Words Without Songs

Words Without Songs Part IV

Tonight I am still up and it is 11PM.  I am all wound up because I have almost decided to take the apartment with the dingy paint and the roaches.  I’m trying to talk myself out of it.  I spent the day looking at some nice apartments in regular apartment buildings. They were lovely but realistically, on a social services salary, I can’t afford $600 a month.  This place is $450, and I already have a container of boric acid which I use to deal death to our large, hairy centipedes here at the convent.

 I’ve lived in convents with mice and mice don’t bother me.  Yet they are actually more destructive than roaches.  But, ugh!  On rainy days big ones (a horribly large roach is called, in these parts, a “water bug”, as in, “that’s not really a three-inch roach, it’s just a water bug.”) would come out of the walls of the school building and into my office, and I would run all over looking for someone to kill them.  Even when they were only staggering out to die (the roaches, I mean), I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of their large corpses.  It’s a silly phobia and I hate being bound by it.  But I am.  So I have to think this over carefully.

 I probably should wait until I have an actual job.  Am I showing faith or lack of it, in rushing ahead like this?

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It really isn’t fair of me to complain about any of this, least of all about missing God.  I knew, back when I was feeling so much peace, that “peace” didn’t mean “I’m going to get what I want.”  I had only hoped.

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Someone reminded me not to eat any meat as it was Friday.  I had forgotten we are in Lent.  Was I saying, it seems like years ago, that this year I was actually ready for Lent?

 I feel like I am sort of on the outs with God.  Sulking and sullen.  I am proceeding posthaste with a lot of faith that things will work out, yet I stop and think how poorly this tactic has served me so far in life.

 It will only be three weeks tomorrow, but I feel as though I’ve lived a whole lifetime in that span. And I wish it were someone else’s lifetime.

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 I decided to wear a skirt to interview, thinking I could look a bit less dowdy.  Although as I walk around in the city, I see that plenty of others look dowdy, so why should I worry?  Such vanity.  At any rate, I thought it would be well to shave my legs, and in doing so I cut myself enough that it was clearly a sign to continue to wear slacks.  Honestly, I have never cut myself before.  It must be stress.

 At today’s interview, the supervisor I spoke to had a long ponytail of hair tied in several places with rubber bands, and he kept picking it up and wrapping it around his head while we were talking.  I think I made him nervous.  He was one of the few interviewers who asked me why I’m looking for a job, so I told him.  I’m pretty sure it made him nervous.  He must be Catholic; the Jewish human resources guy at one agency just thought it was interesting.  Religious make Catholics nervous.  Maybe it’s just as well not to be one, then.

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 The other day I was calling about a job and I inadvertently put “Sister” in front of my name, the first time I have done that; in fact, I added, “from St. –,” the name of my former ministry site.  I shocked myself. Luckily it was only a receptionist and not the person I needed to speak to.

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