frozen.

there i was yesterday, minding my own business and trying to touch up on my review of the commerce clause, aggregate doctrine, and that damned lopez holding (what did lopez hold again?? i keep forgetting. see? azn airhead), when lo and behold, something happened to make my heart sink.

this: the governor of california has called for an immediate hiring freeze and budget cuts throughout the state until the $ 14 billion-plus deficit is fixed.

frozen, just like that.

upon this bit of news, i rushed over to the state personnel board's website. this site is the hub for all the open job positions throughout the state for all the bureaucratic agencies. i wanted to see how the governor's announcement impacted the job announcements. there had been a good four pages worth of openings for my job classification when i was last on the website just the night before.

finally, after many attempts to open the website at all, i found there are only two pages of openings.

nooooooo!!

good news: some of the jobs i applied to are still up. . . . but who knows for how long. they can just as easily yank those posts down in the next 30 seconds. that one department i interviewed with last week still has their four vacancies posted up. and i have ten applications that i finished putting together today that i will put in the mail anyway in the half-hearted hope that someone will see my application, fall in love with me, and want to interview and hire me.

uh-huh. not bloody likely. but please let me dream, else i have a complete mental breakdown before i even take the bar. :-P

and i'm not above begging; in the next few moments, i'm going to call up the agency that i interviewed with, now that they will have had a good week to think about it, and beg them for the job.

i guess we'll see. . . .

but it sucks having to worry about a job at this point. i was so sure that i would be employed and have a job lined up by the time march came. and i didn't want to waste any time; financially things are just getting tighter and tighter by the day -- and my student loans are set to go off deferment in may this year . . . .

fuck! a hiring freeze now of all times!

i guess this is karmic retribution for always being so full of myself. this is the fates smacking me on my ass for always being presumptuous. i was so sure that i would be hired at least by now! and yes, i did want to be hired by the state. i want my old salary and my old health benefits back. i need a new stash of contact lenses and a new pair of spectacles. and to tell the truth, i'd like to go see my shrink again. that ol' coot rocks. i miss him.

being poor is NOT the way to go. i never thought, after my starving grad student/law student days, that there'd still be days like this. and yet i take full responsibility for this. i'm a huge believer in personal responsibility. i belong to that school of thought that says that if you manage to dig yourself into a hole, then you're more than capable of digging yourself out. well, time for me to prove this mantra true.

ugh -- but after the bar.

i'm going to give it a few weeks for something to come through for me job-wise. if need be, i'm just gonna get outta town and go where the job market's better.

otherwise, i'm in deep frozen shit come march.

this is supposed to be my good luck year. this is the year of the frickin' RAT, the year that is one-third of the way through the zodiac cycle. good things come in thirds, every four years.

so why do i feel totally fucked at the moment?

damn it, where's my bloody mary? i need a drink.