Post the First - How I got kicked out and found a job!

Warning. This first bit is gonna be super depressing. I swear my life is not normally this dramatic!

^ This is me. Or it was me, at Graduation last May. Add ten pounds and some acne and that's kind of me. Back then I was bright eyed and quirky and full of promise for the future, shining like a firefly in the darkness!

Right up until Reality came alone in size 30 plus combat boots and squashed my little firefly of hope into a greasy, poisonous smear on the sidewalk.

^ This is me a little closer to now, with my littlest sister Madeline at the zoo. I can't afford to go to the zoo now. Unless I get my vendors license and a job there painting faces.

A few months ago, I flunked all of my classes in my first semester at LSUA. A couple of weeks later, my father told me I had to either leave or go back to Florida to live with my mother, something I could not do for reasons I don’t wish to go into. With no job and no place to go, I ended up sleeping on my friends couch, wondering how I was going to live.

But, in the space of a few weeks, with luck and desperation, I got a job and found an apartment in town, which I am moving in to tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my job is only part time, paying $7.50 an hour, and the apartment is $425 a month, plus electricity. I can hope for only minimal support from my family, who are also in dire financial straits. I’ve got no car, and no idea what I’m doing.

In short, I need money.

That’s part of why I’m doing this. For every hundred visitors I get, I’ll get a check from the advertisers, which will buy me ramen and oatmeal and keep me in art supplies. Also, maybe reading about my experiences and mistakes will help out others in a similar situation. I can say with absolute certainty that we need it.

I won’t go in to the nightmare of flunking out of college. Suffice to say it was awful, and happened for no other reason than my own stupidity and naiveté and laziness. I flunked so thoroughly that my gpa dropped below a 2.0, and I lost my eligibility for financial aid, witho

ut which I couldn’t continue, even under academic probation. Ashamed, I hid it from my father for as long as I could and, as I should have known it would, made things worse for myself. When he found out, he gave me until the end of the month to find a job and an apartment, or I would I have to leave.

Hunting desperately for work, while the knowledge that your own family will shortly be tossing you out on your ass is breathing down your neck like a fairy tail wolf, is one of the most singularly unpleasant experiences I have ever endured. I had begun looking for work long before the threat of homelessness had truly descended. But in this economy, I wasn’t getting a single call back. And, honestly, I didn’t particularly care. I was comfortable living in my father’s house, I thought everything was fine, I was in no rush. I was lazy. Then the deadline came, and suddenly the barren job market was a much bigger concern.

My first move was to join a job finding site. I chose Monster.com, because I’d seen commercials and ads about it. Unfortunately, quantity of adds did not equal quality of product. The set up was busier than Walmart on Christmas Eve, and equally frustrating. Imagine the sweating, aggressive, menopause besieged mothers in blindingly patterned holiday sweaters as the hectic, clashing, over filled home page and the exhausted, rude, disinterested employees as the lagging servers and uncooperative navigation, and it’s a picture perfect match. The whole experience was hair tearingly maddening, and ultimately fruitless. Monster found only three open jobs in my area, two of which had been filled months previously. The other was for Petsmart. I don’t know if it was the Petsmart website, the Monster website interfering with the Petsmart website, Firefox interfering with both of them, or some combination of the three, but the application crashed halfway through no matter how many times I tried to fill it out. After three days of fighting with Monster, I gave up. Perhaps other, similar sights are better or, as I’m inclined to believe, such things are targeted to older, more experienced, career seekers, rather than entry level nineteen year olds in middling Louisiana towns. Whatever the cause, I moved on to walk in interviews.

I’m a reclusive person by nature. I hate to even leave the house if I can help it, which is why I made this more traditional approach plan B. It also didn’t help that I can’t drive and have no car. This meant I either had to beg my friends to drive me around town in search of ‘now hiring’ signs, with no hope of gas money at the end, or suffer through a series of extremely awkward drives with my father, still infuriated and disappointed with me for my screw up with college. In the end I had to go with my father, simply because my friends were not available at the right times.

