Perhaps a little too much vine-flavored bounty? A little hangover with my morning court case, please?
Sigh... I left the office at 6:47 pm this evening after being pulled into a 4:30 pm meeting with the senior accountant and the CFO. Reports are needed, collective scrambling for contracts and a sense impending doom surrounding the management of certain properties were all the talk of the day. Needless to say, I have yet another layer of work piled onto my many varied striations of Legal Clerk duties, compressing at an accelerated rate now and promising a very precious gem of a headache, product highly valued yet underpaid.
I am not completely at my wit's end, having recently bandied some ideas and suggestions with my mother and best friend. I am just feeling a little drown-y for lack of a more nuanced term at 11:38 pm. In today's world, it's all about keeping abreast of the news, following this witty post-Black Man commentator, interspliced with news from The Post, Al-Jezeera, The Economist, The Ecologist, The Times, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad inifinitum.... Well my little faithful BlackBerry Curve can only take so much, and so my bank account, for the record. Trying to keep a budget and pay every blasted private/public/sub and unsubsidized school loan is draining what would otherwise look like a sub-lower middle class income. I can't afford an upgrade to keep up with the wave of digital information that so often thrusts itself as the surefire method for me to rise up out of economic poverty with my intellectually rich potential.
I really need a new laptop and a new phone/phone plan. My brain is fried from daily computer work to the point that it is an existential chore when I get home to do anything else on a computer for myself- writing, research, networking, even entertainment.
How do I get out of this funk?!
Enter The Humble Book and its enticing counterpart, the New York Times Book Review Section.
For the archaic Luddites among my readers few, these would be the tangible, weightier, relatively cheaper versions of blog postings and news bites. I don't have to squint and scroll through an endless feed of information. I can focus on one chapter at a time, pore over one book review and their myriad of new words to look up in the dictionary and add to my lexicon. And I still feel connected to modern society, and what's more, excited about learning and pressing forward with my foreign affairs career aspirations!
I say all of this to say that on the way home this afternoon, I felt a little dejected from my ordeal and the pittance I must magically stretch beyond physics to pay my way through life with. I cracked open today's reading choice, Economics for Dummies, and first read a mini article about First World subsidized farmers threatening the livelihoods of Third World subsistence farmers. Not exactly uplifting and encouraging facts. But the excerpt was well written, and helped me to conceptualize the Price Ceiling graph the story was meant to alliterate. Of course, the subject of rent control was also mentioned, thus crystallizing the details of my current line of work against the issues I want to tackle in my dream job.
I got to thinking about a certain letter languishing in my room from a fundraising entity of NYU. Apparently I was caught unawares some random phone call months ago and "pledged" to give $50.00 for their efforts. This is the third letter I received at the end of July with them asking me to remember my pledge and essentially pay another bill. I called their phone number and explained apologetically that I am in no financial position to cough up $50 with my current budget and politely tried to bow out. Not my proudest moment, as a believer in fundraising and community support, but damn these expensive school loans and the fact that my promising career after my triumphant Master's Degree has not translated into burgeoning purses to benefact back to NYU!
I decided, after having read the economics chapter, that I would turn this fundraising to my advantage. Instead of merely writing a letter stating how I can't afford their pricey fundraiser drive. I will include an appeal for a job at any office in NYU that deems my skillsets worthy.
Seeing as how I am educated by NYU, perhaps some hawk-eyed office-person with a sense of humor/duty/insight will come across my resume attached to my response letter and pass it along to the appropriate party for review.
It's so crazy, it just might work!
