2.26.2005 ||> There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
As I sit in an office doing tedious numerical ordering of claims no one is ever going to look up, I look around me at the office atmosphere. The people I'm working with are really cool, but they're all contractors. The real office staff are weird. They had a party yesterday and specifically didn't invite us temps or contractors to share in the cake and other goodies. As if the 7 of us would eat it all. But it didn't make me angry, it just made me think that they are boring people with boring lives. So mundane that they get their rocks off by randomly putting down people hired to help them. It made me even more determined to get a job not partitioned off in a cubicle, surrounded by petty politics. It would be easy to lose perspective and get absorbed in the day to day silliness.
The cool thing is that I felt like I didn't belong to that. Like at any time I could get away and do something interesting. That I had options. But sitting there in the cubicle surrounded by mediocrity, I wondered about the environmental impact of that atmosphere. Am I less interesting just by being there?
About an hour ago, I had a conversation with one of the girls at the temp agency. I decided last week to temp until I could find something I really want to do and they found me a filing position yesterday. Then today she asked me if I was okay with working there for three more weeks. Unfortunately, I would like to find a job doing something other than filing and the three weeks would cramp my job search. So I told her I couldn't take the job because I was looking for a job.
Wha-at? Gosh, how could that be misconstrued? Plus, she told me she didn't understand me.
But you understand me, right?
I'm in a quandary. About a year and a half ago, I came across an interesting document. Well, "came across" is misleading. Rather, I searched high and low for a listing of Russian curse words and their English equivalents. The Alternative Dictionary wasn't useful for my search because it used Latin letters and not the Cyrillic, so I had a hard time reading it. It took me days to find what I needed, so I made sure to save it for posterity.
Now, my motives were pure. You see, when you're a teacher that does not speak the same language as her students, the little angels get it into their heads that they can say anything they want and the silly teacher will never understand. So I learned it and got back at them. Now, I occasionally think that I should list the revised version (I got my tutor to blushingly update it) because maybe there's another poor American out there that is being cursed at in Russian and they don't understand at all.
Now here's where the vote comes in. Probably I shouldn't put it up because young, impressionable minds might get their grubby hands all over it and lose their innocence. But then I think on my childhood and we all knew the bad words by about 8, right? (oh god, please let it not just be me!) And there's all those poor non-Russian speakers who could be getting cursed at right now with no come back. And we're all adults, we can handle it, right?
So what's a girl to do?
An Uzbek and an American were talking one day when the topic of free speech came up. The American said, "In the US we are so free that we can go right up to the White House and protest George Bush."
The Uzbek said, "We are just as free here. We also can go right up to the presidental mansion and protest George Bush."
Labels: politics, uzbekistan
