Actually, more accurately, it was a followup of a job interview. There was a lot of paperwork and a surprisingly easy-flow conversation with the man who might be/is/IDK, it's highly likely that this man is my new boss.

It looks like I'm gonna be flipping burgers for more than minimum wage now.

Well technically, that'd be FLAME-GRILLING burgers for more than minimum wage. But the place has an anti-harrassment policy, and it has a policy that protects trans people in the workplace.

And me being a trans people, that means a lot in considering a job in a place.

Thanks to that lucky interview, I don't have eighteen thousand applications to fill out in the morning. I can just chill the hell out until I find out when I start.

So today marks the…I think the ninth day that I’ve been on a new medication for the pain that I’ve been having in my back and sides, for the nerve pain that happens for fibromyalgia.

MEDIC!!!1one

In case you missed the details, we double-confirmed the diagnosis at the recent doctor’s visit, wherein I got the phone call from the doctor that went “Uhhhhhhh, how soon can can you get in here again?” and moved the appointment up from a month from now to last Monday. After I managed to drag myself to that appointment and described the pain that I’d been having (“It’s like having this big guy who’s wearing giant stiletto heels wrapped in thumbtacks dancing on THESE pressure points on the back side of my body. Oh, and they’re all on fire.”) I asked him if there was anything that we could do to see if that was actually fibro--like some kind of test or something--or if we could do anything else to see what it could be.

“Well,” he said after giving me one hell of a People’s Eyebrow (Google Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson if you’ve never seen this phenomenon before) “there aren’t any tests for fibromyalgia out there, so we can’t exactly test for that.”

“Faugh,” I said, right before a nice little stab of pain sent me into a pretzel twist. “Urrf. What’s the good news?”

“The good news is fibro pain? Basically what you’ve just told me, plus now we have an explanation for that ridiculous fatigue you’ve been having.”

“I don’t know if I LIKE this kind of good news, doc,” I said seriously.

“The good news is that there’s a medication that helps for this and that it’s available for cheap as a generic, unlike that new thing that’s on the market now--I don’t trust that one, for the record. It hasn’t been around enough and they’ve changed the marketing about four times already.”

“Well, good to know we know something,” I said, trying to move my arms further than they had been for the last couple of days. What else do I need to know?”

“It’s in the literature. Just trust me.”

It’s been around nine days that I’ve been on this medication. That’s not a long time to evaluate the effects of a drug on anything, but I have noticed a difference since starting it. Mostly, the main difference that I’ve noticed is that I’m not as dead tired as I used to be. The vague overspent feeling that I’ve had in my muscles for as long as I can recall is gone, fading slowly as my rest actually starts to do some damn good for once in my life. The stabbing-burning-scraping pain that I have been getting in my back has started to back off throughout the day, though there is some soreness that is still coming on throughout the day when I work and run errands--that is to be expected, according to my doctor, since I only just started this medication and it took this long to figure out what the hell we were dealing with in the first place. I’m also actually able to get to sleep at a reasonable hour again--this stuff kicks in FAST and before I’m aware what’s happened I’m kind of just “blaaaaaaghaldaldfjldfj.”

But I feel better than I have in a long time, and that is a huge victory.

MONEY CASH STACKS WALLET FAT CURRENCY EUPHEMISMS!

The start of a new month means a stack of new financial things to worry about. Of course, that means it’s time to do some strategizing. While running around on an electronic cigarette forum I got a job lead about tech support. I take a test that features actual questions, and then a bunch of weirdly placed jokes (”If all trout are fish, and all fish live in the sea, then what can you say about mackerel?”), and out of nowhere, I GET AN OPPORTUNITY for a new job. The interview was yesterday, and I found out that the training--the training itself pays more than my current line of work does, and I’d be working from home. I’d be the dude you get when you call the internet people about your router, wondering why your router isn’t working to get the “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?” and then the “Okay, since we’ve tried that, let’s give it a little goose with this setting here, and here and here and there we go all fixed!” Yep, things are looking up. $10/hour for full time after training is done, and $9 during training. I ONLY MAKE $8.25 (minimum wage) RIGHT NOW. So you can imagine the incredibly bad happy victory dancing I do when I get this info.

I’m on the bus running errands when I get the blip-boop of an email. It’s the hiring department of the place. They need my upgraded specs (?) and the connection speed. Since I don’t HAVE upgraded specs, I do my CURRENT specs and explain that I have no idea what they are talking about, and then do my speed test.

Then I find out the minimum speed is 5mbps.

My speed is 3.94 maxed.

The fastest in the area? That would be Charter, and the only other option in this old-ass building.

