Of course, the situation was my own fault: got to campus at 8:30, set up in the brick, had breakfast (a bagel), and drank three bottles of water while reading four books of the Iliad for class. Left the Brick, went to the bathroom, left Hawkins Hall, and walked to Linthicum, where I went directly to the lecture hall — do not stop, do not collect $200, whatever the fuck that saying is — took my seat, and halfway through class realized that my bladder was sending an urgent message to my brain:

Dear Snay,

You really need to find a urinal ASAP, and in the future, please don’t drink so much goddamn water.

Love,

your bladder.

Of course, getting up and walking out of the room isn’t really an option, as Dr. B made clear the first day of class. The second day of class, when someone got up to go to the bathroom, she did let them go, but only after making fun of them. So, since I’m a pansy who would rather be tortured by a full bladder then risk public humiliation, I just let my bladder keep on sending signals to my brain while I resolved never again to drink three bottles of water and taking it on faith that my bladder was empty.

So, of course you remember Net Speak Girl, and if you don’t, go refresh your memory with that conveniently placed link. In short, I L-O-A-T-H-E her. For those of you who don’t read “dash”, that means I’d really like to drop kick her off the Psychology Building’s clock tower. As class begins winding down, and people begin packing up, and I’m having delusional fantasies of emptying my bladder into a urinal, Net Speak Girl raises her hand. Is Doctor B aware that class is already over?

Dr. B, in fact, still has two minutes left on her watch, as she explains to the whole class, so why doesn’t everybody stop packing up, and we’ll use that time to finish Book Eleven of the Iliad?

I very much wanted to grab Net Speak Girl, violently cram her into a urinal, and then unload my bladder onto her. Suffice to say, getting to the bathroom, unzipping my jeans, and letting loose a stream of urine that lasted for several minutes was the most amazingly excellent feeling I’ve had in, oh, at least two years.

Last week, I wrote about an angry e-mail I fired off to my leasing company because the dog across the hall wouldn’t stop yapping and they seemed powerless to do anything about this. Mind you, when they caught me with three cat several years ago, they were on my ass and wouldn’t get off.

Well, apparently, it paid off, because while I was at the career fair, they called my cell phone. I’d turned the volume down so I didn’t hear my phone ring, but I had a lengthy voice mail. The funniest part was when the woman said, “we recieved your … (long pause) … e-mail…” Anyway, she went on to say that the leasing company was aware of the problem, numerous complaints had been recieved, and the leasing company was (finally) aware of the problem. Apparently, they suspect two dogs are in the building.

Anyway, so now I feel a little regretful about the tone I used in my letter, and a little ashamed of how often I used the “fuck” word, and all of the derivations thereof. I’m going to call her back later this afternoon, and apologize. Coolness factor, though: I’ve now got the direct line to the office in charge of this mess, and a request to call anytime before 6:30pm if I hear the dog barking so a maintenance guy can be sent out to listen to the barking and help with the documentation.

Good stuff.

So I dressed up in my monkey suit and mosied on down to the career fair at the Towson Center yesterday. Although I had to park on the opposite side of the stadium, it wasn’t a far walk, and was very enjoyable in the warm weather which was melting all the snow into the streets (and made for a treacherous walk to my apartment tonight from my car). Note to self: get a new sport coat. The old one was a “hand me down” from my dad several years ago to wear to my grandfather’s funeral. It was very tight across the back, ick.

In any case, I had an enjoyable time at the career fair, and I would like to publicly thank Anonymous Coworker and Broadsheet for helping me fine-tune my resume, as well as for all their advice. It goes without saying that they’re drinking on me at the next blogger happy hour. (I don’t mean that literally, I’m not a table, I just mean I’m buying them a lot of beers is all. Even then, I don’t think I’m adequately repaying them).

I wandered through the entire fair, although a lot of booths I didn’t visit either because I haven’t majored in accounting (seeya, IRS), or I don’t want a career in the military or police (although I did seriously considered a career in law enforcement several years and did quite a bit of research into it and I would like to drag bad drivers out of their cars and beat the living pisshit out of them), or because I don’t want to work at a bank or in financing. I was disappointed that there did not seem to be any marketing firms (that I saw), although I did have interesting talks at several government booths. While the recruiters there didn’t seem overly thrilled to have “another English major” (one woman at a state government booth turned to her partner and actually said, “he’s the second English major! What do we have for English majors?”), they generally seemed mollified and a little happy when I told them I had some background in restaurant management and inventory control (and I think the navy logistics thing would be cool, even if it would mean relocating to Pennsylvania). I also spoke to representatives of some publishing firms, while a little bird whispered in my ear (er, via my cell phone) that I’d missed a big local printing powerhouse. Birdy’s advice? “E-mail ‘em your resume with a note that you talked to them at the fair but had run out of resumes. They’re not going to remember.”

I think I’m also going to put some effort into getting my resume out to marketing firms. Mind you, I don’t exactly know what it is marketing firms do (they, um, market stuff?), but I’d imagine they probably have more openings for writers of the creative side of things than they might for technical-oriented writers.