working on a saturday

it's a sunny winter saturday. everything is slightly melting and everyone is out adventuring. it's a day when people get up early just to walk under the blueness of the sky and above the whiteness of the glistening snow. the gold in the air makes us all think of spring...

a case, yesterday, of my physician's office refusing to prescribe six little, individual antibiotic pills without seeing me in person so they could diagnose me with what i knew i had and prescribe me for the drugs i knew i needed has landed me here: at my desk, at work, on a saturday.

an ebscoland rant:

i have sat here since nine-thirty. i have completed over sixty articles, which comes out to more than seven hours worth of work. i need to put in an eight hour day. so you would think i could go home in an hour...

i have three hours left to sit here.

where is my incentive to keep typing? will i get paid more?

i will get my fifty-cent-an-hour raise next september, like every other peon in The Office.

of course, i could have taken a sick day yesterday. paid, at that. which is a benefit i admit i'm very thankful for. but the reason i'm here today is that i couldn't bear to lose two hours of overtime (time and a half) that i had already worked for during the week and which would have been null and void had i just called in sick.

to spend my entire saturday in The Office, on one of the only sunny new england days of the winter, so that i can make forty some-odd extra dollars is sad.

how do you make it in this world from being desperate for forty extra dollars to having a home with kids and a dog and two cars? i feel like it was easier for our parents. somehow they figured it out.

but then, there are the stories of my mother surviving off of a tomato plant that seemed to keep producing tomatoes for her to eat while my dad was away in the navy and she was desperate for food. stories of the family who took her in once a week for dinner and sent her home with the leftovers that she would try to stretch into as many meals as she could. stories of the homemade christmas gifts that she and my dad made out of scraps because they had no money to buy presents. stories of the boxes and cement blocks and boards that they fashioned their furniture out of in their first apartment.

so maybe i'm not so badly off. maybe it's all right.

i'm luckier than many. i have an example to follow.