Where am I?

I've gotten this question a lot in the past year or so. Understandably so, the past year was kind of a doozy.

I was working at a hotel in Denver, commuting back and forth from old Monument for the overnight shift. It was... ok for a while. the money was good, but it was just a weird situation to find myself in, and it really put me in a funk. I developed a lovely case of migraines, and had a very strangely, and I will say, bad living arrangement. Very very bad.

Oddly enough, that wasn't really the problem. Actually, now that I have a healthy addiction to Deadliest Catch, I definitely realize that I was pretty whiny about the whole messed-up sleep cycle bit. But throw me a bone, I haven't had coffee in a year, nor have I been properly awake since I gave it up!

No, the real problem was actually my work place. You'd think that working in a hotel at night with no one else around is no big deal, and most nights you'd be right. But it started off on an odd foot and got worse from there. I was hired for an unethical reason, and then asked to lie about it to my coworkers. Sometime after I started working at Macy's and was told, not asked, to lie about where jewelry came from if I received a compliment, I realized something about the kind of person I am. It bothers me to lie to people, perfect strangers, about where i got a stupid necklace; my personal brand of integrity (get ready for it) really only allows me to lie about big things that won't effect anyone but me. You read it right. I'll lie about all kinds of things without qualm, but dang it all if I'm not going to tell someone that, in fact, I got this blouse at New York & Co. and NOT Macy's! I won't lie to very many kinds of people, mind you, but I guarantee that if you've lied to me and I caught you, I probably won't have a problem lying to you. It's immature and vindictive, yes, but people tend to not lie to me, so I guess it serves its purpose, yeah?

So, back to the hotel. I was hired specifically to be an on-hand, already trained replacement for the other, full-time night person, so my boss could just fire him whenever he did something stupid and couldn't cry foul and claim ageism. Oh yeah, it was a valid concern. He would have sued them so fast, given the chance to make a mint off that corporation. What can you expect for a former dentist who lost everything to Bernie Madoff? Yup, have that one on your conscience too! No worries, though, he got fired, and he earned it.

By some token, you should be thinking, well, hey, you got your job, though it took them four (count 'em) FOUR months to get the job I was hired for, I could stop lying to these people that I needed to trust and wanted to trust me. Here's a question for you: ever forged work relationships based on lies, or any kind of relationship? It doesn't just happen in Lifetime movies, folks! It happens in life, it sucks, it hurts you every time you sidestep the truth, and you feel like garbage for playing along with the charade for the sake of a bloody job. If I didn't still have migraines now, I might have believed that the lies and the migraines were related. no such luck.

Anyway, the job was weird. In the end, my 23-year old boss had an affair with a manager in the sales department, blatantly flaunted it in front of those of us on the front desk staff, and pretty much made being at work the very opposite of what it should have been. I need my work environment to be about work. I don't intentionally bring my personal life to work with me and I can put on a pretty smile and deal with drunks all night long. But when work becomes the soap opera? My Fight or Flight response, which is very finely tuned, screamed FLIGHT!!!!! With every fiber of my being. I don't know that I lasted a month after that whole debacle began.

So that was that. The last day I worked was at that job, I quit without having something else lined up, which was utterly terrifying. Then I took off to Alabama at the turn of the year, and jsut got back a week ago Saturday. Was it running away? In part, yes. In part it was confusion, frustration, and sheer annoyance at that damn question.

Where am I? Back in Colorado. Job hunting. Waaaaaaaay over southern men, and humidity. Ready for a career and doing what it takes to get there. Ready to figure out not where I am, but where I want to be. I missed out on the opportunity to go back to school this fall, thanks to a certain person I don't like at my university (Go State!), so I have to postpone until spring term. It's no biggie, gives me a chance to save some money for the move.

So in the end, if you want to ask me where I am and aren't wondering if I'm physically lost or stuck in traffic, first off, please don't. Pretty please. Just know that I have a plan. I always have a plan. Half of them never pan out, but that's not the point! I have it figured out, but the execution just takes a little bit of time. Yeah, the job thing is rather pressing at this very moment, but it'll get there. Not quite lost, but not quite ready to give up yet, either.