"Here�s what I think," I said. "I think guys want to fuck just about anybody. When a guy says he�s not attracted to a woman, all that means is that he wouldn�t crawl through two miles of sewer to fuck her. He�d only go half a mile, tops."
"Well," she said pensively, "based on my twenty years of research and experience, I�d say that�s pretty much it."
"Fat women?" I asked. "Skinny women, old women, young girls, women with terminal cellulite, women with gigantic hair and tattoos?"
"Don�t forget all waitresses." �Cynthia Heimel

Might I just say that I loved David Grenier's column last Sunday? Loved and adored it, and wanted to put it in the weblog except I wanted to say more about it than I would put there normally.

He's so right on the "women dress sexy for themselves" kind of thing. Or as Lewis Grizzard used to say, "Just because she's (looks like she's) looking to have sex doesn't mean she's looking to have sex with you." I feel all fat and frumpy and ugly when I�m dressing down, and sometimes you just want to go out looking good without it having to Mean Something. Heaven forbid it be 105 degrees outside and I might want to wear a tank top and a skirt without getting some guy offering me a ride. Though ironically, sometimes wearing sweats can still get you guy action. I always hate that, since when I wear those clothes I feel like I'm advertising "I'm taking the night off from being good-looking," so I won�t have to deal with that for a change. And yet, I can get it anyway. No wonder I feel like walking sex bait sometimes. Then again, don�t all women every time we�re alone in the dark?

The double standard, however, is pure evil. It�s like there�s nothing you can do to get rid of a guy you�re not interested in without things becoming ugly. If I had a buck for every guy who thought I was interested in him purely because I did not spit in his face upon our first meeting and managed to have polite yet dull conversation instead ... I�m not at all flirtatious, and don�t even know how to flirt, but somehow they always read it as "She likes me!" It truly frightens me how so many guys take that as I�m leading him on.

My mother will go on about "Can�t you just go out with a boy and have a nice time without things going farther?" and the answer seems to be no. I feel like if I agree to go out to a movie with a guy alone, I�m leading him on, even if we never said it was a date, I showed up in sweats and refused a ride home. None of them let me pay for my own ticket and throw fits at the idea, which is a BIG sign, and you just know the entire time that they�re secretly getting off on their "date" with you and wondering if they can get away with the "friend" hug/grope (something I've been pressured into more times than I can count, but how on earth can you get out of this without getting bitchy?) when you want to go home. God, that�s frustrating. But on the other hand, it�s completely socially unacceptable and regarded as downright cruel to say "Hey, I noticed you have a crush on me, and um, it�s not mutual. Sorry. Could you please stop crushing on me now?"

I don�t think anyone would even pay attention to that if I did say it, given how many folks are pining away for me that I know of. Maybe it�s my fault for hanging out with geek boys or something, but when I find myself dropping out of almost my entire social crowd (which I did a few months ago), which I�ve been in for almost four years, because too many of the guys in it are making innuendo to me online, it worries me that I feel that I have to do that. But some of them have been pining for years, and I told them all no, and they refuse to listen. No wonder I feel uncomfortable around them. I miss the girls I hung out with there, but I can�t avoid the guys who come on to me and see/talk to them too. Argh.

And yeah, whenever you tell a guy no, you always run the risk of the "fucking stuck-up bitch" rant, or worse. It literally terrifies me to turn someone down. No wonder I�m such a chicken about it. It is easier to just chat innocently, hope they get the hint (they never do) and then go to the bathroom and never return or something than to say anything negative. Either way, you either don�t get rid of the guy or you could end up scared out of your mind. Don�t you love those pleasant alternatives?

Oh, how I relate to this entry of Regina's. I'm kinda there right now, in case you haven't noticed. Hell, after reading the first page I was thinking "Maybe I should send this to my mother" (not that she'd read it) "so she'll get the point of what it's like now."

Now you'll notice from reading this entry that she starts out with a listing of how many positions are open for admin assistants/exec assistants/secretaries are in the want ads vs. writing/graphics jobs. Since I'm going through the same problem, I thought about going through the want ads here and showing you guys my own list... until I realized that I would essentially come up with about the same numbers here for the secretarial stuff, and 0 listings for writing/graphics, so why bother?

And you know what? Flipdog annoys me, as do most of the automatic job search sites I signed up for do. I can't even keep track of which one does which because they're all useless. People say that searching for jobs on these general online sites is a great thing, but it isn't if (a) you are looking for jobs that are not in a big city, and (b) you are looking for jobs only in one city. They will send you jobs for all over your state, even if they're bloody useless, and you can't always alter the search results to weed this junk out. One of them is so bad that you can't add keywords in at all, and you have to pick a town you want to job search in, and it mentions every pukey, low-population, lowlife little town in CA, but do they mention the town I actually LIVE in? Nope. Flipdog refuses to find me any jobs that are not listed in Sacramento, and it keeps sending me medical jobs. Hello, not even remotely qualified for that, yet I don't have a way to weed this shit out either. I spent one whole day doing the online search thing, and came up with crap. Complete waste of my time. Honestly, the only places I've seen any job listings I could actually go for are (a) UCD, (b) my former paper's ads, and (c) the Sacramento Bee ads.

