was a mechanic and they have mechanic jobs available everywhere, plus he can drive. I had nothing but retail experience, and didn't want another job doing that.) So I began applying for jobs online--looking primarily for editing work--and Mikey and I decided against renewing our leases at our apartments. In March I joined MySpace and had some fun preparing my profile. And I got trolled by some jerks from a place called TheForum: someone posted one of my "asshole gallery" links there and encouraged people to send me death threats and rape threats, which they did quite a lot of for no apparent reason. According to them, my crime was "taking the Internet seriously," so I deserved to be repeatedly told how ugly and fat I am and to die in a fire. They were further enraged by the fact that comments don't post automatically to my site, so they attacked me for being "pathetic" over "screening comments." (Honestly all the spam automatic posting would get me probably would have been more annoying than the hundreds of "please die, but let me bang you first" comments, but they were convinced that I was deliberately censoring them, which made them even more rabid.) They eventually got tired of telling me my nose was ugly and that I should be grateful to the cybersex losers since it was all the offers I'd ever get, and they faded away. Sadly, that wasn't anywhere near the last time someone decided it would be humorous to organize hateful e-mails to me full of sexual content and violence, but that's what happens to people who decide to say stuff on the Internet. Especially if they're women.
Mikey and I went on a road trip looking for a place we could be happy. It wasn't a particularly happy trip, though we saw some places we liked. Messing around in Jacksonville, Florida taught us we probably didn't want to live there, and we visited St. Augustine and Orlando for other reasons. It was kind of disappointing, though, that we spent all that time trying to decide where to move and not getting anywhere. I applied for an editing job on the Internet, and the company wrote back interested after seeing my résumé. But when they called me for a phone interview, it turned out they wanted someone local--in another state--and hadn't mentioned it in their Internet ad. That was a waste of time. I visited my grandparents and my dad, and shortly after, Mikey and I checked out New Port Richey. We liked the area, but I was still more interested in making sure I could find a job in the city I moved to rather than just move to a city and find a different job, so I kept applying online. Finally, I got a nibble that was in the neighborhood: A business in Clearwater was looking for an editor. I set up the interview, but was dismayed to find that Mikey was mightily opposed to moving there, and he got very upset with me for even considering it. I got irritated that he expected me to limit my future options based on his preferences, so we had a big fight over it (which was also awkward because some of it happened while Fred was visiting me and he had to witness a bunch of it). But since actually having a job lined up when I moved sounded like a much better option than showing up in a strange town of his choosing and hoping I could find something, I made it clear that I valued my own well-being to being dependent on his approval, and we acknowledged that we had different priorities. So at the beginning of June, I went to the interview, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Everything was fine at the start; I interviewed well, took an editing test that I found simple, and found the pay arrangements satisfactory. But then they required me to take a "leadership survey." The questions of which were clearly along the same lines as Scientology's personality test, by which they determine whether you would make a good Scientologist. Having realized I'd also seen a reference to L. Ron Hubbard somewhere in the building, I realized that like many other places in Clearwater, this place was probably controlled by Scientologists, and I did not expect to get offered the position after turning in my survey. And I was right. I wasn't. They actually never even called me back after interviewing me, but when I inquired, the assistant of the woman who'd interviewed me (but who would no longer speak to me) told me they'd been instructed to continue looking for a good candidate for the position. I kinda felt like I'd dodged a bullet, but still . . . no job. Mikey proposed that we move to Tampa and live together, and while I was interested in the Tampa area because it would just plain be easier to live near my family, I told him I did not want to have a roommate. This also annoyed him, but he accepted it. We took a several-day trip to Tampa, where we stayed with Meghan and looked at apartments. I was pretty desperate about the job situation, because I had no savings and couldn't really get an apartment without a job, but Mikey and I ended up applying to live at a place called Curiosity Creek which didn't have quite as strict requirements for moving in and seemed more inexpensive. (Of course, that meant it was also in a pretty bad area of town, but there wasn't much I could do about that since I had no money.) We applied there and Mikey left me to stay with my mother, who helped me sign up at a temp agency and assisted me in getting my first cellular phone so I could have a local Tampa number for if any jobs called. I did really well at the temp agency's tests. They were really impressed with my typing speed. Ha. On June 10, when I got back to Gainesville, I put in my two weeks' notice at my job. My boss was kind of shocked, and said, "I'm very sorry to hear that. Put it in writing." My assistant manager said, "OH SHIT." And later, "Boy, that sucks for us. Does it suck for you?" And my café manager hit me really hard while screaming "TRAITOR!" A co-worker was appointed the next kids' specialist, and I had to train her. As for Jeaux, he'd been following all my trials and tribulations and was sad at first that I was leaving, but then he found himself in a situation that allowed him to move at nearly the same time! His roommate was going to leave and Jeaux wasn't technically on the lease, so he'd have to deal with that and get a new roommate OR just move somewhere else. Why not move to Tampa and try to get a better job, and still get to see his best friend once a week? Score. My mom helped us a LOT by delivering our apartment deposits to Curiosity Creek once we were approved and assisting us in several other things. I started having my last contacts with local friends and breaking the news that I was moving; I went to the mall with Stacy and her daughter, hung out with Mike, and even talked to my old boyfriend Phil about what kind of job I might get when I moved to Tampa. (He helped me apply for a position to be a school secretary at my old high school, since I wanted some kind of administrative position where I could use my computer and editing skills. I got an interview that was unfortunately scheduled for my moving day, but I took it.) I went to my last anime club meeting and they took me out to dinner. I began setting up utilities, handling most of Mikey's administrative stuff for him since he was going to drive our moving truck and help with the heavy lifting. And I finally started packing my apartment, which was emotionally and physically exhausting. I hate moving more than I hate most things, and I'd lived in this apartment for six years.
Throughout all of this I still managed to never be late on my webcomic--I was still posting it every Friday, no matter what. On my actual moving day, June 27, I had the comic materials ready to draw on while sitting in the U-Haul! And speaking of the U-Haul . . . Mikey and Jeaux got the truck while I was finishing up packing, and it started raining. The first time I got up in the truck, I slipped because of water that had gotten inside the truck. I fell out and landed on the ground face-first. It resulted in some pretty severe injuries. I had a terrible black eye and bruise across my face, and both my knees and my shoulder were severely scraped so I found it hard to walk. I'm lucky I kept my teeth. And I still had packing to finish! So that I did, with an ice pack strapped over half my face, limping around taping boxes shut. My friends helped me a lot with loading the stuff since I could barely lift anything in my condition, and by nighttime the truck was packed. Mikey and I slept on inflatable mattresses and left the place a mess when we left in the morning. But the end of June marked the end of an era: Ten years in Gainesville, six years working at the bookstore, and way too much time spent living on no money in a tiny apartment. I was ready for bigger and better things, and though I limped out of there literally bruised and with no real job prospects, I still had a lot of hope for what the next stage of my life would bring.
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