Lo(is)(,) Me

Applied for a full-time position at the Kilmartin branch. I was reluctant to do so. Much as this position is what I've been aching for for years, I don't want to work with Lois again. Life's too short to spend any time under the thumb of an OCD freak, and my life was shortened well beyond the three years I spent walking on eggshells for her at my first library job. Tight as a drum, she had to have everyone else around her at the same brittle pitch. I was always relieved to not see her decrepit two-tone (three, if you count the rust) Broncosaurus when I drove in after school. And the sight of her puckered matchstick head, the dirt-brown hair painted on skin of ruddy transluscence, set on a cadaverous frame inverted my sphincter and whacked my nuts around a tetherball pole. No, I don't want to work for her again.

But I have to have that job. I all but dream about it. Going to movies or out to eat--they seem like rich-people things to do, and have for four years. All that time without health insurance, too. I sometimes wonder how I have survived the continuous stress of timing my bills to meet my paychecks, praying my car doesn't break down. And now the perennial rent-rise is higher than ever while my pay remains serfish. I see getting this job as an almost orgasmic catharsis, the Dutch boy pulling his thumb out of the dike and replacing it with a stick of lit dynamite.

Friday I'm going to be working over at Kilmartin just to help out while Lois is on vacation. Tara arranged it. She didn't say so, but I think she intends it to be some kind of showcase of my talents meant to give me a leg up on the competition. Then Paul told me in confidence yesterday that the hiring is about to begin for the new branch due open next summer, and that he's lobbying for the first opening to be the one he's promised me, the equivalent of the Kilmartin job. The opening seemed so far away that I thought I'd just hang on at Kilmartin (provided Lois would hire me) until the new branch opened, then crawl over to the new place with what's left of my sanity, but it certainly would be nice to skip that middle and last part and start my new position where I am and make the move to the new place with everybody else. Because Lois is away, she won't be getting to hiring over there till the end of June, which happens to be the time frame Paul gave me for hiring me on fulltime where I am (or at least letting me know more definitely what's going on about it).