Seriously, Karma?

For the past two days, I feel like Karma is seriously trying to mess with me. There have been so many things that seriously were about to drive me over the edge, but then something else happens to make it not so bad. Yesterday morning started out pretty good. I actually got out of the house on time, and didn't hit much traffic. But then when I was at a red light about a half mile from work, I saw steam billowing out from under my hood. PEACHY. So because I had no idea what's wrong, or even what kind of things could be going wrong under the hood of my car, I basically coasted to work (because I didn't want to press on the gas and have my car explode or something equally as heinous) and called my parents in a panic. But then in a stroke of genius, I realized that I happen to work at a shipping company that has an in-house shop, with an in-house mechanic. So I basically ran in, introduced myself to the mechanic, and then proceeded to beg him to take a look at my car. So bless his big greasy hands, he looks at it, and replaced my radiator tank for the price of parts only. So for $63.82, I was able to get a new radiator tank, which would have easily cost me (or my parents, since they're taking care of all the maintenance on my car til I graduate and it becomes officially mine) $100+ at a regular garage, once you add in labor costs. So then he came up a few hours later and shows me a picture that he took on his phone of my battery cables, which are covered in an icky green gunk, and tells me that he'll replace my battery cables for like $5!!! SWEET!!! I’m sure that those cables would have been a pain in my backside sooner or later, so I’m glad that he found them now, instead of discovering it when my battery is dead and I really have a place to go.
In order to thank this fine mechanic, I decided to do what all Kiest girls do when someone needs thanking – you bake them something. Our mechanic is a diabetic, so I even took the time to go online and find a low-sugar recipe for him so that I wouldn’t be responsible for sending him into a sugar shock or whatever happens when a diabetic gets too much sugar. I go to bake the cookies, and realize that I need salt…and the proceed to find that all we have left in our pantry is stupid sea salt. Yuck. But oh well, it didn’t seem too bad, and it was only ¼ of a teaspoon. But then in all of my spaziness, I forgot to set the timer for the second batch of cookies. So I was in my room eating my dinner and trying to get ready for work today, and I started to wonder why I hadn’t heard the timer go off. So I check on the cookies to find that they now had the consistency of hockey pucks. That was the first batch of cookies that I have ever REALLY burnt in my life, which was just depressing. So Ron only got about 10 cookies, but I think he liked them so that’s what counts.

So Karma continues to laugh in my face when I finally get in bed, and forget to set my alarm clock. And I haven’t been sleeping that well in the first place, so I roll over this morning and see that it’s 6:56am – and my alarm is supposed to go off at 6:30am. LOVELY. So I race around like a madwoman, thankful that I have my mother’s preparation skills and have most of my stuff ready the night before, and race out of the door. I timed it – I am now aware of the fact that I have the ability to get ready in exactly 24 minutes – and that includes shoving down a bowl of oatmeal. To add on top of that, it’s pouring, which doesn’t mean much except to put me in a more negative mood. Plus I get to mail my parking ticket explanation in the mail, which just makes me mad that I got the stupid ticket in the first place. Also, there is just so much drama going on in all areas of my life that I just get bogged down with it. And then with days like today, I overanalyze everything (not that you do that, right? Or am I the only one?) And then the e-mail from our UP President that says a classmate was found dead in his apartment is just plain depressing.

I know that this isn’t the happiest blog post, but according to the weatherman, the sun will come out tomorrow J

Oh, The Joys of Life

Sometimes, I envy that headless chicken – you know the one, where someone who is beyond stressed says, “I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off!”

If only the craziness in my life were that calm.

Honestly speaking, and comparing to other people who I’m sure are far more stressed than I am, my life is pretty good, although stressful on my own levels of measure. I remember during my senior year in high school, all seniors were required to take Senior Health, where we learned all about the human body (learning reproduction for the 18th time, anyone?), healthy lifestyles, blah blah blah. Mostly stuff that we’d heard before. Although one day, we learned about the negative side effects that can occur with high amounts of stress.

“OK, everyone, today you’re going to take a test that evaluates your own levels of stress based on events that have happened in the last year. Then, after you’re through, we’ll compare scores among the class.”

Apparently, there are different categories or levels that you can fall under, based on your score, that tells you the likelihood of having a serious stress-related injury in the next year.

After taking the test, it was determined that I had one of the highest scores in the class, and that I had over a 75% chance of having a stress-related health risk in the next year. Of course, I wasn’t surprised by this news: that year, I was moving out-of-state with my parents after graduation, then getting ready to move to a new city and start college, my grandfather was terminally ill with colo-rectal cancer and we knew he was sliding downhill rather quickly, and I had at least 2 other close family members with serious health problems.

