The GirlAlive Blog

The obligatory Michael Jackson post

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m out of a job soon. The one thing I will truly miss about this job is the people I work with. They’re smart, witty and in several cases, every bit as twisted and sick as I am. Of course the conversation around here this morning was primarily about Michael Jackson. Here were some of the comments made in my office and elsewhere on the topic of Michael Jackson’s death. Some were from me. Some were not.

“He was like Elvis. He started out a talented musician and ended up a mutated freakish caricature of himself.”

“I don’t think I could stand another 20 years of watching bits fall off of him anyway.”

“They won’t need to embalm him. He’s mostly plastic already.”

“If they bury him, he’ll never decay. That’s what future civilizations will think humans looked like.”

“They can’t cremate him. Can you imagine the fumes? It would be like burning a tractor tire.”

“It’s a bit like when my grandma died. She was gone from dementia years before she actually died, so when she finally went, we didn’t really mourn because the person we loved was gone long before she died. It’s the same with him. We lost Michael Jackson, the musician, years ago. Now it’s just the passing of the demented shell that was left behind.”

“Elvis, ‘The King’, died at an early age. Now the ‘King of Pop’ died at an early age. Someone should warn Prince and Queen Latifah.”

Are we rude and insensitive? Yes we are. Tasteless? Certainly.

In reality, it sucks for his family and friends. They’ve lost someone who matters in their life, and that always hurts. At the same time, the world doesn’t get to stop and the tv schedules and radio play don’t change when a non-famous person dies. When a celebrity dies, the family has the whole world crowding around to offer encouragement and comfort. When a regular guy dies, most people never hear about it, and the family is told, “Deepest condolences. You have 3 days of bereavement leave and then you’ll have to dip into your vacation time.”

In the last year I’ve lost my husband’s best friend, David, (You think MJ was young at 50? David was 39.) a lifelong friend of the family, Don, and my grandfather’s girlfriend, Jeannie. Plus two hamsters and a guinea pig. I prefer to save up my grief and sympathy for the people who really matter to me, not for a has-been singer I’ve never met.

Drawing that I did.

Okay so today at work there was a meeting. It was boring. I mean, it was perfectly fine for the people whose work they were talking about, but most of it didn’t really apply much to me. Especially since I’m only working there for 5 more weeks, so it’s not like I care about long term plans.

Anyway, I was sitting at the other side of the table from the boss, next to the other data entry clerk I shall just call C. I got bored and started doodling. I drew a picture. I showed it to C. He almost asploded from trying not to laugh.

So for all the people who have said that I should post more drawings, here is a crappy scanned image of the drawing I did during the meeting today.

Ignore the robot. He is not plotting your destruction. Honest.

Alana

Needing ideas.

I’m out of a job very soon. There are a limited number of jobs that I can do in an office, and even fewer that are willing to hire an immigrant right now. My husband has a decent job but he earns about £500 a month less than we need to pay all our bills and continue to eat. So I need money.

I have a cafepress shop that brings in a few hundred dollars every few months. Nowhere near enough to live on. The ads on my web pages bring in even less.

Ideas I have in process right now:

Freelance proofreading and editing – I’m nearly through my course for a proofreading certificate.
Etsy shop – I make handspun yarn suitable for knitting, crocheting, and weaving. Not a lot, but it might be a little extra cash.
Zazzle shop – I’ve been thinking about moving a lot of my t-shirt designs from cafepress to Zazzle. But I lost all the source image files when my computer was stolen last year, so I’d be starting over from scratch.

What else can I do that you would pay for? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Virtually unemployed

I got official notice from my boss that my contract will not be renewed when it runs out at the end of July. Which it pretty much fine by me. I don’t blame them a bit. There hasn’t been enough work for 2 data entry clerks there for months. They can’t justify paying for a contract data entry clerk in Edinburgh when the Glasgow office has a bunch of permanent data entry people who have nothing to do. So they made the logical choice and chose not to renew my contract.

So I’m officially looking for work now, even though I’m still working for another 6 weeks. I’m getting closer to finishing my proofreading course. I’m not entirely sure what it’ll accomplish for me, but it will be nice to have a piece of paper confirming that I’m a bit anal retentive.

