Sarah Government
The title of this entry is derived from the book Jennifer Government, a futuristic novel where all the countries have been taken over by corporations and the last name of every citizen is the name of the company they work for. Except I’m not going to be directly working for the government, only in an indirect way through a company contracted by the government. And I won’t be using firearms. Or chasing John Nike (guilty of having teens killed in order to sell sneakers) across several continents.
It was quite a process. I saw an ad in the paper for a case managment job that looked interesting, I sent in my resume on a whim. Weeks and weeks after I thought I wasn’t going to hear anything back, I got a call. I went in and the first thing they did was put me in a small room and give me a test SAT-style- 50 math and verbal problems to do in 12 minutes. Then I had to answer a series of personality and work style questionnaires. I couldn’t believe it, talk about intimidating. Then I had the interview. A couple weeks later, I had a second interview, this time with four people. When I left even I knew that it was a good interview, but I didn’t know if it would be enough. Then on Monday they called offering the job.
I am very excited. But today I had to tell my company, and never before have I felt so much like I am letting people down. It’s hard.
#178/#9 to go- Despite a late meeting, horrible Burlington traffic and a determined carpet cleaning salesman, I went and ran 16 miles tonight. The sun was already going down behind the mountains by the time I got on the road. I rigged up a miner’s headlight type of thing on my camelpack, which was equivalent to having a flashlight shining from my left shoulder. This turned out to be very effective, as half of my run was in darkness.
The stars came out and I turned off my light and ran by the glow of the milky way for a while. I saw two shooting stars. I thought of a book I read a long time ago that ended with the girl and boy sitting on a bench holding hands and the line “they looked past the moon and the great satellites of Jupiter and dreamed upon the stars.” That book hit me hard, because more than anything, I wanted to be noticed by a boy. Not just noticed, but recognized in a soul mate kind of way. How incredibly exquisite that yearning was, when I was 12 going on 20. (Or so it felt then).
The run was ok, muscles a little tight and loss of energy in the last 3 miles. By that time it was so dark cars were blinding me with their headlights when they passed by. My last long run of the training- finito!
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Sep 24th 2003Uncategorized