One Foot In The Door

I heard from my friend Christina this past week, before New Year's, asking if I was still looking for a new job. I have missed working with her a great deal (she is the person who sent me home the day I came in to work looking like Samara from The Ring and insisted I go home and have a good cry), so when she suggested I send her my resume, I jumped at the chance. I've already been putting feelers out, sending my resume when I find a job posting online that seems like it might be a good fit, but I haven't been desperate to leave my current occupation. My job is not that challenging, but it is dependable. I like my co-workers, and I can deal with the specific aspects of it that make me unhappy. It's not like I work in a coal mine, so I've learned to be content with my weird schedule, my days off in the middle of the week, the insistance by the corporate office that in order to have dual roles as admin and events presenter (I teach a weekly knitting class for the guests of this establishment, which I love doing), that I need to only work a total of 40 hours between both departments. This means that I have to cut three hours out of my work week at the desk in order to make up for the three hours of class time. It's a pain, but I've never objected because despite finding it unfair, I understood where they were coming from. When you employ as many people as the corporation I work for does, you need to make sure your bases are covered.
The change in my hours, plus the fact that my boss told me, in no uncertain terms, that my days off could not be altered, plus the fact that she has been slightly lacking in the professionalism department, have made my decision that much easier to make. I sent my resume to Christina, who forwarded it to one of the partners at the law firm she left here to work for. I went in for an interview on Wednesday morning, only minimally prepared, figuring that going in cold was a better idea. I didn't want to do what I usually do- overprepare and oversell myself, ending up in a position I am really not the best fit for. I've done that once, when I worked for Verizon, and it was traumatizing, to say the least. I knew at that time, when I showed up for training, that I had to keep that job, even though it confused the hell out of me and I never really fit in with the other people there. I ignored my instincts and just buckled down, forcing myself to just deal with it, because as the primary bread-earner in my relationship, I had to keep Gino and myself afloat. When I got sent back to my original position as a lowly directory assistance operator, I was so relieved, I cried, even though I knew it meant finding a more affordable place to live and no more shopping at the nice food stores. Leaving that position was, in the end, worth going back to ghetto groceries. I also did the same thing when I interviewed for Pine Cone Hill, pitching myself at the woman who interviewed me with a little too much enthusiasm. I was not really the best fit for that position, as I had been working for a company that valued speed over accuracy for so many years that I didn't know how to make myself slow down. Their customer service model was all about building relationships with their customers and taking the time to listen. They were slow food, where I was used to short-order cooking. I couldn't adapt, and when they did their big layoff, I got the chop. If I hadn't been laid off, I think, I would have probably gotten fired for not learning their ways.
The interview with the attorney went well, and I felt my confidence swelling the longer she kept me in the room with her. I drew parallels between law and healthcare without really reaching for them, I was honest about why I felt the time had come to move on from a place I had worked for nearly three years, and I maintained eye contact, which my father taught me is key to showing a new person that you can be trusted. It didn't always come naturally to me, but I've reached a point where it actually feels strange to not look straight into another person's eyes while I'm speaking to them.
When I left the interview, I felt similar to the way I felt in September, after a particularly successful knitting class, thinking to myself, "There is nothing wrong with you. There is something wrong with every man who tells you there is something wrong with you," and I actually believed it. It is easy to say these words, aloud, to voice them with something close to conviction, but it is harder to really believe them, to take them to heart. The things that bothered me the most for the better part of this past year- being rejected, not once, but twice, hating myself and my body, wondering where I slipped on the tracks, are not eclipsed by a new professional achievement, but they seem less important. I was hired the day of the interview, despite not having a shred of legal experience, despite not having a college degree, despite the fact that I didn't have my references printed out and prepared. Who cares that I don't look perfect, that I am a little abrasive, that I love too hard and with too much of myself? What I have managed to do, this year, despite every painful moment, is pretty impressive to me. I don't usually impress myself, but I have managed to find a new job, squeeze my brain until a novel popped out, and form a better friendship with my ex-husband, all without missing a single day of work. All of these things serve as a reminder that just because I am not good enough for a couple of dumb guys does not mean I am not good enough.
I think that, and maybe this is a justification I make to myself just so things make some kind of sense, that my intelligence, my success, all of the things I really value about myself, might actually end up being a detractor to the guys I always end up being into. Gino is barely able to keep his head above water, money-wise, without me, but he didn't appreciate me more because I brought in more money. I think that knowing he needed me, literally, for survival, made him resentful of me. One time, his mother was lamenting the fact that she could never leave Gino's father, saying, "You can't escape the fact that you always need them for the financial support," referring, of course, to men.
