“Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.” Francis Bacon

I started a new story today...It will be about the lives of several women and how they all have the same feelings that no one really cares, even though they all lead very different lives and each of them, observing the others, would think the other women "have it all."

Here is a brief excerpt:

My name is Alicia. I am the Invisible Girl. I don’t mean I’m a superhero. Quite the contrary. It’s more like my absolute lack of anything resembling super-powers makes me nearly impossible to notice. I wander through my days, hidden within my own life.

I am the girl in the office whom people do not see. Sometimes I look down at my own hands and expect them to be a misty representation of the flesh that is actually there and am surprised when my fingers, wiggling in wonderment, are more solid than an apparition.

Last week, another girl in the office spoke to me at a moment when it wasn’t even necessary. Both her words and their content startled me.

She said, in a tone of strange curiosity, “You look pretty today,” as if she wondered that she had even noticed. I wondered as well. Had she seen me for the first time today?

Nothing about my appearance was different, so I replied with, “I’m wearing new mascara.” Perhaps it is comments like this, with absolutely zero interest or enthusiasm, which make me indiscernible to the naked eye.

Comments?

Tash: "I found out this weekend that my right boob is my lucky boob."
me: "Really? I thought that in general either both boobs got lucky or neither did..."

Club Res. Life

I am sitting in my office, taking a break from work, while Club Marian is in full swing outside my door. Currently, there are two DJs set up in my residence hall, one on the 1st floor, one on the second. We have multicolored lights, a strobe lights, a bubble machine, and floors covered in balloons. And my residents are having a blast. Thank goodness it is only for a couple of hours!!

When I was an RA, we never came up with a programming idea this cool, but then, none of us were DJs, either. One of my RAs is a DJ and recruited one of his friends to help him by spinning on the other floor. But it is keeping them in on a Thursday night and hopefully keeping them away from the alcohol, and maybe reinforcing that when they go out, they don't need alcohol to dance and have a good time!

I need to write a letter and do some judicial file upkeep, so I figure that if I have to be on-the-job from 10 till midnight, I will actually get some work done. I'm just going to peek in on them periodically. I know, I know...I am such an old stick in the mud, huh? But this is the time of the night I've usually got my PJs on and am finally getting to watch my nightly dose of HGTV. Not so tonight, so I'll try to catch up on stuff that should've been done today except I had to do Homesteading and 1:1s and Summer Staff training planning meetings and be on duty (had an unusually high number of serious call-outs during the day).

Oh, and Happy Birthday, peacegrrl!!!

Blackout Central

I just returned from spending the night in a vacant staff apt across campus with nothing but my laptop to keep me company (So why didn't I blog last night? You might ask. My answer is: Shut up. I don't know.) due to a power outage in my building -- the third one in the past month & the second forced evacuation of the hall. Bleh.

The 1st outage was due to human error. The construction people building the new bell tower hit a high voltage line. We were in the dark for roughly 12 hours, all during the daytime. The 2nd was a "planned" outage during Spring Break where we were notified only late Friday afternoon that the power would be off on the following Thursday (mind you, this is SB Fri., and no one is around by 3:30 PM when the email goes out). This time we (I, actually, as the DOD) evacuate 2 res halls and the campus shuts down at noon b/c two halls, 4 classroom buildings, and one home on campus are affected. We were in the dark for about 17 hours so they could actually repair what had just been "patched" during the last outage. Even I was forced to relocate temporarily, and I slept about a combined 2 hours all night long.

This time, another evacuation, and the power affects only 3 bldgs on campus, mine being the only residence hall, and I am informed around lunchtime that I must find all of my residents, tell them they need to find somewhere else to stay for the night b/c we're closing the building down, and have them let me know where they are staying. (miraculously, I have a list with locations of all but about 4 of my 128 residents.) I have to make my staff sleep on the floor in the lounges of two other halls, angry parents are calling b/c we're asking their kids to stay with a friend for the night, the light is off from 7:40 AM Tuesday to about 2:45 AM on Wednesday and somehow I managed to sleep pretty well, actually!

Hopefully we will remain fully powered for the rest of the year! Agh!

Duty in a Ghost Town

I have been here all weekend b/c I was on duty Friday night and last night...But I have never had a weekend that was so interminably slow. Next week is Spring Break for the students, but the University is still open, so we all have to work. That's fine with me! I'll be able to get more work done in that one week than I have in the entire rest of the semester up to this point! All my contracts can get done and go out to the SC groups, both offices can be completely filed/organized/cleaned, and I can actually, though I am on duty both Tuesday and Thursday nights, get some much needed rest!

Saturday morning I didn't even wake up until around 11:55. It's been months since I've slept until noon! And even longer since I actually awoke and felt rested. I only wake up feeling refreshed about once every six months or so. I really hate those people who get all rejuvenated while they're sleeping. Who do they think they are?

But the silence is wonderful.

Yesterday afternoon I scared the daylights out of one of my residents b/c there are so few people around. I heard her in the laundry room and poked my head in to say hello and she jumped about three feet off the floor, startled. Of course, it startled me, too, when I heard her rummaging around in a room I assumed was empty! I was just minding my own business, headed down to the Pepsi machine. It gave us both a good laugh, though.

I'm looking forward to peacefulness for a few days. I hope I'm not disappointed.

Yes, I cry

Today I went into Jackie's office and started bawling about how we lost a big group for the summer that would've brought in about 3/4 of my annual salary in income (I promise it's not that much) and how I couldn't do anything about it. They didn't want to put their interns into the cells in TR, tho who could blame them? One look at the sample room and the boss lady might as well have said "Not no, but HELL NO!" That was what her expression was shouting at me. Of course now, five hours and one hellacious mutha of a roommate conflict later, I am angry rather than teary-eyed. Angry that I allowed myself to feel that it was my fault that buildings are closed every seven years for routine repairs, angry that we might not even get NYSP and yet they still have all of the friggin' campus reserved for all of June so I had to turn down a camp that would have made us $13,500 in only 4 days, furious that the caf people give me a hard time b/c I don't bring them enough money making camps during the summer (cheer & athletic camps provide them with the most bucks) yet NYSP occupies everything for June and TJBWT occupies everything for July-- that leaves space only for small professional conferences which require few conference rooms and for church camps who only stay in housing but use little to none of our facilities.

UGH!!

Summer Staff Selection is ended. Woo-hoo!

I know it's been ages, but now my summer staff has all been interviewed and selected. What a relief! Even though I will only be with them until June 30th, it is an extremely personal thing to pick a staff, especially for the summer.

Summer staff teams tend to be much more laid-back and close-knit than during the academic year, just because most of their other friends are gone and there is more time on their hands so they end up really getting to know each other well and hanging a lot more than they do when they're all taking 18 hours and planning 4 programs a semester and all the campus activities are running full-tilt and there's Rush to worry about (Ahem! Recruitment, I meant to say) and work-study hours to complete...Well, you catch my drift, anyway. Plus, we tried really hard to select an equal combination of reslifers and non-RAs for the Summer Assistant staff.

I think we did very well, and just by the virtue of their work habits, my successor will be left with a cake job! I've already done (or am currently in the process of doing!) all the hard stuff! By the time July rolls around, even Orientation will be done. Man, I am good!!!

But now I have to run and work on all the stuff that got ignored for a week so that could be done. The cycle of ugliness (a.k.a. work) really never ends, does it?