I was having bad dreams last night.
Not as bad as they were for the first two months since I moved here. For several weeks, I would wake up in pain from grinding my teeth, with a splitting headache that wouldn't quit.
Most mornings, my teeth don't hurt and the headache only lasts until I drink some coffee.
But I still had this bad dream.
The boy's friends were throwing a party so we went. I had been to some event or contest, where I had won a hundred dollars, all in singles. We were in this long line for the party at this mansion. But then the line moved. I had been behind a fence and then had to climb over it. I asked him to hold my money. But when I asked for it back, he had lost all but five dollars of it. I was incredibly upset.
Then the phone woke me up. It was his mother asking if we had electricity because apparently, the electricity was out in much of Dearborn. Fucking DTE. Whenever there's a winter storm, some neighborhood loses their electricity--not just for a few hours but for a few days. The really bad part is there's a lot of homes that have electric heat. Now what are you going to do if you have electric heat and you *don't* have relatives in the area? I know, I know, a startling concept since the only real reason to live in Detroit is because you were born here and just never got out. Or what if your family also lives in the area where the electricity is out, like what happened with a friend of ours. He just stayed in a hotel. But what if you don't have money for a hotel?
People in Michigan seroiusly need to learn how to sue. Seriously. This happens a lot in the winter here. Folks need to do to DTE what people in Chicago did to Edison when the power went out for a week in the summer one year. They took a class action suit against Edison. And you know what? It's amazing how quickly an electric company improves their service when they've been hit with a law suit.
Well, at least we have power. Knock on wood.
Yesterday was an exercise in futility. I saw some new jobs listed in the Dearborn Press and Guide. I had applied at two, and got the usual "someone will review all the applications and decide who to call back" (what do they need to know to hire you at a goddamned fruit market?) before it started pouring out. Ugh. I really don't understand the mentality here that I've found when looking for a job. I've had so many potential employers be incredibly rude to me in the interview process. It's weird, they just always act like you're lucky to have a job. It's a mindset that's foreign to me. I mean, sure, I know that the economy is bad and they have a lot of applicants, but more often than not I've had potential employers act in ways that if I ever dared act--even when the economy was good and I was getting fifteen calls for interviews a week--I would have been rushed out of their office, and never called again.
I don't know if it's because of the economy or if Detroit just has a much higer percentage of rude, unprofessional people in HR departments, but it's baffling. And it's been in everything from administrative/office work that requires a certain amount of experience, maturity and knowledge to generic counter/cashier jobs that a monkey could do.
Okay, I'll jump through the hoops to make $30,000 a year but when it's something that I might have turned down when I was a teenager, there's just no way. I'm sorry, I know I need a job, but there's a point when it comes down to principle.
Anyways, it's odd. I mean, even when I was 18--this is with absolutely no skills and no experience of which to speak, and this was in 1989 when we were also in a recession--it still wasn't this bad. If I walked into a deli, about 60% of the time I walked out with a job. The other 30% of the time I received a call within a week. And maybe 10% of the time I didn't get the job. And then, there were always cool shops to be had, like in a bookstore or in some artsy little card and gift shop. The thing is, this was in the height of my goth days, too, so I looked a lot more extreme than I do now. So, you can see why this whole experience is really foreign to me. The notion that the only jobs I would be able to find are either factory jobs or telemarketing--well that just blows my mind.
Ugh.
Anyhow, so the job hunt was again futile yesterday. I may go over to the mall tomorrow if the weather is remotely decent, and see if there's anyplace hiring. I might fill out applications for places that aren't, just in case something opens up. I haven't seen any help wanted signs the past two times I've been there, but you never know. While I'm at it, I should go to both the art supply store and the comic book store and put in applications just in case.
But yesterday wasn't merely futile on the job front. It was futile across the board.
The boy had seen a coffeehouse featured in Metro Times "Best Of" and so we went to check it out. Unfortunately, coffeehouses never last around here and when we found where it was supposed to be, it had closed down and was in the process of being replaced by a fitness center. Damn.
Later, we headed out for this deconstructionist exhibit. The boy had never heard of the street, so he looked it up on mapblast. But we never saw the street. We drove all over downtown looking for it but came up empty. We spent a good hour driving around in search of this place, but were never able to find it.
So, I came home and worked on a painting, while he relaxed on the couch.
My paintings have been ugly lately. I haven't been satisfied with them. But I've found the only way around that is to paint more. And that's the answer both to my quandry about school and the mental stagnation I find myself slipping into all the time. It doesn't matter if something doesn't look good. It doesn't matter if it somehow seems severed from your usual inspiration. You just have to do it, and keep doing it, until it looks good. You need to get those bad drawings, bad paintings, bad sculptures out of you. Then, you reach a breakthrough and it gets better after that.
Trite wisdom, I know, but it's what is most prevalent in my head right now. Another thing that is prevalent in my mind is sort of this overanalysis. Some things elicited a reaction in me that made me wonder the past. The kind of things where a word or a comment can make you obsess over memories and color them either in the positive or the negative. This kind of mental crayon is both enticing and dangerous. I guess that's the pitfall of overthinking. You can see too much, be offended or deluded, and neither one is healthy. But it always seems better than the alternative: the void. Having questions linger that you'll never know the answers to. Last night, I felt this. But I found the diversions: painting, writing, a nice meal and a good glass of wine, while watching a movie. As time goes on, I'm better able to treat the mental crayon for what it is: a way of attempting to fill in the blanks. People don't give gifts, usually. They don't generally explain themselves to you, and I guess part of that is a pandora's box thing. I guess another part of it is that much of their self awareness is just more mental crayons anyways. So there will always be these blanks.
Crayons. There's just always something about that imagery that I've liked. My sister, when she was in college, did an etching of a girl reaching up for crayons in the sky. She called it "sixty-four crayons". It was one of the first shows that she ever had. When she died, the image was reproduced on the thank you cards sent to everyone who attended the funeral. My father, when he opened his cultural center, named it after the etching and has an image reproduced on every calendar. I have thought for a long time that I want one last tattoo. I said that I would stop at five. Well, this is the last one that I would like to get done. I was thinking it would make a good shoulder piece. But I have been waiting until I reach a point where I can do it. Where enough time has passed that I know it will be a positive reminder, a memorial, rather than some torturous, obsessive thing that I can't let go of. It's getting near that time. Maybe I'll do it next month. I should be getting some money for my birthday. And her birthday would have been a little more than a week after mine. It would be a good way to honor her memory. I told myself that I would get it when a year had passed since her death. It will be two years in July.
I think it's time.