On the first day of unemployment, nobody said to me, "You must wake up by 4:30."

Okay, that's lame, I know. It's just there to celebrate the fact that I did NOT wake up at that time on a Monday morning, for a change! I woke up around 7:30 (sigh), but managed to doze around until 9. Hopefully my body will readjust to normal again. I stayed up till midnight last night for the first time in ages without the aid of alcohol and a bunch of screaming people in the apartment.

I had a nice relaxing morning- slept, showered, surfed, etc. I was calm. I met up with Jackie and we went out for Indian food. (Yay cheap buffet!) Naturally, we discussed the whole job thing up and down the dial before moving on to other stuff. She doesn't think she is going to get into grad school (and truth be told, neither do I), since she's got average grades and scores and insists on applying to the most blueblood of schools (Berkeley is the "lowest" school she is applying to). Unfortunately, she cannot be convinced to apply to some less shining schools, as a Big Name is very important to her. She wants to impress. Sigh. Oh well, at least she's being realistic about it.

In other conversational topics, somehow the subject of this one prof we'd both had came up. I will refer to him as Mr. 18th Century, but anyone who knows much about the English department at UCD will know who I am referring to. For those who don't, I dub him this because he desperately wishes he'd been born in this century, since he absolutely despises this one. It would not surprise me to find out that this man takes a horse and buggy to work every day and does not allow electricity or a telephone in his home. He's not known for being nice or even not-icy to people. He strikes me as one of those folks who is just waiting for retirement and in the meantime will act as he pleases because he can. Now I had him for a normal requirement class, and despite the warnings I'd heard about the fellow, I just wanted to get this class out of the way ASAP instead of waiting for another instructor to teach it, and figured I could handle him. Hah. His obsession in life is grammar, but when I say this, I mean beyond the traditional "make sure it sounds good" kind of grammar. I mean stuff like he disapproved of connecting words like "and" or "or" or pretty much any little useful word like that that keeps a sentence together. Honestly, that just doesn't make sense to me why someone would think this. You'd nitpick over your essay for a week and get a C-, IF you were lucky. (I have no idea how I got a B- on one essay, or a B- in the class altogether. I think there was one A.)

Jackie, however, had him for creative writing. And oh, dear lord, the stories she has are a thousand times worse, and she told me some more today. The man, who is a fairly frequently published author, believes wholeheartedly that:

(a) Originality is the worst thing ever and should NEVER NEVER NEVER be demonstrated in writing, and publishers only want to print unoriginal, ripped-off work forever. (It apparently has not occurred to him that once upon a time, these people were original.)

(b) The only good authors came out of the guess-what-century.

(c) you should always endeavor to COPY (yes, copy, he wanted you to write down who you were copying on the stories) one of these authors when you write.

Oh, and if you acknowledged the existence of the 20th or 21st century in any way, say, by mentioning how someone got to a certain place via car, he knocked points off. If someone had blatantly ripped off the plot of a movie, pretty much dead on rip-off of it, and someone (i.e. Jackie) mentioned this, he got all pissed off. Naturally, they hated each other like poison.

Why am I mentioning all of this today? Because one thing Jackie told me about him today that absolutely BLEW MY MIND: He considers television to be SCIENCE FICTION.

SCIENCE FICTION!?!?!?!

That just royally ticks me off. I already thought it was utterly wrong to tell students to be unoriginal and it infuriates me that he gets away with that (not that anyone would stop him, I know), but this takes the cake. I'm sorry, Mr. 18, but there is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that television is considered science fiction IN THE TIME THAT YOU ACTUALLY LIVE IN!

Incidentally, I found a book of Mr. 18's in a store one time, and going on what I read of the flap of it, he was trying to rip off of a writer from the 1940's. And the blurb about it essentially said that was what he was doing. God, that's lame.

Moving on, we then went to see Monsters Inc. Yes, it's cuuuuute. That little girl Boo is soooooooo cute! There's more to the movie than that, obviously, but cuuuuuuute is what will stick in my head forevermore. What a sweetie! She was adorable in her little monster costume, running around, making expressions. Awwww! It's good beyond her cuteness, but dang. That's the first human I've seen Pixar do that seemed real to me.

