angry

i think i am angry. angry over losing my job. anger over the fact that i've been doing this shit for 20 years and i still have gotten nowhere. having a job is like a relationship. you gain some knowledge, but when it's all said and done, you are back to square one. i guess the different is that we don't have resumes for relationships. that would be funny.

anyway, i go back to the drawing board on august 15. i have known this for... well, since i started, really. and let me be honest, i hate my job. i hate the small, cover-yer-ass crap i do on a daily basis. we play more of the blame game than any other position i have been in. it's really ridiculous how much time we spend pointing fingers instead of getting shit done.

but i am in love with the people here. i don't know how they have such a crappy work environment yet manage to have a bunch of awesome people. they are cool and laid back. it's like we all have Stockholm Syndrome and we know it. learned helplessness. and we bitch about the inefficiencies here. we complain about how we outsource almost everything and our building is half empty. the craft room and the photo studio is gone. no more PIC. no more production department. we've been parted out like an old car and yet we still run. because we all like what we do. just most of us wish we didn't have to do it for this place.

anyway, most of these people i won't ever see again. i have been coming back for 4 years, but i have the magazine now. i don't think that i want another full time job like this, so i don't know if i'll be back. it's like high school graduation: you'll keep in touch with the people you want to. and you don't have to put up with the people you don't like anymore.

but i feel like when i did when i couldn't graduate from college with my friends. most of them left the summer of 1996, my boyfriend among them. then my best friend moved into his old apartment and took his room. i rattled around that town and that apartment like a ghost in purgatory. i didn't know what to do with myself. then my best friend moved to chicago. and when i finally was able to go back to school, i was all alone in a place that used to be my sanctuary. but now it was like a prison. i had no reason to be there, it wasn't fun anymore. i would walk past the imaging studio and expect to see steve's coat or bag slung over the back of a chair. i would see my friend's artwork up all over the place. places we've hung out. i was left behind.

and i feel the same way now. everyone fun is gone. and now i sit here with nothing to do. i hate this feeling. anxious, irritated, restless. forgotten. invisible. i still have friends here, don't get me wrong. but no one to really talk to. and you don't see it coming. you know that it will suck without your friends, but you don't realize how different it's going to be. you don't know until you're in it. and i am in it. trying not to be a nuisance to the people around me, yet trying not to go crazy with boredom.

oh, and we might not get the house because of this. if they know i'm out in less than a month, we might be screwed. i hate this so much.

a friend's birthday

today is a friend's birthday. she would have been 37. she passed away on November 9, 2012.

we were friends by circumstance. we moved into the same building at the same time. she was funny, sarcastic, nice, sincere, and welcoming. we watched each others cats when we went on vacation. we would stop and gossip about the neighborhood happening when we saw each other. she enjoyed mowing the lawn with our annoying push mower. she helped out around the condo building. she taught me how to make monkey bread and i then gained 20 pounds. she was always fun to talk to.

i hate writing this in the past tense.

November 9 was fairly normal. it was a friday. i had stayed home sick from work that day. that night, while we were getting ready for bed, we heard sirens. this is nothing new in our 'hood, so we ignored it. until they got closer. and closer. and stopped. right in front of our building. it was a fire truck. they broke out a stretcher and other stuff and headed inside to the building next to ours. i also notice a white car, illegally parked at the corner with its flashers on. it had been there for about 30 minutes.

my thought process: there were stoner North Park University kids on the first floor. maybe someone fell and hurt themselves or decided that pot was a gateway drug and OD'd on something harder. friends, bill and laura, lived on the second floor. the wife has a medical condition and they have a toddler child. maybe something happened to one of them. and my friend lived on the third floor. i'm sure nothing was wrong with her. she was 35, no kids, active. she just ran a half-marathon.

after while, the firemen came back out with the stretcher. i thought that meant that whatever was happening was OK, taken care of, and that they were going to be on their merry way. never mind that a police car had just pulled up. and an ambulance. we went to bed. it was about 11pm.

on a lark, i checked my text messages before laying down. it was a text from bill. "you should come down here." so i pulled on some clothes and shoes and went downstairs.

bill was at the door. a policeman was hovering about. bill says, "shannon's dead."

excuse me? what?

the policeman comes over and says that shannon's boyfriend hadn't heard from her all day. and she hadn't gone into work or called in, which is very unlike her. so he came over around 10pm to see what was going on. she was laying on the couch watching TV, or so it seemed. turns out she had died sometime the previous night. they suspected an aneurism.

while i was standing there in shock, more cars pull up. her college and work friends start showing up. the chicago police had contacted the police in boston, where shannon's family lives. they called her friends in chicago to come see what was going on. they knew more about her previous comings and goings. meanwhile, the boyfriend was still upstairs talking with police. shannon was dead on her floor.

at some point, the firemen and policemen start clearing out. one of them asks, "have you seen the cat?" they think her cat, Gizmo, got out with all of the doors being propped open. my last wish for a deceased friend was to find her cat.

we searched until 2am. scott and i looked high and low. her friends also helped look throughout the neighborhood. it was an unseasonably warm night, probably in the low 60s, so it wasn't bad to be outside. we thought we saw a cat, we chased it through alleys until it disappeared. then we saw another one that was hiding under the bridge by the river. we tried to coax it out, but it was having nothing to do with us. that was unlike gizmo, who was the sweetest, friendliest cat on the face of the planet. but being freaked out can do strange things to a cat.

we searched until we found a dead kitten in one of the alley ways. after that depressing display of failure, we went home and went to bed.

i saw the coroner's truck. i heard the commotion of them taking her body down the stairs. i decided that i didn't want to see them put her in the back of the truck. bill saw everything. i guess he and laura also heard everything, including when the boyfriend came over and realized that she was dead. they heard him yelling her name over and over. i guess he tried to do CPR on her, so he put her on the floor of her living room. i just can't imagine hearing that. or, hell, being her boyfriend and having to do that.

we continued to look for gizmo. i would sit out on the embankment of the river and keep an eye out. i put out cat food. i put up posters and posted on Everyblock and Facebook. i was deeply saddened by the fact that shannon would lose her cat on the same day she lost her life.

then came a text from one of her friends. gizmo was in the condo!! turns out he had hidden himself away when the police and fire people were tromping through. i guess her friends and her parents were in shannon's living room and out saunters gizmo, like nothing was wrong. oh my god, i think i collapsed with relief. they let me and scott come over one last time and say goodbye to that fluffy, squeaky gray cat.

it was a terrible ordeal. i can't imagine what it's like for her real friends and family. to know that i would never see her or talk to her again. i would never see her mowing the lawn or picking up trash around the 'hood again. no more condo meetings made better because she was there.

and today is her birthday. i am friends with one of her friends that i met through this whole thing. she posted a pic of her and shannon. i went to shannon's facebook and scrolled through to see all of the pictures people have been posting over the past two years. then, while scrolling, went back to the time when she was still alive, posting herself about Obama and Michelle. he had just been reelected and she was so excited about it. it just made me more sad.

anyway, happy birthday, shannon. i hope you're wowing them with your humor, wit, and monkey bread where ever you are.