It is time……

I’ve had long warrior poet hair for nearly two years now and it is with a heavy heart that I concede its time to finally shave it all off. Its been bothering me for a while now but the clincher came from work. I have to tuck it behind my ears and wear a baseball cap-like a sex offender! No really, and the beard doesn’t help, I look like one of the founding members of the KKK(when I’m in work). Its time to get rid of it, plus my boss assured me that I can lose the baseball cap if I’ve got short hair ie: I will no longer look like a weiner who wears a baseball cap.

Downsides are few enough; I’ll look permanently angry for a while, can’t do cousin IT impressions anymore and have lost the option of shaving my head to avoid ‘the fuzz’. Ah fuck it, this is the longest I’ve ever gone without shaving my head. I’m gonna trim the beard so that its all the same leangth, I’ll look like a small burrowing animal-it’ll be savage!

Always bring your shovel if you want to go to work

I love working in the Deli. I’m yet to show up for work in the full of my capacities but nobodies seemed to notice it and the shift sandwich system is pretty relaxed so I can probably start getting breakfast lunch and dinner there for free-result! Its also provided conversations like this:

X: Hey man, whats your name?

Me: Rua

X: Rua? Man, I ain’t never heard a name like that before. Thats pretty crazy

Me: whats your name?

X: Julius

Me: fuck off

(and banter did ensue)

I have however noticed that everyone who’s been working there for more than a few months is a fat fuck. I’m a fat fuck too though so its ok. I vividly remember the first time I finished an American portion, a full three and a half weeks after I arrived. I was so proud of myself, it was a real milestone. Then I looked down and realised that there was a lot more of myself there than when I left Dublin….meh, just means I’m harder to kidnap

You want me to take a what test?!

I am currently sitting on my living room couch waiting for a callback about a job handing out fliers(I know, glamorous). The guy called me up in the Mall but(in a fit of unparalleled idiocy) I asked him to call back in an hour because I couldn’t hear him over the anarchy in the background. “oh, you’ve a lovely Irish accent” sounded like “welcome aboard, we just have to fill out a bit of paperwork” as well as bit of a come on. Who knows, if the bastard ever does call me back I might live out the American Dream and fuck my boss up the ass(I’m not gay but I’ll learn, for all the dreamers out there…).

I applied for the job with a certain reservation. The add on craigslists made repeated use of those dirty words ‘clean and sober’ and worst ‘drug test’. Granted, gone are the days when my piss was so intoxicated that’d melt clean through the test cup (whilst sprouting out unicorns and other mythical creatures) but I’d still have a hard time passing. In fact, I’ve spent the last half hour trying to work out whether or not I need to fork out $20 on whatever ’snake-oil miracle drug test passing kit’ they have in Walgreens. I found two timetables of how long it takes for stuff to get out of your system and decided that the most accurate one was the one in which I had the best chance of passing the test.

The guy has a fair point though, people in such important jobs need to be checked up on. I handed out flyer’s with AAF in Dublin, it wasn’t the worst job ever but the people we were working for were assholes. It quickly got to the stage where we were showing up drunk not for fun but out of some warped sense of principal. The worst was handing out Wall Street Journals having gone straight to work from the night before, literally standing up at a session table downing drinks and saying “we goshta gofer worrrrrrr…..k”. Our supervisor was not impressed, I stopped getting phonecalls after that. AAF got the odd one but only because she wanted some of his honey*.

Speaking of which, his girlfriend is coming over which means…… he’s moving out which means…… I get a room all to myself for a full 4 days!! Although, I can see the Coy getting promoted from the floor in the girls room……………nahh! 4 full days!

 

*not literally, you fucking moron

connectivity

AAF and I got a bit of a shock the other day when we realised a few things:

1. we hadn’t very much money

2. the rent is due in 3 weeks which means we need to both be working by the end of next week to have it on time

3. if we’re not working by the end of next week we may as well go home because….well….the Irish are coming! Apparently the bulk of J1ers are due out next week, typical fucking paddies-coming over here, taking our jobs and seducing our women folk

I think it says something about my organizational skills that we’ve been here less than a week and are already having to think of places we can nick toilet roll from.

Things started to look up the second we printed off our CV(resume)’s though.

We were sitting in Quiznos lumping them into envelopes when the old guy beside us asked, out of curiosity, what we were up to. We started chatting and, no lie, it took a minute or so before I realised that I was listening to the thickest West Belfast accent I have ever heard!

Half an hour later we had a list of contacts, addresses and businesses as well as a name to drop when we arrived. All of them were in old Irish neighbourhoods and all of them were pubs(most of them dives too)-I thought the Celtic Tiger had killed off this system, apparently not. He even dropped THE line, the line that you will hear off any ex-pat in almost any major city; “ah sure this city was built by the Irish”.

Its a funny one, I’ve heard my mam, my dad and a fair few of my aunts and uncles come out with it about different places over the years. Its always used in a positive light, ignoring the fact that regardless of how you dress it up we only built half of America because there was no work for us at home. Of course, me and AAF are from a different generation-a different country-and we’re on holidays! So we decided only to use the old system if we got really stuck. I mean, I could start working as a labourer tomorrow(there’s actually a MacTírean construction company here and I’m probably related to them-I just don’t want to ask) but I came here to have fun, not to work. Moreover, watching football aside, I’d rather leave Ireland at the aiport. I left to leave.

We stayed up late that night wasting time with online resumes for big shops that neither of us could finish because we don’t have social security numbers yet-pain in the ass! Then AAF convinced me to shave and wear a shirt for job hunting the next day.

I hate shaving, I hate being clean shaven-I look about 12 years old. I’m clean shaven maybe once or twice a year and I hate it. But, it worked, I start work in American Eagle next Wednesday having walked in with a resume and charmed the pants off the manager(literally, I had the guy in stitches!). I don’t own any American Eagle clothes, they always seem too clean and expensive looking but fuck it, anything is better than construction.