Awkward did not even begin to describe it.

My father took the lead, leaving me to trail depressingly behind, smiling apologetically at the employees we cornered as my father, looming and clearly insensate, demanded applications. Most of the time my father’s shake downs ended in the employees informing they only accepted online applications or weren’t hiring anyway. We went home frustrated and empty handed, and I was left lost, wondering what to try next.

(This is my Dad and Cathy, by the way, with Madeline at her Karate thing. She was awesome.)

My step mother Cathy suggested my next step, actually. She drove me around town, while I took down the names of local businesses and their hours. She was much more helpful then I expected, and surprisingly much less awkward than my father. She pointed out apartment buildings, and gave interview tips, and budgeting ideas. Supposedly, there are websites that do that professionally, but she did a much better job, without the headache of hunting the information down on the web.

I took the list I’d made and called my way down it asking about jobs. It turned out there were far more open positions than Monster had suggested. I put in applications for all of them.

Then began the waiting game.

More than a week passed with no calls. I knew dad was counting down the days to sending me away. I was in a near constant state of apprehension, carrying my phone around constantly, waiting for a call. I would have taken a job doing anything at that point. I thought, if I could just get an interview, dad would let me stay.

At last, on June 15^th, I got a call from Blockbuster asking me in for an interview. I dressed nicely but not over formally in a black cotton skirt and short sleeve shirt. I read on yahoo that straight hair is perceived as being more businesslike, so I straightened it the night before. I wore minimal makeup and jewelry. When I got there, I smiled from one end to the other and was as

friendly and sociable as I am capable of being. I asked lots of questions and took notes. I’d considered what kind of questions they might ask before hand, and thought of answers. Such as “What’s your favorite movie, and how would you sell it to a customer?” It went spectacularly. They were interviewing ten other people that day, but by the end of the interview they were already addressing me as a part of ‘we.’ They promised to get back to me the next week and I left in good spirits.

That was Wednesday. By Tuesday of the next week, they still had not called back, and my father had lost patience. He came home from work during the day, carrying a bag of Wendy’s. He handed it to me, told me he was taking me back to my mother on Friday, and left. I’ve never been a very big crier, but I cried a lot that day.

That afternoon my best friend Matt picked me up, and worked it out with his mother to let me sleep on his couch a while, until I could get back on my feet.

<---------This is Matt, by the way. Someday, I will have his turkey-baster babies, weather he likes it or not!

I spent the night there, then went home in the morning after my parents had gone to work and started to pack my things. My father brought me boxes at lunch time. Shortly after he left I had one of the worst anxiety attacks I’ve ever had, by myself in the empty house. Working through it on my own is what finally made me sure I could do what I needed to do.

When my father got home I informed him that I was not going to Florida. My bags were packed and Matt was on his way to pick me up. I would finish packing up my things and clearing out my room in a few days. He offered no resistance.

I moved in with Matt.

The next day, Matt’s boyfriend Caleb, who was himself job hunting, gave me a valuable tip(Actually, my mother gave it to me first and I didn’t believe her). Often, businesses, especially franchises, get so many applications that they don’t even bother looking at them. They only really consider the people who show enough initiative to call back or stop in to check and make sure the application was received. Caleb said that counts for interviews as well, so I called them that minute, and they told me I’d start the next Tuesday.

<---- This is Caleb. He grows on you. Not unlike a viral fungus, actually.

I rocketed from the saddest I’ve ever been to the most elated in milliseconds. I knew better than to think dad would let me come back because of this, but now I was confident I could do it on my own. Matt and Caleb and I went out to buy celebratory pants, specifically the ones I’d need for my uniform.

And that's where I'm going to stop for tonight, since it's now technically tomorrow. In a few hours, I'm going to be moving into my new home.