Sunday, April 26, 2020

Made for this

oh, fuck yes

We’re into month 2 of the COVID-19 craziness.

We’re supposed to stay at home and stay six feet apart at a minimum.

I was made for this shit.

Who would have thought that introversion, general shyness, and social anxiety would turn out to be a blessing instead of a curse?

 

- - - - - - - - - -

There’s one other huge thing I was made for:

Working in construction as a cost accountant.

If the Cats hadn’t come along and the assistant controller hadn’t been such an ass, I’d probably still be at the HVAC contractor in New Hampshire. (Of course, she ended up being fired by the Board and I wonder if she would have taken me down with her.)

I left my last job because they were struggling to make payroll. Famous last words: “I’d rather temp than wonder if I’m going to get paid.”

Well, two days after that, I got a temp job with a construction company. They had a new CFO and a huge mess. I jumped right in and started identifying problems, trying to find solutions, blah blah blah.

I’d continued to interview that entire time; I was enjoying the fact that I could work without the pressure of a permanent role. The office had a weird vibe, too, and I wasn’t planning on staying. I couldn’t… I would have quit before the year was out. But it was a job at a time when I was desperate for a pay check.

Seriously, I am so lucky that, while I couldn’t work remotely, I had a job with an essential business.

And then it all went to shit and they offered me a job on a Friday.

Thankfully, I had just interviewed with another construction company. I got offers on Friday and Monday and took Monday’s.

This title is better (Controller), the pay is the same, the commute is better, the job is more or less the same. Cost control, working with PMs and Estimators, trying to set procedures and put other accounting controls in place.

I’m very good at working in companies that need to be straightened out.

This one… well, it’s bad.

I’m not going to go into details, because I can’t, but hooooooo boy. I’m feeling a little bit like I’m over my head. I’m wondering what the fuck I got myself into.

This is my normal, though.

This is where I thrive.

I couldn’t have asked for a better job.

Seriously.

I’ve spent too much money on professional organisation memberships and I’ll be taking a metric fuck ton of professional exams. Definitely the CMA exam and the CCIFP exam. I’m even thinking about getting some bookkeeping licenses.

I think they’ll go well with my current title and they might fill in some blanks - not every company books their transactions the same way and it feels like I’ve forgotten some of the basics because I haven’t used them in years - so it’s worth the thousands of dollars that these will cost me.

I’ve only been a Controller for a week, but I know this job suits me more than any other I’ve had in a long time.

I don’t know… for the first time since I left the Cats, I’m finally feeling like myself. I’m excited to get up in the morning and that’s a new feeling. One I haven’t have in a long, long, time.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Христос Воскрес! (like bread dough)

station of the cross :: lviv, ukraine :: november 2016

So… in Ukraine, for Easter, you say “Христос Воскрес!” - literally, Christ is risen.

Ukraine is full of religious icons, absolutely gorgeous ones, all over the place. In public! Oh, I was so scandalised by that.

Ukrainians - at least the ones I know - often have altars. My grandparents house had a Virgin Mary tucked in the corner. The relatives I met in Ukraine had one, too.

All that to say, I am not the least bit religious.

So, I find an inordinate amount of joy in the fact that wishing someone a Happy Easter in Ukrainian is basically a reference to a man I don’t believe ever existed, let alone rose from the dead.

I’ve been focused on what it means to be a Ukrainian more than usual lately… and it’s been weird.

Mostly because I wasn’t brought up as Ukrainian. My mother wasn’t having any of it, so I was only exposed when I was at my grandparents’ house. I have a lot of fuzzy memories… stuff that comes to the surface when it’s triggered by something: a news article, a blog post, a random word on a website. Sometimes, I remember things that surprise me and sometimes I wonder how I never put two and two together before.

Wow. I’m in a rambly mood tonight. Possibly, a wee bit manic. (Wanna know a secret? The tone of my writing changes. (I get very parenthetical.) I ramble.)

Back in 2013? 2014? I decided I needed to find myself. (The last time I think I said that in all seriousness was the time I’d told my father that I didn’t want a summer job… that I wanted to take the summer off to go find myself. We’d just thrown my mother into a hole in the ground and gotten served with a restraining order. I was trying to wrap my brain around all of it and being stuck working retail didn’t sound like a place I needed to be right then. Well, he grabbed a napkin and a pen. Drew a map of the house. Put a BIG FUCKING X in the kitchen and told me I was found. God, how I miss that man.)

So yeah. Finding myself.

Fun fact: There’s a book out there called “Losing Your Parents. Finding Yourself.” It was given to me as a gift after I was orphaned. I ended up setting it on fire in the backyard. ( Here’s why.)

Pyromania aside - the title, and the little bit I read before my mother’s ugliness was put out there for all the world to see, really resonated with me. If they hadn’t used my mother’s FUCKING WILL to prove a point, I might have read the rest of it. I might have found solace in it.

But… fire. Fire is good. Fire is cleansing.

Like a phoenix, I rose from the flames.

(Oh, shit, maybe I should take an Ativan and calm down a little bit. Nah, fuck it. If you can’t handle me now, you don’t deserve me later. Better living through science, amiright?)

Anyhoo… My father’s side of family appears to have sprung out of the ground in Nowhere, Maine. A town so small that it doesn’t even qualify for the Census. So that left the other side. HER side.

I’d shied away from everything and anything that reminded me of either my mother or my aunt, and then decided FUCK IT (and, oh, if you didn’t see that coming, I’m utterly disappointed in you.)

I decided to learn the language, re-learn the culture, discover myself.

I’d been a casual learner, Even when I went to Ukraine, I wasn’t anywhere near fluent despite all the lessons.

I’d kept up the lessons when we got back from Lviv, but then we moved to Florida and everything went arse over tits.

Now, at my temp job, I’m surrounded by Spanish speaking people. Instead of making me want to learn Spanish (God, I hate that language. I took Latin and French so I didn’t have to take Spanish.), I’ve been inspired to re-focus on Ukrainian.

And now, it’s fucking Easter.

The last time I spent Easter with a family member (Ukrainian or not), was the year we went to LL Bean to buy kayaks. A certain family member called me, yelled at me for not going to church like a good Ukie, and then asked me to come to Easter dinner. Blocking that phone number was one of the best things I ever did.

But, I digress.

Again.

A few months ago, I got a weird Facebook “call” from my youngest cousin. Shocked that she’d reach out to me, I assumed the worst. Nah. Nothing that exciting. But before I knew it I was FB friends with her, her sister, and my godfather’s daughter.

All of whom are the children of Ukrainians.

My cousins have been slaughtering the Ukrainian language lately in their excitement to celebrate the coming of the Easter Bunny. I fucking hate when Ukrainian is transliterated. I hate it more when it’s transliterated and spelt incorrectly. If you’re going to use the language, use it.

Fuck, half the time, they don’t even know they’re actually speaking fucking Polish.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Polish, mind. My grandparents spoke both interchangeably, but at least I can tell the difference between the two.

OK. Rant over. I’m going to go watch a stupid horror movie and continue reading this amazing Scorbus fan fic. It actually makes the events of Cursed Child almost acceptable. Like if this chick had written CC? Oh, it would have been a beautiful addition to the canon instead of the trainwreck the actual CC was…