Needless to say, in regards to addressing and sending graduation announcements, cleaning out my house and packing said house, saying good-bye to high school friends and mentally preparing myself to make new ones in a new town, starting a new job in a new town where I had no friends and didn't know anyone outside my family and my dog, and then trying to adjust at a new school, in addition to the worry over my ill family members – yeah, its no wonder I had one of those high scores.

However, I knew that “this too shall pass,” and I wasn’t too worried. I thought that once I moved, started college, and my family problems died down, my stress level would return to normal, and I would return to my happy-go-lucky self, whose biggest worry was that I wouldn’t meet any cute boys at college and that my parents would turn my room into a home gym or something.

As you probably guessed it, that dream didn’t last long. By my second year of college where I had 6 midterms in one week, 3 times during the course of the semester, I was literally having panic attacks on the phone to my mother multiple times per month, who did her best to calm me down, and assure me that no, the world was not going to end if I didn’t get 100% on this test.

(Just for a bit of background info, I only got one B+ in high school, and that was my physics class. I graduated with a 3.95 GPA, which I was very proud of. However, it also gave me an unrealistic opinion as to my own IQ, which was challenged the minute I stepped foot on my college campus and realized exactly how many more people are smarter than me….by a LOOOONG shot.)

Over the past three and a half years since I’ve graduated from high school and taken that eye-opening stress test, I’ve gone back and found the same kind of stress test on the internet, and even took the same one during my Human Resource Management class. And as a matter of fact, my life is still overly stressful – at least according to those smart psychiatrists who make the tests in the first place.

So long story short (a lot of my posts end this way – sorry about that), I’ve gotten quite comfortable with the fact that I will probably always have a 80%+ chance of incurring a stress-related injury for the next year…for the rest of my life. It hasn’t happened in the last three and a half years since high school, but I’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

Maybe I should take up Yoga…although I’m sure that while you’re supposed to practice deep breathing and cleansing of the mind, I’ll be thinking about the one thing I simply cannot forget to pick up at Fred Meyer this week.

Questions on the job

After 4 months of arduous searching, daily visits to Craigslist, my school’s website, and the OregonLive! website, I finally found a job, something that isn’t easy to come by in the current economic state we’re in. But God bless my contact at my temp agency (one of the many I applied to) who found me a position at a local distribution warehouse and got me an interview. After 3 trips to their Clackamas location, 2 interviews, and a lot of nerve-controlling chocolate, I landed myself an entry-level job in their offices as their new Customer Service Order Processing clerk.

I’ve never been so happy to delete shortcuts from my IE Favorites menu. Farewell Craigslist, OregoneLive!, Jobdango, Monster Careers, and school site. Good riddance, more like it.

Sorry. I just need a moment to revel in that.

Anyway, so I started my job yesterday. Man, I was prepared….at least at home. I had already decided what I was going to wear (in order to skip the 20-minute ordeal of standing in front of my minuscule closet, lamenting over the fact that I have nothing to wear), I had packed my healthy lunch (is it a faux pas to bring your lunch to work in an American Eagle bag?), and had the coffee pot ready to go for the next morning. I almost forgot to set my alarm clock for the ungodly hour of 5:45, but maybe that was just my subconscious rebelling against getting up that early. Which for a previously recent college grad who was sleeping in until 9 every morning, is pretty early. I walked in the door 10 minutes early with homemade cookies in hand, all in the attempt to make a good impression on the first day. We’ll see how long that lasts.

(Just kidding, Mom. I know you raised me better than that. I think.)

So for the next week, I’m just trying to learn the ropes of the discount dry-goods business. We distribute lots o’bread, those tasty pies from Safeway, bread, chips, and coffee. All the stuff that I love and is just kinda bad for you. This job doesn’t seem half as complicated as the insurance industry (my last office job, which made me realize my deep and passionate hatred for insurance of any kind), and the biggest problem that I’ve seen so far is that a few boxes of potato chips that were labeled “Rippled” were actually “Plain.” I can deal with catastrophes like that. Fires, semi-trucks stranded on a highway, and physical harm usually cause an unnatural spike in my blood pressure.

Not to mention the amount of tedious paperwork that always accompanies those kinds of catastrophes.

But the one thing that I hate when starting a new job is not knowing anything. I know that no one expects me to know anything, but I simply hate asking a question every 3 minutes, no matter how legitimate it is. People know that I don’t know the names of all our drivers, or product listings, or who to call when one of the garage doors doesn’t work. I’m usually a pretty independent person who can figure things out on my own, but this new kind of environment is completely befuddling to me.

I can’t believe I just used the word befuddling. I apologize.

I’ll start my formal training next week, the training that will be useful to the actual job that I’ll be doing, in my very own office. Until then, I’m more than happy to answer the phones, put together drug testing procedure binders, and send out a million faxes.
Because that’s the stuff I can do without asking too many questions. J