By The Numbers

To summarize the past four months of my life:

I permanently withdrew from the graduate program I was slated to begin in January. I applied to 72 jobs: 11 in September, 16 in October, a whopping 39 in November, and just six in December. I was offered 10 interviews and made it to eight. I had four second round interviews. I had one infuriating third round interview. I had one faux job offer which dissolved into nothing when I left a message accepting the position, called five more times that day without success, and finally got through to someone the next morning who gave me an attitude, told me they were “still deciding” and never called back. I met with four staffing agencies. Two of them laid off my original recruiter. None of them were able to find work for me in a span of almost four months. So, you see, it’s been a rocky third of a year.

And absolutely none of it matters now because I was offered a job this past Friday (this time with legitimate paperwork!) which I gleefully accepted. I’ve learned an important lesson, which I think my father was right in saying that I’m lucky to have learned at this age when I have so few financial obligations. But even in my euphoric state last Friday, I had one last lingering concern. I worried that this phase changed me as a person, made me a somber, antisocial downer unable to even write a funny blog anymore. So I did the only thing I could to test the waters: I got invited a dozen of my friends over for a Christmas party, got shit faced drunk, spilled a rumndietcoke down the front of my shirt, and needed a team of people to help me overcome the hiccups.

I'M BACK BITCHES! AHAHAHA!

Close Only Counts In Horseshoes & Hand Grenades

I just… I don’t even know where to start. I have spent the past five days trying to decide where to start. I’ve started and then stopped and erased everything because it was not to my liking. I take my blogging very seriously. In short, some things happened on the trip and those things were surrounded by a lot of…. quiet. I don’t know if those events were actually eventful or just seemed eventful because they were not, in fact, cornfields. So, before another week goes by and my relations in New Jersey get their collective panties in a twist over the lack of posting, I’m going to go ahead and just start at the beginning. If you don’t mind.
Our wagon ride occurred mostly without incident which goes against everything I know about the Oregon Trail. There was no typhoid or blocked mountain passes or bear hunting (not yet anyway… that’s foreshadowing, folks. You gotta pay attention to my foreshadowing. T, are you paying attention??) We managed to fit almost every one of our worldly belongings in the barely-existent trunk of an Audi TT. Then we drove five hours west with four pit stops because seriously, at any minute we were about to fall off the face of the earth and I was reluctant to pee on a farmer’s front yard. Also, Beau needed tater tots in Troy, NY.

Finally, we approached our destination in West Bumble. We zoomed past the farmstead (going entirely too fast, eh hem) where Bologna was standing outside frantically waving her arms. That made me start flapping my own arms and squawking. Beau, probably because he was going entirely too fast, was one step ahead of me and was already turning around in the driveway of someone who might have run out of their home with a shotgun. Instead of an angry yokel, we next encountered a loose cow that proceeded to race the convertible for a short distance. It’s as if we went to the zoo and found a tiger walking around outside its enclosure. These things aren’t supposed to happen. Tigers are supposed to stay in their cages, and cows are supposed to stay inside their fenced pastures.

We spent the remainder of the day wandering around cornfields, taking pictures of deer poop, and getting acquainted with the holiday’s cast of characters. In addition to the family, we met two cats, Sweet and Pooh, so named for their individual temperaments. Sweet was particularly awesome. She’s twenty years old and noticeably blind. When she looks at you, it’s like she’s looking through you directly into your soul and reading your inner most thoughts. Then she would go and wreck my theory of feline wisdom by walking into walls and meowing peevishly at them as if it was the wall’s fault. According to Mr. T (T, that is your dad’s official blog name. I just wrote it with the intention of circling back and writing something more clever, but then I was all, “Mr. T?! YES.” These things just come to me) Sweet still goes outside and hunts. AND ACTUALLY KILLS STUFF. So, yeah, she may be a little clumsy and we may have found her standing in a toilet one night, but it’s all a part of the cosmic feline wisdom that I detected in her spacey stare.

Thanksgiving morning, before I woke up, the menfolk (T [Hi T!], his dad, my dad, and my Beau) went into the woods with guns and tried to kill things. Real guns. With like, real bullets. My boyfriend and my father with his iffy hearing and his poor eyesight went deep into a secluded forest, somewhere south of the Adirondacks, with loaded guns and little supervision. But happy times! They all came back alive and empty handed. Apparently, a few shots were fired but, as Mr. T told us, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” They should have brought Sweet with them. She would have felled a buck with telekinesis and plaintive mewing.

We rounded out our visit to the middle of nowhere with a trip to the closest town which was a thirty minute drive through the woods and fields and farms. And at that, it was still the middle of nowhere. We wandered and visited a used book store and looked at Christmas decorations. All very peaceful, pleasant activities but you don’t want to read about that. You want to read about Beau pitching a hissy fit at a bakery which was really slow in that not-a-Starbucks-in-Boston way so we left before he got a cookie and complained about it until we got him a beer at a dive bar on the edge of town instead where he nearly got us all shot by loudly announcing that “those guys really suck at darts.”

That night we had an Oregon Trail style send off. Mr. T made us a bonfire in the backyard and sharpened sticks so we could roast cocktail wieners and marshmallows. We were having a merry ol’ time setting things on fire and stuffing our faces, when a mile down the road, the dogs at a neighboring farm began barking. Hysterically. The T’s all looked at each other and were quiet for a moment before forcefully starting conversation again. I was not so easily fooled so I asked what all the racket was about. They told me it was nothing to worry about. The dogs probably just smelled… something. Something? Yes, something. Like a coyote. Nothing to worry about.

I’d already been worrying about that for days. Ever since Mr. T said that the coyotes were originally introduced into the area in order to keep the deer population at bay, but they weren’t big and mean with drooly fangs enough, so local officials introduced a coyote/timber wolf cross breed. How is everyone ignoring the wolf part?! That’s like ignoring the part of me that’s Polish. Yeah, I’m mostly Italian, but that doesn’t cancel out all the Polish qualities. You should see me try to do simple common sense tasks like open a box of frozen chicken nuggets. The Polish is in there, festering, and it makes a difference. Except, generally speaking, those genes don’t make me snatch unsuspecting city folk from camp fires and feed them to my young.

Needless to say, despite attacking a bush with my pointy stick in self defense and nearly soiling myself twice, the predators stayed at bay long enough for us to wrap things up and return to the comfort of the indoors and the protection of Sweet.

Truly, this was a proper Dangerous holiday. I was nearly run down by a cow, pitch forked by angry locals, and eaten by a coyote in the span of 72 hours. Oh, and my dad almost shot my boyfriend which would have been a particular inconvenience because there was absolutely no room left in the trunk of the car for a body.