bridesmaid

“You are a wonderful candidate, but…..”
“She was a sharp candidate, but….”
And the standard “while your skills are certainly impressive, we have decided to pursue other candidates……” which we all know is a boilerplate line of steaming horse whooey.

I swear, if I hear any of this one more time I will scream.

The premise, when I started this blog, was that I would write about being single and jobless. Yes, yes, yes, I realize I’ve deviated from that plan a wee bit, but most all of my travails spring from those two issues.

Being single and unemployed sucks. It’s as simple as that. Taken individually, they’re not great places to be in life; finding yourself in both of those situations simultaneously is more than any one human should have to bear. Oh, to hell with that nice phrase. It’s bullshit. It’s pure living hell, is what it is. I am fed up.

You married people that think for one minute us singles are having great weekends? Think again. My standard Friday/Saturday night typically involves wine, canned goods or rice, cookies if I’m really lucky (which hasn’t happened since, oh, April 22nd, to be exact), and falling asleep fully clothed with the TV blaring. Wild life, eh? [Ok, so maybe the marrieds have similar evenings, but at least you’re doing it together.] Living single means there is no one around to help you if you find yourself puking your guts out in the middle of the night, too sick to go out for 7-Up (no, it wasn’t alcohol related, it was really horrendous stomach flu); no one there to listen; no one there to notice if you make it back from your run or not. Now I’m an independent sort of woman, but this is getting old.

You do find out a lot about your friends when going though the rough stuff. You find out who they are or aren’t. I could write a novelette on that topic alone. [I know I’ve written about this before, but I think it bears repeating.] If you’re rich, you have lots of friends. Find yourself in the financial crapper, and a shocking number of those “friends” scatter like cockroaches on the kitchen floor of the dump you used to live in back in college. Single women are rarely invited to couples events. For now, I’ll just say this experience has been a depressing but useful education.

I found out yesterday that I was runner up – again – for a job I interviewed for earlier this week. That interview was the second one for this position, and a two and a half hour marathon grilling by three head honchos. When I got through reading the rejection email, I promptly got into my car, drove to the store, bought both tequila and vodka, and a family sized bag of Tostitos for good measure. This has seeming become my way of handling the stress and disappointment. It’s that or fling myself off the roof. When I got home, I wrote MK to assure her that I’d lock myself in the house for the night. The last time I went on a tequila bender, I decided to go walkabout in my front yard at dusk and fell into a very large hole.

So…I’m the runner up every frigging time, in both personal and business arenas. I swear. It has to be my turn sometime soon.