monday kind of grey
Mark Rothko, Center Tryptich for Rothko Chapel, 1966, Houston
I am broker than broke, but I wear raw rubies on my earlobes and deep orange carnelians on my fingers—both pieces of jewelry I made. There is celery in the fridge, along with crimini mushrooms and basil leaves to stir into a pasta. The other night, I made a roasted topping on whole wheat pasta that was delicious, nutritious, and nothing short of amazing: red and yellow peppers, red onion, mushrooms, garlic, sea salt, cracked peppercorns, olive oil, and basil. The meal was nothing ornate, just simple flavours, and great nutrition. The vegetables took forty-five minutes to properly roast, so the house was heavy with scent, making our mouths water and stomachs plead for a preview.
The night before that, I made roasted asparagus with a side of pierogis. I love having a friendly little kitchen to whip up my meals in, and daydream about buying a KitchenAid Mixer, chrome or black; more baking tins; and a set of knives even better than the one I currently have. This is domesticity. I never thought I’d want more than what I could make with my hands. I’m learning there’s a whole world of culinary art that I’m hopelessly behind on. I’ve some catching up to do. Shaun likes my experiments and rewards me with butterfly kisses of lash to cheek and spins me around to say, “Baby, that was wonderful!”
This being broke bothers me because I pride myself on my independence. This city is very difficult to find employment in, even the retail and serving jobs I’ve always done to supplement my earnings. However, I have a few job prospects, so I am looking forward to seeing what happens. None of them is my true life’s work, but I’ve learned about compromise. Sometimes, one has to sacrifice a bit of the present to find the future. This year, my goal is to pay off all my bills, repair my shaky credit, become financially stable, and study investing so that I can start accruing a portfolio. I’ll probably be working like mad and having little creative or personal time, but it’ll be worth what my hard work will bring for my future. There are opportunities on the horizon, but I’m a little nervous. I’m almost afraid to hope too much because everything gets ripped from my hands, so I’m covering my head and stepping out into traffic, just to remind myself that I have to keep taking chances.
I’ve been made a few job offers, pending a background investigation. These are wonderful, secure jobs with benefits and good salaries, the kind of jobs that would change my life, and that I could do well and happily. Each interview I’ve had, I’ve killed and I mean killed. I could tell the interviewers wanted to hire me on the spot. Afterwards, I sent miniature Rothko prints and individual handwritten letters. Right now, I am playing the waiting game as my background is investigated.
My background is clean as far as criminal record, education, and job history, but my credit isn’t amazing. It bums me out that I could potentially lose a job because of making less than ten grand a year for the last five years. In a way, it’s a form of classism, like you need to make a certain amount to be paid a certain amount, but if you haven’t, no one will take a chance on you and you’ll be doomed to jobs where you never make more than that amount. Or your credit is dotty because of bad decisions you made when you were young and desperate but you cannot hope to remedy that without a job that pays you enough to actually feed yourself and take care of business. The job won’t hire you because of your shaky credit, so you’re once again doomed to low-paying jobs where no one cares if your credit is good or bad. You forever live in the food ghetto, the one where you’re too poor to consistently eat by your organic or healthy ideals, so you eat very little because you’d rather eat nothing than to eat lard and pesticides.
This is the kind of stuff that knots my fingers in the sheets at night and drenches my brows with sweat, even though I’ve so much to be grateful for and might have a choice of several new jobs. I’m not scared like I was at Arco, scared of being trapped in a place that no longer was what I believed in, but I am scared, scared that I’ll be doomed some lower-class economic status, even though my education and job performance says I should be doing so much better. I am not feeling sorry for myself or asking for help, more needing a way to express these things and also, to be real. One of my readers here once said, “Sometimes, I wonder whether you’re real or not.” This is all too real. Live it, live through it, and see.
Bet me I don’t end up cocktailing for one of the bars in Rittenhouse Square because I can clear six hundred or more a week. The thing is, it won’t move me towards my future in a way that prospective employers would appreciate. Damn this feeling confined and knowing that I am so much bigger than the sum of the life I am living right now. Band-aids on craters and all of that rot. I'm dripping tears and blood all over myself, and this is real, as real as it gets on a Friday that is a Monday kind of grey.
the velveteen jewel
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muse) wrote,
