Postcards from the Imagination

As in, I'm unemployed again. Five minutes after I left the office today, the agency called to say that in less than two weeks, I'd finished the 6-week project for which I'd been hired. Therefore, Company X will no longer require my services. For a single mom living paycheck-to-paycheck this is really bad news. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do for the next three weeks, but I'm exhausted just thinking about it. If anyone knows anyone in the Greater Boston area who needs help with anything at all, put in a good word for me, will you? Somehow, I need to feed myself and the girl, keep my Rxs filled, register and insure my car in my own name, and come up with the cash to get myself and my belongings down to New Jersey in a little over 21 days. At this point, people usually suggest credit cards or borrowing from family. Unfortunately, I don't have credit cards, and my mom needs me to pay her bus fare up here to help me move. So really, work is the only option. I do have something lined up post-move (have already started), but I was really relying on this temp gig to get me there.

In other news, I don't always get to literary type things in a timely fashion, but sometimes I do eventually go back. Example: Richard Siken's Poetry Foundation dispatches, which I happened upon today:

How are you? Fine, and you? It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we’re terrified that someone will actually break down and tell us. Everyone I know is in some kind of pain. Everyone. How do you like them apples? And so, another reason to lie, because we’ve all agreed not to tell the truth to each other, not about that. Someone put their hand in my heart and they didn’t take it back out. If I died tonight, no one would notice for weeks. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. I learned it well. Do I have the stomach for it? Do you really want to know?

Yeah.