Disappointments

It's not been a good couple of weeks for me.

First there was that whole baseball thing. Pero ya eso es agua pasada so I won't go into that.

Then there was all this craziness with my job. As I've alluded to before I really can't stand my job anymore. I've been here for 7.5 years and my time has been up for a while now. After ten years of deliberation I decided that indeed my calling lies in the health care field somewhere. So at least now I'm in school part-time retaking my pre-med requirements. In the meantime I am still here though, continuing my existance as a corporate cog. Over vacation this summer I decided that this would be last year of dual citizenship and that I'd say goodbye to the corporate world for good Summer of '05. Well, deciding that has made things any easier. In fact it's made things harder. I hate coming in here more than ever. Anyway, so I signed up to be a volunteer interpreter at a local hospital (one of the things you should do to prove your committment to medicine and the community to the medical school admissions boards). I attended two training sessions in early October. Two weeks ago, on a particularly bad day at work where I was about to just walk out (again . . .) I received an interesting phone call. The trainer had called me up to offer me a job as an interpreter. That's right! "Here, have this job." I can't begin to express how I felt at that moment. It really felt like a divine experience. God had answered my prayers and come to deliver me from this hell. Hallelujah! So I go into the city and meet with her and slowly things start to turn their true colors. While the interpreting would be wonderful experience, there was some undesireable clerical work associated with the position. And the big bomb: the pay would be less than half what I make now. I was so desperate to leave that I barely flinched at that. I was going to take this job even if it meant postponing school for another year. Then I started thinking about that. A lot. I realized that I liked school more than anything and suddenly the idea of postponing school seemed utterly absurd. So I call her up and say "no, thanks!". I mean to stop working next June and it wouldn't make sense to just take this job for 7 months. She calls me back 15 minutes later and asks if I could please take the job for just 7 months then. UGH!! It was hard enough to decide *not* to take it the first time. By now this has been a week long drama which will end up being nearly two weeks by the time it ended today. So for days I am going back and forth between yes and no. It became an obsession. I was constantly thinking about it, worrying about it, and writing up countless versions of my budget. Should I go into something more interesting now but lose a lot of money? Or can I just hold it out for 7 more months? After much deliberation I finally decided I would not take it. And this morning I finally got a hold of her to tell her the bad news. Thankfully she was very understanding and agreed that if I was pulling myself out of the workforce shortly that I should try to save as much as possible. And so gang, I will stay in this perverse world of corporateness for another 7 months. Projected liberation date is now June 3, 2005.

Last huge disppointment for the week: the election. We've managed to re-elect the American Hipolito. Damn. I am at a loss for words about this. I just can't imagine how so many people actually voted for this man. It's against my morals to vote for someone with a sub-100 IQ. I had no idea there were that many rednecks and religous zealots in this country. I am angry at the way he manipulated God for his own political agenda. And saddened by all the people, especially Latinos, who fell for it. Who will all those people run to when their kids get drafted? Hmmm.

I just hope that after I quit this job and go to school for forever that there are actually some research jobs out there. Maybe we'll have to move to California!