I said nothing, never pointing out the fact that in our situation, the roles were reversed. Managing without the money Gino brought in has been difficult, but not impossible. He only ever worked part-time when we were together. Even when he split his time between his current job and working for UPS, he never worked a 40-hour week. Both of his jobs were hard, manual, labor, of course, and I gave him more credit than he probably deserved for working them, but he never put in as many hours as I did. I always brought home more money, but the thing is, I tried not to point that out to him. Gino remarked on it often, in terms of the unfairness of it, how I got paid more than him for sitting on my ass all day. I had to apologize for my own minimal success, with the fact that despite not completing my education, I managed to find steady employment using only my skill set. I was apologetic for earning more money than him and for earning a job that allowed me to sit on my ass all day in the first place. Nothing was handed to me and I was given the same advantages as anyone else, but Gino's persecuted worldview made me feel guilty for a lot of it. A man's ego is a fragile thing.
Gino also had a tendency, it seemed to me, to imply that I was ditzy. He would talk to me about things I could understand, but just wasn't interested in, like time travel and conspiracy theories. I would contribute nothing because I had nothing to contribute, which, to him, made me seem like I just didn't understand what he was talking about. He would try to get me to watch episodes of Dark Matters and Through The Wormhole, or other programming on Science Channel, and I would try to pay attention, but it just wasn't compelling to me. I would sit through an episode, then beg him to switch to an episode of Community or Hell on Wheels or something else I could just sit back and enjoy. At the end of the day, sometimes you just want to give your brain a rest. I asked him why he did that this week, and he seemed genuinely surprised that I would think that. He didn't apologize for anything, of course, turning on me and accusing me of talking down to him all the time, making him feel like he was the dumb one. I wanted to object, but I knew that the time wasn't right for it, so I did apologize for always correcting his grammar and pronunciation. It's a bad habit I could never kick, that I inherited directly from my father, and I knew he hated it, but his malapropisms were hard to let slip by. If he said "worth ethic" when he meant to say "work ethic", it just drove me nuts, because people are not always kind. I just wanted to protect him, keep him from getting made fun of. I looked at it from the angle of being protective, but it hit his ear as just more criticism.
Mike implied that I was kind of dumb as well. When I told him the story about Gino's attempts to educate me, he started teasing me about it, and Liam started showing up for our Thursday night get-togethers with episodes of Through the Wormhole loaded onto his USB drive for us to watch. I knew they were doing it just to annoy me, and I could have squashed it by not reacting, but I got a little irritated. I don't doubt my own intelligence, but I am used to insecure people inferring that I am not that smart, so I'm just a little sick of it. Sensing how much it was annoying me that Liam and Mike not only wanted to watch a television show about quantum worlds, but refused to stop talking about it while I was sitting there, contributing nothing, Mike said, "Well, we could watch something about knitting instead," his voice just dripping with condescension.
I'm not a big fan of being talked down to, and while I can take being teased, I have an easier time with it if the joke is, you know, good. I told him thanks for the offer (you fucking dickbag), but I don't watch television programs about knitting, I just knit. Having a hobby that is girly and silly does not make me girly and silly. And, even if it does, who cares? Being girly and silly doesn't make me stupid, either. I know I have a bad habit of dumbing myself down for men, especially if I like them, because most men like to feel that they are the smartest one in the room. Or, at the very least, the men I've been involved with seem to want that.
I guess I am a little more insecure about my intelligence than I used to be. When I was younger, and I was overweight and really awkward, my brain was all that I had. I was one of those people, who just had to remind everyone how smart I was every second of every day. It didn't really win me a lot of friends, so I toned it down. I know that I don't have to impress how smart I am upon people, but it gets to the point where, occasionally, I don't really seem that smart at all. Najwa told me recently that when we first met, she had no idea I was smart. That was probably due to the fact that when I first met her, I didn't talk much because I was totally intimidated by her prettiness and didn't really make a great first impression. Still, she told me that my brains aren't really there on the surface, that they come out slowly.
I hope I can learn to speed up that process, when it comes to work, because I have a very short window in which I need to learn my new job, and I don't want my new employer to regret hiring someone who seems like a dullard. I need to just remind myself that being smart is good, that it has gotten me farther than anything else has, and that I don't have to water my intelligence down for everyone.