Guess it has been more than a week since my last post - I must be slipping. Although, truth to tell, my life is pretty much confined to the weekends since during the week I don't have much time to do anything other than work and commute. Generally speaking that is, because I took last Thursday and Friday off. Not because I necessarily wanted to - since I'm a contract employee, when I take time off, I don't get paid for it. But the rest of the communications staff was down in Baton Rouge, LA for a big company meeting, leaving me with nothing to do.
Thursday I ran a bunch of errands that were piling up on me, like taking my dress from Ella's wedding to the dry cleaners, dropping off clothes for tailoring, getting Yoshi's brakes fixed and getting my allergy shots. Then Friday I drove out to Stony Brook on Long Island to visit Polina. I watched her band practice for a while, then we went to dinner with some of her friends.
After they dropped us off at her dorm, we hung out there for the rest of the evening on her top bunk bed, playing Scrabble on Facebook, videochatting with her friend Patrick, and having some long-overdue private time. Seriously, despite all the time we've had lately, we haven't actually been in a bed together since Aug. 10, the last Poly Cocktail Hour she attended ("Polys in the wild" - Aug. 11, 2009), so that alone was worth the four-hour round-trip.
I probably would have stayed overnight in her dorm room except that Angel was having a Brown Bag Party at her house the next day, and I had invited Agnieszka to come with me, so I had to go back to New Jersey to pick her up anyway. Angel sells intimacy products (i.e. sex toys and novelties) through these Tupperware-style parties she throws, and at events like the Spice NYC party a couple weeks ago. Agnieszka and I drove out to Queens and had a fun time at the party, learning about different lubricants, stimulators, vibrators, and other somesuch. The thing I'll most remember is Agnieszka playing with a latex-like face used for fake blowjobs - she had me in stitches. I also won one of the games where the prize was a deck of Hustler playing cards that said "Barely Legal" on it - I wondered if Angel was making some comment about my girlfriend, but she denied it.
We came back to Agnieszka's place from the party, and chatted for a while to catch up. It's been quite a few months since our last outing ("Shanghai Mermaid" - May 31, 2009) so it was nice to talk with her about what's been happening. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've known Agnieszka longer than any other friend in the northeast who is still currently in my life, and it's always nice to get her perspective on things.
On Monday, I had a second-round interview with a PR firm in the city, on Vanderbilt Avenue right next to Grand Central Station. I met with the president of the firm, and we seemed to hit it off well. He asked me what I did in my spare time, and in a burst of honesty that comes from being gainfully employed, I told him that I do volunteer work in the LGBT community. He smoothly indicated that he was fine with this by saying that he has a close friend who was the first openly gay board member of the New York Stock Exchange. So that is a plus if I decide to work for them - I wouldn't have to be evasive about Polina, who would surely visit the office at some point.
The real issue of course is whether I want to make a job change in this economy after only a month at my current job. The job I have in Princeton is in many ways my dream job - I get to do a lot of creative writing, I don't have to deal with a lot of people, it's low pressure and low stress, and in an interesting field at a very healthy company. The free lunches and free drinks are nice, and the people are great to work with. The downside is that it's not a full-time, permanent position (which is both good and bad) and the commute is wearing Yoshi and me out. So if I stay there, I will probably end up moving to south Jersey in March, and that's not really where I want to live.
I'm not supposed to think about this dilemma until it becomes one - that is, until I get a comparable job offer from the new firm, and that hasn't happened yet. But if it does, it will be one of those life-altering decisions that I'm not eager to make right now.
