ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

God, what a hellish week. I’ve never worked two full time positions at the same time before, but if I have any say in the matter I won’t ever do it again. Near the end of the week I finally got up the nerve to call and quit at Manpower. Manpower wasn’t particularly nice about it, but when I went by the hospital to apologize and get my time card, the medical records staff were all extremely nice and understanding about it. They even invited me to come back and visit sometime, and two of them gave me their information to use as references someday if I needed it. They said that if they needed money orders sometime they’d stop in and see me at work. Anyway, so far my new job has been fairly rewarding. The manager, whom I haven’t seen since Tuesday because she got chicken pox this week, is really nice. Her sister, who manages one of the stores in the Kansas City area, filled in for her on Friday, and is now my hero because of her creative Puerto Rican uses of the word “motherfucker”. She even calls women motherfuckers. I cannot help but admire her for her pluck.

In addition to all this, I was taken to a Mary Kay cult gathering by my roommate this week. Some lady stopped into our store after I’d left one day, and invited her to come in to be a model for this thing they were doing, and told her to bring a friend. So I showed up as well with her, and it was kind of a den of depraved horrors. Picture a tiny room crammed with fifteen or twenty scary smiling women, all sitting in front of tiny makeup stations listening to advice from other scary smiling women on how to make one’s lips more pouty. My roommate and I were terrified and at a loss for how to behave, but we managed not to fall beneath the fiery wheels of their feminine blitzkrieg, by watching the others on the sly to see what little brushes and swabs they used. I was dismayed to learn that apparently I have a beauty condition called “small eyes”, although my roommate defied their eye classification. At least no one said I had piggy eyes. After we spent forever applying makeup and hearing them talk about how to incorporate these techniques into your daily morning routine—they do this every morning? I thought—we were herded into this other room fully of rapidly applauding, smiling women with shiny teeth. “I have reached a level of acute discomfort,” I whispered to my roommate.

After being filed in front of all these shiny strangers by the person who had dragged us all in, we were allowed to sit down and listen to some poems about God and then a lady stood up and talked for a while about being inspired to be beautiful. Some of the women were nearly in tears by the end of it, including me. Not because I found it sentimentally moving, but because it all made me so miserably uncomfortable that I wanted nothing more than to go home and never look at the color lavender again. Finally we were allowed to escape, but not before we filled out guest cards with our addresses and forced to agree to host a small Mary Kay party with our female friends. The smiling women didn’t seem to believe us when we admitted that didn’t really have any female friends right now besides each other, although they were very nice about it. We agreed, mainly so that we could leave, and then as soon as were were gone, began planning what to do to get out of this commitment. I think we’re going to go with the story that our apartment has “bad lighting”. Either way, I think we’re in their clutches. We are screwed.