At any rate, I'm not really checking Sac jobs, since public transport to Sac is pretty damn iffy. You have to take Yolobus from Davis to Sacramento, which takes quite awhile (and flaky drivers to boot, so let's hope you're not needing to be on time for anything), and then you have the option of being dropped off at one of two sites, which are pretty close to each other, and trying to negotiate the bloody confusing Sac transport system from there. Now if I actually lived in Sac (and if I do move, maybe I should move there; I've heard midtown is nice and you don't need a car and the rent's a bit cheaper than here), that would be one thing, but not living in Sac, I'm uncomfortable negotiating the transport. I used to wait at the bus stop with a lovely woman who did the Sac bus thing, and she had to leave home at seven a.m. and hope the bus driver showed up on time, etc. Having to leave home at seven a.m. for over an hour of bus transport is something to avoid if I can. No more seven a.m. leaving home, thankyouverymuch, my body can't take it any more.

So now that I've COMPLETELY bored you with this crap about the bus, back to what I was going to comment on.

Like Regina, I have also noticed that writing jobs are few and far between. The only one I've seen listed anywhere was writing for a group of dentists (I loathe dentists, as you know), and I would have applied for it had it not said that travel was required. And if you know of a media outlet that's NOT laying people off, I will faint in shock. (Okay, I might know of one, but they have about three staff people total there, so if one of them's gone, the paper dies.) So I too have figured that writing is out of the question for me until the recession ends. Writing is one of those skills that people seem to think isn't hugely necessary anyway, you know? You can't find just anyone to be, say, a rocket scientist, but any old fool should be able to know how to write a little, or enough to make by so we can lay the writers off and replace them with our previously-hired rocket scientists who will now be doing two jobs. Or something like that, anyway.

So I too figured I should go into secretarial. Unlike Regina though, I have pretty much no actual experience in this (though my previous position at work certainly had elements of that), but I have been figuring that I could perhaps get hired for that anyway. Of course, then reading that every ad wants 2-3 years of experience first and you need to know Excel, I haven't been finding much and have definitely being feeling inadequate. So far the most "promising" jobs I've seen so far included bank teller and working the front desk at some doctor's office downtown. And I haven't exactly felt motivated enough to apply for those jobs, so that should tell you something, huh? No, instead I throw myself headlong into applying for the temporary stuff at UCD that even vaguely promises doing anything else but customer servicey stuff.

So anyway, I was just bowled over by the part where the woman Regina's talking to says she wouldn't be happy in the job for more than a month, and then they start talking about all kinds of other stuff, and the woman says that nobody'll hire her for an admin job because they know she won't be happy. I know I'm naive as hell about the adult world, but it blows my mind that an employer would actually care if you were happy in a little admin assistant job in this day and age, where presumably people who are applying for the job but haven't done it in a while are obviously unable to get jobs in their actual fields of interest.

(Dear any admin assistants/secretaries that may ever read this: I'm not dogging you, I swear. Y'all are great. My mom is one of you. I don't think it's a bad job to have. It's just well, not my ultimate goal in life, more like something else to pursue while I can't pursue the original goal. Or as one of my books put it, "Every woman in my family has had to learn secretarial skills to fall back on. I am the first one who has ever had to do so." Only in my case, I never actually learned formal secretarial skills the way I should have.)

Okay, so perhaps that's only practicality on their side so they won't have to train someone new in a month, and given the massive amounts of people applying for jobs they can afford to be incredibly picky. But still, happiness at work is an actual consideration for some folks?

Anyway, I actually felt excited for Regina when she found actual positions she might like and applied for them and got interviews right off the bat. Good for her! Good for her that she knows what she wants, good for her that she plans to work on publishing stuff (I'm still trying to write well enough pieces that I think could be published, so I'm waiting on that one. But maybe the novel could do it, after 5 new drafts or something.), good for her that she had the balls to apply for a job that she has no experience in when they asked for it (that intimidates me out of applying) and still managed to get an interview anyway. I am impressed.

I'd like to have the same experience someday. Alas, I don't think now is the time that I'm going to find that person who doesn't want me to do anything less and thinks I should go after my goals, or whatever. (Unless we count Mom, who isn't hiring.) But you know what? That's okay right now. Happiness can't be a major consideration for me right now, and I don't think it can be until the economy improves. I have seven months worth more of rent I have to worry about paying before my lease and savings run out, and that's a much higher priority than my own emotional happiness. And let's face it, the fact that I'm jobhunting in a small town and don't have a car really chops off most possible options at the neck. If I can find a job that I'm numb about but can pay the rent on a long-term basis and I make it past the three-month period with no trouble, that'll be doing really well for me in this day and at my age and with my particular skill sets in life.

But you know what? Maybe this will come along for me later. Maybe in six months, maybe next year, maybe in five years (or maybe in seven right as Saturn Return comes to bite me in the ass), but I do kinda think that at some point I'll be able to get back on track again. I hope so.

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