Along with that was a little cartoon about a bunch of hateful little birds and one great big perky one, the Harry Potter trailer (I swear, EVERYONE I know has already seen it, on the first day, and now I have no one to go with. And I know I won't get off my ass to go see it alone.), and the "Breathing" Star Wars II trailer. I could never get any of the damn trailers downloaded off the Internet, so it was my first time seeing that. The reviewer at the paper had given it a bad review for the lack of any sound but breathing, and I have to agree with him. It's an interesting idea to have it all timed to Vader breaths, but (1) Listening to Vader breathe that loud is damned annoying, and (2) I found it incredibly frustrating to see some cool ass scene and then have it go dark between breaths. Ugholah.

I picked up my second-to-last article in the paper today. I haven't been able to bring myself to even read it, though I saw that they teased the article on the front page. I wonder if that was to be nice to me one last time. Eh, probably there just wasn't anything else to put on. It's sad. I think I'll be skipping reading it for awhile now. It's a space thing.

Then I went back home and got a phone call from Denise, who is another English major/graduating class friend. She seemed quite cranky.

Denise's two major issues in life are that (a) she's a mix of four different races, and (b) her father is a jerk. Both of her parents are biracial, but her dad is in denial about most of these races and always went around yelling at her to be Chinese, etc., whereas her mother told her she was American. She's a confused child on that one. They got into a series of fights a year ago and he has never spoken to her again since then. Nope, not even for graduation. Honestly, he just ticks me off.

Wherever she goes, apparently people are always asking her her races ("Hi, nice to meet you. What nationality are you?", she says), and then most don't believe her in the slightest when she tells them, and give her shit about it, plus she's noticed that she gets different treatment for saying she's multiracial than if she cops to only one race, or they think she is only of one race. This has been going on on a daily basis for her for a long time now, and I think she's seriously hitting the breaking point of furiousness. She's run out of nice or non-mean things to say about it, but "I don't want them to think I'm sensitive about this." Me: "You ARE sensitive about it! It drives you nuts all the time!" Honestly, if people are going to be dicks about this to her all the time, she really might as well yell at them that it's none of their business. I do not get why that is such an important thing to ask a person in this day and age. Why on earth do you care? So you can pigeonhole her into some slot already? God! It wouldn't even occur to me to ask somebody this sort of thing because it doesn't freaking matter in the grand scheme of things.

Then, finally, I attempted to do what I'd been putting off doing all day ... calling unemployment. Gawd, that got me nowhere. Here's what I found out:

(a) The whole thing is on an automated system, and I found no "push # to talk to an actual person and ask them questions about something" button.

(b) They say that there will be loooooong waits to talk to an actual person (not that I even got to that point).

(c) They are going to increase the amount of money they give out to people (for those who earned on the higher end of the scale, I guess) in January. People who apply for it after January may get more money, those who apply now will not.

However, I could NOT find out:

(a) if I personally was likely to receive more money if I waited until January to apply (being on the lower end of the earning scale, I don't think that's a guarantee one way or the other).

(b) if I had to apply for unemployment by a certain date after I got laid off in order to receive it, thus preventing me from waiting around until January.

(c) how long I could receive unemployment in the first place.

Presumably I might be able to find these things out if I put in to apply for a claim, but what if I don't want to do that right away? What the hell do I DO?

Gah. Total frustration. Unfortunately, I no longer know anybody in CA who has done the unemployment thing and knows what's going on with this. At any rate, I no longer run into any of them any more. I seem to know plenty of folks in other states who have done it, but it could be all weird here.

Okay, I finally managed to find this, information-wise. I think at least some of this will answer my questions (looks like between 3 1/2 months to 6 1/2 months pay, they only count from when you file, doesn't matter when you became unemployed), but the number calculations are splitting my tiny little mind wide open. However, I did manage to fill out the forms online and I will attempt to fax them in tomorrow or something through Kinko's. It's so weird now to NOT have a fax at my constant disposal like I've been used to for the past four months.

Last night I heard from my friend Demma from high school and filled her in on the news. She and the boyfriend Scott want to come up for a visit tomorrow (since they are also out of work). She has been wanting to visit for awhile and then something keeps coming up at the last minute. Though since now we can meet up on a weekday, this could help. We all wanted to go to this used-Renaissance-Faire clothing shop in Sac, only now we can't afford to buy anything! We'll see what happens tomorrow, I guess. They want to spend the night, so I may or may not be able to get around to updating tomorrow. If I don't, that's why, and I will then write a fat, snarky entry for the next day. Though I do have an already-written essay about NaNoWriMo I sent in to Chris Baty the other day that Elph wanted to see, so I may just post that one up tomorrow morning if I get around to it. They're showing up between 11:30 and noon, so perhaps I should er, wake up early and get moving on things.

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