WHERE MY FAMILY HAS A CONNECTION IN MY NAME ELSEWHERE.

I CANNOT GET A CONNECTION HERE BECAUSE MY IDENTITY IS IN USE ELSEWHERE.

ONCE AGAIN, BULLSHIT STRIKES.

THE WORST PART ABOUT THIS:

The worst thing here is if I clear this out, they’ll know exactly what happened. Two of them are using this ill-gotten connection to get their college classes done--that will be held against me if I have it shut down and dragged over here where it belongs. I only JUST fixed that bridge, and now I’d have to burn it?

Fuck. Me.

Back to the rat race. So much for full time work.

*trudges off*

I wake abruptly, realizing that it is full daylight outside.

“…aw, fuck.”

I roll out of bed and walk across the apartment—the new arrangement of furniture means that the phone is about three yards away from the bed, and impossible to roll over and simply slap into silence.

It’s 7:55 AM.

“Aw, fuck.”

I have seven minutes to get dressed. The closest clothes are streets and I throw those on. The uniform goes into my purse as does my phone, my cans (not those cans—headphones), and my iPod duo.

I’m ready in a minute and forty-five.

I’m half out the door when a niggling little sense goes, “Check your keychain.” I do that.

My bus pass clip is AWOL.

“…Aw, shit.”

I start to ransack my apartment, undoing yesterday’s work immediately.

My alarm goes off. It’s three minutes until nine.

One more scour.

Another scouring when I don’t see it.

I panic. I call work. "Please let it be slow.”

The phone opens on the first ring. “Good morning—”

At first I think it is a voice mail. I freeze. Then I remember I need to be SPEAKING and ask what the deal was with my last lateness and pretty much beg for it to be slow, as if our deskman can make that happen.

…I luck out. It’s slow. In fact they were just about to text me.

I almost fall over in relief.

If you need me I’ll be searching for my godsdamned KEYS. And probably eating toast. My nervous stomach has decided to kick itself into gear this morning.

What you are currently looking at is the lifeline for people living in the projects—specifically, those poor bastards stuck in minimum wage jobs.

I’m one of those unlucky bastards. (And, hey, as long as we’re on the term, it’s actually true in my case—If I was a part of Westeros’s social classes, I’d have a bastard surname. And since the Starks are the family I’m behind in my admittedly way-behind reading list, just call me Snow.) So when I got into the building today and saw a table loaded down with canned goods and sundries, I partook in that most holy of generous food-kitchen rules:

If you need it, then take it. That’s why it’s there.

As a result, there is much more food in the “oh crap things are getting bad here” stash in the pantry. If this comes up each week as it usually does, I can probably stock up to the point where I’ll be safe even when I run out of month at the end of the money.

But there are projects that need to be started, work that has to be done, and savings that have to be done to get a certain plan off of the ground and into the proper phase of development.

At some point I will be figuring out how to use Paypal for things like donations and contributions. For one, I find myself needing the use of a good nutritional analysis program so that I can provide the nutritional data—even if it is only the base data—for the recipes that I have developed. The cheapest alternative is still more than I’m willing to spend in the winter months, and all that is left at the end of the month goes into a place where I’m not allowed to get at it until I actually have made enough to get everything done. I’m still working on the projects and experiments, but it is mightily inefficient to have to go onto the internet every time I need to analyze a recipe for the project. …also there is the very real threat of someone finding one of my creations, ganking it, and plagarizing it—and worse, possibly  making MONEY off of something that isn’t their creation.

Normally I’m kind of lax where it comes to the enforcement of copyright enforcement—it’s hard to do and expensive to boot, so it is often impractical for the guy who has less money to do anything about it.

And in this case, I’m the guy with less money.

I wonder how many people would enjoy a little taste of Quinn’s work in the kitchen. Even if the only buyers are from LJ, I’d put out a collection or two if it was in demand enough by the time I got enough recipes to fill a tradebook.

Three days of 7+ hour shifts.  I'm tired.  My shoulder's sore, I'm not sure what I did to my wrist, and I'm so tired I can barely see straight.  I'm going to have to take it easy until my next day off—I got no idea when it is, either.

See that time? 8:10 PM?

Problem was, I was entirely too hyped up on what had happened to be able to focus on one thing at a time, and that included being able to write a damn thing.

The last time that I had a Saturday that was this exciting was last year, when the bus that I was on the way home from work on was being shot at at one point. Normally nothing else would be as exciting, but yesterday there was something that had me so wired that didn’t get any sleep until earlier today when my blood pressure dropped through the cellar and knocked me out.

Whoops.

You’d think I’d know my luck by now.

( What happened??? )