I’m going to have to be stingy with money for a while until I can find more work. Luckily, I’m pretty good at that. I lived on frozen peas and ramen noodles for several months in Seattle. My cousins are coming over for a visit, but they’re good at living pretty cheap too, so we’ll have a great time regardless.

Anyway, I’m going to bed. Got to get up to go to my truly dead-end job in the morning.

By the way, happy father’s day to all the fathers and stuff. Especially my dad who is pretty cool. He is so cool that Jay Leno wants to hang out with him. Seriously.

Practically Canadian

If you remember your middle school astronomy lessons, the earth is tilted on its axis, so that in late June, the north pole points toward the sun all day and in December, the south pole points toward the sun all the time, leaving the north pole in the dark. This is why the length of daylight changes depending on the time of year and the latitude that you live. The closer you are to the poles, the more drastic the difference between summer and winter daylight hours.

I bring this up because I live in Scotland. It’s pretty much next door to the north pole. To be more specific, I live at approximately 55 degrees north latitude. (90 degrees is the north pole and 0 is the equator.) Right now, the sun rises at around 4:00 in the morning and sets sometime around 11:00 at night. (Internet says 4:32am and 10:01pm, but I went to bed at 11:00 and there was still light streaming through the window, and I woke up just before 4:00 and there was light streaming through the window.) The winter is quite the opposite. For all of December and January, I never saw daylight except for a few hours through my office window in the middle of the day.

I’m not from tropical regions. I’m from Minnesota. If you are British you think that the northern parts of the US are about the same latitude as Britain. (I have not yet met a British person who didn’t think that — including my own husband.) You are wrong. Minneapolis is about 45 degrees north latitude. That’s 10 degrees further south than Glasgow, which equates to almost 700 miles. The only major cities in the US that are even close to the same latitude as Scotland are in Alaska. The entire United Kingdom is further north than the northernmost point in the non-Alaskan US. I checked. The northernmost point in the “lower 48″ is the northwest angle, the little nipple sticking out the top of Minnesota. It is at 49 degrees, 23 minutes North latitude. The southernmost point of the UK is the south end of the Scilly Isles, which is at 49 degrees, 51 minutes North latitude. If you shifted the UK directly to the west and positioned it over North America, it would be entirely in Canada. Glasgow would be near the shores of Hudson Bay.

On the 4th of July, Americans can watch fireworks in relative dark at 10:00 at night. In Scotland on the 4th of July, it doesn’t really get dark enough for a proper fireworks display at all. Where I grew up, it was usually at least very dim, if not fully dark at bedtime all year. I never needed blackout curtains or anything because I slept at night. Here, there is no night for two months a year. I checked, and Minnesota has at least 2 hours a day more nighttime right now than Scotland does. It’s not right.

I can get used to most of the weather here. Cold? No problem. Rain? It’s just water. Wind? Okay, so the constant wind does annoy me. But the difference in daylight hours between here and the US is the one thing I just can’t seem to get used to. I can’t get to sleep when it’s still light out. I can’t get back to sleep when I wake up with the sun streaming in at 4:00 in the morning. Yes, I already have one of those stupid sleep masks. It’s uncomfortable and makes my face sweaty. I don’t want to wear a stupid mask. I want it to be dark outside.

I hate this ad.

Okay, so this ad gets on my nerves every time I see it.

Question 1: Why did Fox’s biscuits decide that the perfect animal to represent their brand would be a panda? Couldn’t Fox’s think of any other animal that might work?

Question 2: Why is the panda a New York mobster? What does the New York mafia have to do with pandas? Ever? Pandas are vegetarian bears from China. It makes no freaking sense.

Question 3: Why can’t he pronounce the word “biscuit”? “Biscuit” is a word in America. It is pronounced the same way that it is in Britain (even though it doesn’t mean the same thing). I have never EVER in all my years living in the US heard anyone pronounce it “bisqwits”.

Basically, this commercial is annoying, nonsensical and bordering on offensive.