Sometimes Aunty Christ likes to pretend people are French

In a few weeks, I’ve gone from incredibly insecure and feeling like I can’t do anything right to feeling like I’m on top of the world. Am I awesome now suddenly? Well, maybe. Aunty Christ is not counting out that possibility. Was I worthless and horrible two weeks ago just because I felt that way? Unfortunately, this question leads to all sorts of mental acrobatics, in which I try to figure out a rational way for me to accept that I am currently awesome while maintaining that I was something better than rotten a few weeks ago. I think I can do it. I’m pretty good at self-delusion.

I’ve been remiss in my blogging duties, and now I find myself with all sorts of things to talk about. For one thing, school. I feel as though I should be embarrassed for saying so, but I love being a community college paralegal course student. And I’m really good at it. I know, I know, it’s like bragging about medaling in the Special Olympics, but I brag. I received the highest grade on the midterm in all three of my classes. I’ve started giving the correct answers, occasionally, in class, and (it is very hard to admit that I am proud of this) my classmates—some of them, at least—seem to assume that I’m smart. It could be the glasses, of course. I wear glasses because I’m smart, not because I’m myopic.

It’s tempting, given my newfound amore with the law, to turn this into a law blog, but since this is only my first semester, I feel it might be premature. I could only cover topics such as: “How to interview: Rectangular table or round?” And: “So you want to file an appeal? Be ready to answer a lot of questions about tangentially related topics, apparently.”

More on that later. My other favorite topic lately is the economy, and more importantly, why the national economy is sucking for me. To sum up briefly, my former company (which sucked) got bought out by a larger company, which also sucks, and which apparently bought us simply to (1) drive itself into debt, and (2) fuck with us. This week, I was asked to leave my comfy basement, where I have been working for the past seven months, and come to the office. The stated reason was so that I could help on a filing project, although I think we all can guess that the actual reason was so that my bosses can tell me in person that I’m canned, rather than doing it by phone or email. So impersonal.

So, I spent a day this week doing light clerical work in anticipation of our office’s move to the cheaper suburbs of Saskatoon. This light clerical work involved constructing 300 cardboard boxes and lids while someone else filled them with folders, and then running upstairs with them and putting them in neat rows. As one of my coworkers said, “They are making us dig our own graves before they shoot us.” The shooting began yesterday. About 15-20 of my coworkers were laid off, with more hot laying-off action to come next week, we are promised. As Rich noted earlier, working for the Dread Pirate Roberts sucks big ass.

“Good night, Aunty. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

In today’s economy, I am pretty much guaranteed six months of looking for a job, followed by another several years of underemployment, temping (if I’m lucky), and part-time work. If I were a younger, more flexible woman, I’d strip or sell my eggs. Perhaps both. As an old, I’ll be stuck offering carts to Wal-Mart shoppers. And I promise you I’ll be muttering under my breath to each patron who passes by, “For this I went to a top-ten school?” Because if I am nothing else, I am a bitter, petty woman who unreasonably thinks she deserves society’s esteem despite doing very little to earn it.

So, I was depressed about the whole impending unemployment/destitution/ignominy thing, but as if to balance that out, fate (in the guise of MySpace) has decided to unearth for me three of the best friends I’ve ever had, none of whom I’ve spoken to for over a decade. One is L, my good friend from high school, and the woman who introduced me to The Smiths and Dylan Thomas and Monty Python. We saw the Moody Blues every summer, because that’s where she was conceived, according to family legend, and we more or less lived at the Cabaret Metro and the Vic every weekend, catching Inspiral Carpets, Mojo Nixon, Joy Division, Texas, Peter Murphy, the Meat Puppets, and, oh god, everyone. We dissected a fetal pig together (we named her Fifi Trixibelle), we tried to dred our hair together, we pierced each other’s ears for the 11th or 13th times. Oh god. I mean, we were girls. We were really stupid. And then, for some reason, while I was at college and she was working in a custard stand in our hometown, she decided not to be friends with me anymore, and so we weren’t.

Now—in a twist that I never would have seen coming, she’s living in a house two blocks away from the high school we hated, and raising a kid, and she’s still hilarious and bitingly cruel. She told me about her Christer neighbor who puts a cross in the middle of his lawn every Christmas, and her idea to put a W in hers, and get her friend on the other side to put an F on her lawn. That’s L. That’s the way she’s always been.

And we were both friends with B, my first gay male love. Now, thanks to L, I have his email address. I hear he’s designing at Ikea stores, and rescuing pitbulls.

The internet is a deeply stupid thing, I'll admit. But every once in a while it comes in handy.