work is hard

I feel like a bourgeoise douchebag for saying this, but damn it's been a long time since I had anything remotely like a regular job. 8-hour days are like a foreign language.
I actually really like my job (although I have to admit a shudder ran through me when I saw "Product of Columbia" on my bunch of roses this afternoon and I recently didn't put a movie on my blockbuster queue because it was about a girl working in a South American flower plantation). The first few days are hard anywhere (or so I remember from long ago) because there's so much new information being thrown at you at once; today and yesterday I could barely talk normally when I left because my brain was just completely gone. I'm also being thrown into this rather quickly, and instead of the lengthy training period I was hoping for I'm working completely alone tomorrow, Thursday, and Sunday. That seems crazy to me; yesterday I barely knew half the flower names and now I have a freaking key to the store. So far I'm pretty good at the easy stuff (cleaning, faxing, getting flowers prepped for the freezer) and not so hot at the "real" flower stuff, like arrangements and bouquets. But hey, there's always time to improve. I need to read and learn more about color matching, arrangement techniques and styles, all the jazz. Anyway, that's all.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself

James Bond and his penis (or possibly phallus?) will have to wait a little longer. I got a job! Finally, after being out of school for just over a year, I have managed to become employed by somebody other than Civic. I'm going to start working at a flower shop in my neighborhood on Monday. I imagine flowers are not, so to speak, lily-white in terms of human rights and environmental issues, but for somebody who was desperately starting to wonder if working at Borders (or, god forbid, Starbucks) could be all that bad I'm feeling a little less righteous than I might otherwise be. Besides, since I've come to terms with the fact that I have to be employed somewhere and soon, I've realized that I could come up with something awful that was linked to practically every place I considered applying, at least the ones I had a chance in hell of actually getting hired at. At least I'm not working at the tanning place, and I can stop having nightmares about fruitless job hunts.
While I'm on consumerism etc., I must mention that I'm also on that Blockbuster Total Access thing, so I can rent as many movies as I want every month. Does anybody have any suggestions?

penii upcoming

I watched the new James Bond movie "Casino Royale" the other night. (Overall review: eh.) But it sparked my memory of one of my readings for a class I took a few years ago that was titled "James Bond's Penis". So maybe I'll link those two experiences together sometime soon, as soon as I can force myself through the article again :)
It's hot and muggy here today and I have a headache. I've been waiting for about 3 days now to hear whether I got a job at a flower shop in my neighborhood, which is frustrating. That's all, I guess. Maybe I'll go paint my toenails again.

vanishing act

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend Tabitha either lost her wallet or it was stolen. (It disappeared withing less than a block, so foul play seems like it's at least an option.) In it were, very unfortunately, her ohio drivers license and her social security card.
Here's the problem: in order to get a social security card, you need a license or some other form of valid ID, like a passport, which she does not have. In order to get a license, you need a social security card or some other form of valid ID, and also some sort of approved signature, like a credit card or a cancelled check from within the last 60 days. Tabitha doesn't have a bank account, and her credit cards (which were already cancelled but still being carried around) were in her wallet. So, because she doesn't have a bank account or credit cards, and because both of the most common forms of identification were in the lost wallet, she can't replace anything. In the short term, this means she can't drive (assuming there was even a car around, which there isn't), go into bars or buy liquor, get a different job, and she couldn't fly if she needed to. More scarily, she can't establish her identity in any sort of real way until we manage to think of a way to get around the rules at the DMV. It's so strange to me that the simple loss of a wallet could lead to the loss of so much possibility; it feels like she has been erased from the government-approved world and placed in this marginal area where her activity is limited, sometimes severely. It also feels somewhat descriminatory to me, like not having a bank account or a passport is some sort of frowned-upon circumstance that can impair your ability to do certain very important things. Perhaps I'm overreacting, but this is becoming a real problem and it's kind of stressing us both out.
So, can anybody think of a clever way to help with this? How do you establish the identity of someone whose identity may have been literally stolen? I'm sure this is not the first time this set of circumstances has come up, so there must be something. Anybody?