25 march 01

So I got home from the airport late last night and found a message on my answering machine confirming that I do have a permanent job waiting for me. Problem is, the start date isn't tomorrow, as I had been expecting, but rather two weeks from tomorrow on April 9. That will make a full month without employment, which, given the fact that I have just been informed that I owe $4600 for taxes this year, is very very bad. Therefore I will be spending my morning tomorrow on the phone begging to be given work for the next two weeks. I really shouldn't have gone on a multi-nation vacation for the past 10 days, but I'm not sorry. It was grand, though the customs person here in New York stamped over my Italy stamp from two years ago.

I'm watching the Oscars. I don't think I've ever sat through the whole show before. Crouching Tiger just won best foreign film. I saw it again while I was in Amsterdam, and cried at the end just like the first time. The subtitles were in Dutch so I watched without having to read along. Interestingly, the character that translated to Jade Fox in the English subtitles became Jade Hyena in Dutch. Jade Hyena? Ok.

Freddy, the kid who lives two doors down, knocked on my door a few hours ago asking for help with his math homework. God only knows why he decided I was the person to come to for math assistance, but I let him in, showed him the apartment, introduced him to the cats, and sat with him on the couch where he opened a workbook filled with addition and subtraction problems. He's in the 8th grade, in a remedial math class. What he wanted was for me to do his homework for him, but I got him to do a few pages on his own. Then he sat around and inspected my stereo and computer. He asked about my Sandman poster and in a sudden flash of inspiration decided that "sandman" should be his new tag. Freddy practiced writing "sandman" in bubble letters on the inside cover of his math workbook, and then went home.

There was something very specific I had wanted to do today.