On calls, coincidence and caution

Friday came firmly under the heading of A Good Day. It didn't start off good. I'd spent most of the day plowing through some tedious, and unnecessarily complicated, data entry work, before calling my mother for a bit of a bitch about my continuing unemployment and poverty. As I hung up the phone it rang again and I answered it. Ten minutes later I called my mother back and shrieked at her "I just got a job!". I'm so excited and so relieved to finally have something, and the job itself is almost too good to be true. I'm experienced at it, it's good pay and it doesn't clash with my uni classes or Saturday job. Perfect! It's a library assistant position and , perhaps weirdly, I can't wait to be back in a library again. My love of books is a little excessive and I've felt out of touch with new releases over the last year.

That night I went out to a friend's engagement party in Angel. Surprisingly, since that's reasonably far from our homes, I bumped into some other friends there so, when the engagement party started to die down, a couple of us joined them. I had such a wonderful time, what with the combination of job happiness and fun friends, that it was hard to remember I had my Saturday job the next day. I managed to drag myself away however, and headed home. As I waited for the bus at the end of my tube journey a man pulled up in his car and offered me a lift home, saying he didn't like to leave me standing on my own at the bus stop. Now the bus stop is pretty isolated and it was very late at night, so it's possible he was just trying to be helpful, but there was no way I was getting in a car with a stranger. He seemed perfectly pleasant, and didn't press the issue at all when I said no, but it's just not worth the risk. It's a little sad that we have to be so careful. I can't help but wish, not only that I were more trusting, but also that everyone was deserving of my trust. It would be nice to live in a world where I could leave my door unlocked or accept lifts from passing strangers. Sadly it will never happen, so all I can do is try to think of the most polite way possible of rejecting that lift. After all, I wouldn't want to be rude to my potential murderer, now would I?

On schemes and signing

My state of unemployment is lingering on and I find myself getting somewhat concerned by the time I have on my hands. It's all too easy to sink into a somewhat gloomy place in these circumstances. I don't much like being left alone with my thoughts at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. So, in an attempt to counteract this, I'm trying to find productive things to do with my time. It was the main reason I took up writing this blog, but no work = no money = no funding for adventures = little to write about other than daytime television. My new plan for keeping myself busy actually came to me in a dream and stuck around. Given my apparent susceptibility to dream suggestion, I should probably be grateful I didn't dream about joining a cult. Or marrying a pygmy hippo. What I have decided to do is to start learning sign language online. I have no idea when this would possibly come in useful as I don't actually know anybody deaf, but I thought it might be interesting. I've found some online resources, including some very helpful sites with video dictionaries demonstrating the signs, and made a start on my project. Today I've learnt the alphabet and a few key phrases of the 'how are you?', 'my name is...' variety. We'll see how it goes. I'm notorious for giving up on things when I get bored or they become hard, but I'm fairly determined to get somewhere with this.