Applied online at Verizon as recommended this morning. Also applied for unemployment - which I probably should've done earlier, but I'm not good at these things - and put my resume at the LA Workplace site.

My usual temp agency has another interview set up for tomorrow afternoon. I'm not getting my hopes up at this point, but it's worth a shot. It'll be an 11 AM - 8 PM job (at least, I *think* it was AM to PM) if I get it, which is kinda wonky but whatever. Only thing is, though, I have to call someone when I get there to be let in, I don't have a cell phone, and the agency's not 100% sure that there's a phone at the location I can use to call him...

So, yeah. It'll be easy for this to go wrong one way or another.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know I don't know I don't KNOW

I can't go out and fill out random applications. I CAN'T. Just thinking about it makes me feel sick, just a big gut-twisting sense of aversion. I'm sitting here just fallingn to pieces because I'm trapped by my own worthless selfand my inability to get myself to do anything. This is going to be just like it was back in Fort Worth where I couldn't get a job to save my life and I ended up draining money from my father which made a bunch of trouble for him and my older brother and I just can't take it.

...

If I can make it to February, I'll be okay. The electric company will be hiring for their call center then, and I'm incredibly well-suited for that job, what with 13 years of call center experience. But that's such a very, very long time away. God, this is the absolute worst time of the year to lose a job.

I'm so pathetic.

The job went to someone else.

I'm up to the beginning of January in Persona 3, the final haul to the ending. I won't be maxing all S.Links - I didn't follow a guide, and I wasn't prepared for the long, LONG stretches of not being able to work my Links. I'll be close, though; I have Fortune at 8, and Star and the SEES girls are the only ones I haven't put a lot of time in.

Still, I'm kinda getting worn out on this game. 80 hours, though some of that is probably when I fell asleep while playing. And I have The Answer to play after this... oof. Dunno what else I want to play right now, though.

Blegh. My oven has stopped working sometime between last night and tonight. No idea why; the range burners work fine, there's something going on underneath when I turn on the heat... bah. Needless to say, this comes at the worst possible time; I've got a good 6 or 7 meals that pretty much need the oven to be cooked, and I'd feel kinda awkward asking my landlord to fix it since the next time I talk to him it'll be to let him know rent will be a week late at best.

I'll let it sit for tonight and see if it's just temporary, maybe poke at it a bit if it keeps happening.

Just got back from the interview, which went pretty well, I think. I'd be filling in for someone going on maternity leave, and it'll involve working with a system I'm familiar with, so no problems there. If I'm selected, I won't start working until at least the first of the month, which is pretty much what I expected. I won't know until Monday, though, which is kinda blargle. If everything works out, though, and if I prove sufficiently talented, the supervisor suggested they might be able to put me in a much higher position somewhere down the line. That's hopeful, but it's also a lotta 'ifs'.

Waiting on tenterhooks until Monday, then...

Since I've had little except lots of free time lately, I've picked up my saved Persona 3 game again... but, man, I dunno. Persona 4 really spoiled me; P3 is so much more tedious (and P4 is Teddie-ous! HAH! HAH!), the party AI is completely boneheaded, Tartarus sucks, the S.Links are boring... ugh. I wanna go through it at least once to see the plot, but it's working against me. The only good thing is that I started with a partial save from the original P3 (I've got FES now), so I had my social traits maxed early. I'm really, really missing the better tactics and AI, though.

Well, no job yet, but my usual temp agency has me set up for an interview (back at the same company again, of course) on Tuesday. Which is good, but it'll still be probably two weeks of no paycheck to speak of due to Thanksgiving. I'll manage, somehow. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure my landlord will be pretty lenient if I'm a bit late with my rent, especially considering this apartment is so messed up from water damage and so forth. The pay's going to be somewhat lower than what I've been getting (assuming I get the job), but I'll take what I can get. I registered with a couple of other agencies, but they haven't given me anything solid yet.

Just gonna cross my fingers...

See, this is why losing my job is extremely bad for me:

I hate not having a job, but I hate looking for a job even more. MUCH, MUCH MORE.

I am useless lazy person, and it's intensely difficult to get myself out hitting the bricks, especially since I've had zero luck - I mean zero - in the past filling out applications and that leads to a big ol' cycle of rejection and depression and blegh.

This time, though, I've got to make myself do something, because I don't have any support. I haven't been in contact with my father since I moved to this apartment, and my mom's in Nevada, so... yeah. If I don't get something soon, it could be... really bad.

Job didn't work out. It would have been hour after hour of reading tiny legalese and comparing it to tiny legalese, and I just can't stay focused to do that with any kind of speed or accuracy. I wanted to continue, but I know myself well enough that I wouldn't be able to do it. So, back to having no job and no prospects and plenty of bills and it's just so hard to take.

