I'm thinking of quitting my job. Strangely enough, the work itself is fine. I love all the residents. I thought certain tasks, such as... well it seems inappropriate to write about it.. but I thought I wouldn't be able to handle it. But those things don't bother me at all. The reason I want to quit is mostly the long drive to Gresham. I don't like driving that much, and I hate leaving Portland. I want to be in my own community. Along the same lines, the other attendants are so... how do I say this... ghetto. I like most of them, and we have a lot of fun, but we would never be friends outside of work.

I dread going to work -- more than most jobs I've had, but less than petitioning or teaching English, so it's not that bad. Still, I've thought about it a lot. At first it was the scariness of learning so many new skills and doing complicated tasks for the moody and capricious residents. But I'm totally past that. Now it's only about the location and my coworkers.

I wanted this job because I am interested in being a nurse, and I liked that there was opportunity for a career, as well as benefits. But at this point in my life, when I'm still rebuilding things and getting used to living again, I'm less concerned with the future than I am with the present. I can think about my career later. I want to reintegrate myself with my surroundings and people in my own city. I want to be less isolated. Living with my best friends is great but it gives me little motivation to talk to anyone else, and working with a bunch of people I'd never talk to outside of work doesn't really help.

But who knows. Maybe I'll stay.

In other news, I finally got my car fixed. There are certain experiences like this that make me even more certain that Portland is a charmed city. This Volvo repair guy put his card on my windshield a while ago, and since I've never paid anyone to repair my car before, I called him, rather than try to choose between all the repair shops. I decided to be honest that I've never had it repaired, and always relied on my male friends to fix it. As an innocent looking girl who knows nothing about cars, someone could easily have taken advantage of me, overcharged me, or whatever.

But this guy is like a Volvo evangelist with a heart of gold. He specializes in late 70s Volvos (mine is from 79) and was full of stories about how Volvos are the best cars, and snapped at me if I said anything disparaging about my car. He even had a Volvo tattoo. He is obsessed. He only charged me $180, only $45 of which was for labor, and fixed the power steering as well as the tie-rods (?) which I guess is why my car wouldn't steer. He said, "I can't believe you were driving it like that" and told me I had quite a "project car."

After I drove it home, I noticed all the other stuff he'd fixed: the left turn signal, the headlight frames, the grill (which had been held on with mailing tape), the dash lights, the headlight switch, and a bunch of other things that seemed to be working better. And he didn't charge me anything for any of those parts, let alone for the labor. My car looks SO much less ghetto now. It's almost to the point where maybe my friends won't laugh at me for driving it. But I love it. I don't care what they think.

In other news, we finally got the two male cats fixed. This consists of cutting their balls off, if you didn't know. Now they have bloody scabs and they still try to hump Foo all the time, but they stopped spraying, which is very nice.

I've been so productive, getting a lot of things done, like actually buying my mother a birthday present and mailing it on time. I always overdo presents so it ended up costing me about $50, but oh well. I've been clean for eleven months. And I bought a hoodie with a St. Johns Bridge screenprint on the back. I'm going to either New York or San Francisco with my disabled friend at the end of April, actually on my birthday. The China trip is off but he has a definite trip to Russia in six months. I'm vegan again. I know I always say that but this time it happened kind of by accident. In fact, I'm starving and I think we're going to eat at the Vita. Goodbye!