I've somehow gotten some ransomware on my system. This same thing hit my computer at work, and they couldn't fix it without reformatting. I'll probably end up having to do just that, but I'm downloading a program fom PCTools which will hopefully help.

A couple of Persona 4 comics I found out about, a very spoiler-heavy condensed coverage of the first few hours of play, here and here.

I started watching the Giant Bomb endurance run (Let's Play) of Persona 4 earlier today... pretty funny so far. The best part so far...

( ...is behind the spoiler tag! )

When I'm feeling a bit more centered, I think I'm going to write a series of stories that've been running through my head lately. The theme?

Disgaea meets Touhou.

Yeah. There's some choice interactions available right there. :D

First, though, I wanna put something in for the CoH Architect Contest they announced. I have a couple of existing ideas that kinda work with the 'hero doing evil for the greater good' theme, but not really perfectly. Will have to give it some thought.

As some may know, I was told last Tuesday that the contract position I'm currently on was going to be ended this Friday. This... kinda hit me at a bad time, emotionally speaking. Anyway, I went in to my temp agency last Thursday and tested for another job opening (apparently the only one they had available), and I was told today that I'd been accepted. It's at the same company and building, too; I almost suspect my agency doesn't work with hardly anyone else.

It's... weird. Yesterday, I was a total wreck. Even started hyperventilating a bit at one point. This morning, though, I came in to work unusually... focused. Dunno why, but I was able to concentrate on things more than I usually am. But after I was told I would still have a job after all, I nearly fell to pieces again. Just the emotional whiplash hit me pretty hard, I guess.

Anyway. I'm back on track, more or less, though I'm still far from 'okay'.

I've been spending my time offline this week, just because I'm in the mood to catch up on my huge backlog of unfinished games. Currently in rotation are Diablo 2 - going with a Summonancer, which is a highly lazy playstyle - and Disgaea 2, though bets are being taken as to how far I'll actually get before getting distracted by something else. One day I'll finish an NIS game. You'll see.

So tired of feeling like this all the time. So very tired. It's like if anything goes wrong, any tiny little thing turns out different than what I wanted, it sends me into this downward spiral where I just feel like total crap. It's stupid and it's pathetic and I'm sick of it.

I jumped in on the Champions Online free trial this weekend, and... I think I'll get it, it's pretty fun in its way, but it's probably not worth a long-term subscription.

One of the main problems is that it *feels* like a video game, even more than other MMOs. In WoW, you have this huge sprawling world with thousands of places to go, and in CoH you have huge city zones with people walking around, mobs who almost seem to have their own life, and so on. In CO... you have a choice to start in what pretty much amounts to the Desert Level and the Snowy Level. The cel-shaded graphics work against it in this, I feel. I dunno if I'm explaining myself well on this, but that's my impression.

Second, the fact that it has only one server is a mixed bag. Sure, it'll cure the perception of some servers being better than others, but thirty or forty instances of a single zone with 100 people each means that there's not much chance of building up a community. And you have lots of choices of powers to take, but that just makes it easier to shoehorn yourself into a bad combo. Admittedly, the respec feature counters this and lets you remake yourself up to and including your initial power choices, as long as you're willing to pay through the nose in game currency.

So... yeah, fun, but CoH is the better hero game, I feel. But it is fun to walk my literal tankmage (Power Armor/Sorcery combination) right up to a supervillain and drop my Disc One Nuke (Sigils of Arcane Fire) right in his face.

So.

In the middle of getting caught in a rainstorm... no, wait, that isn't entirely accurate. While being mugged by the heaviest rain I've seen in a while, part of my already-broken car door handle - specifically, the bit I was using as a handhold to open it - decided to break off even further. Opening the door from the outside has become twice as hard, and opening it from the inside (the inside handle broke off long ago) is impossible without twisting around in the sheet and using both hands to scrabble at it. In, as noted, the rain.

Whee.

The classic easy way to replace something like that, I'm told, is to scavenge one from a junkyard, but I have zero automotive mechanics skill; I wouldn't even know where to begin. I highly down Pep Boys keeps model-specific door handles in stock, so I'll probably have to go to a dealership, which will take money that I don't actually have.

The other option is to try to jury-rig a handle by gluing/screwing something into the remaining bits. But given my past history with such things and my tendency, despite all intentions, to give up when I get tired and say 'good enough', this route is fraught with danger.

My life sucks.

So, just a few days until NaNoWriMo starts, and I haven't even decided on an idea, much less developed it. So, as usual because I'm stupid and lazy, I won't be participating this year. Not that it matters because I'd never finish it anyway, and even if I did nobody would want to read it. So yeah.