New home, new job

I have found a job! And just in time, too.

I’ll be editing and refreshing content for a US real estate website, probably about 30 hours a week. Thank the fucking baby Jesus.

I found a cheap room for rent too–with a tub!–in a large house closer to El Centro. But here’s the thing: My roommate will not stop talking. Ever. She is an expat from Texas and apparently she cannot have a moment of silence in her life. She’s either talking to me, or talking on the phone or the tv is playing in the background. It’s just verbal diarrhea. It has no use. There is no valuable information to be gleaned from the content. And she never asks anything about me, not even what I do for work.

Pretty sure she’s a narcissist. She’s constantly trying to manipulate people into doing things for her. It starts like this: “Do you need anything from the store? I’m going and taking a taxi back, so I can pick up whatever you want.” This is code for, “I don’t want to bring all my own groceries up two flights of stairs, so if I buy you one little thing, you’ll have to bring all my groceries up the stairs.” Um, no. I’m wise to your nonsense.

She calls me several times a day. I never answer. And she is one of those people where if you hit “decline,” she immediately calls back again and again, thinking you will have to answer her eventually. Clearly she doesn’t know me at all. I can play that game to eternity. And she messages me like 10 times a day with things she seems to think I need. “I know you told me that you aren’t going to buy a mattress cover for the bed you just bought yourself, but here are these three places that sell them,” and on and on and on about the gal she knows at the store, and how it’s such great quality, and just more stuff I really don’t care about. I just ignore them, because if I answer her with what I REALLY want to say, I will have to move out. So, I’m learning to just smile and nod. Smile. And nod. Are all Americans just completely nuts and I never noticed because I was too close to it?

But, I have a roof, a bed, and a bathtub, so it’ll do for now. But it does look like I’m going to need a place with a generator, so apartment hunting is in my future–AGAIN. God, I’m so sick of moving.

I’ll need a generator because for the past several days we’ve been experiencing major power outages. We aren’t even really sure why. I’ve read that our system was “sabotaged” by the outgoing head of power, who just got shitcanned by the new president. I’ve heard that major repairs are necessary because they haven’t been done in ages. And I’ve read that it’s just that the reservoirs are super low because we are in a drought, just like most of the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s a combination of all three. Who knows? All I know is I have no control over any of it.

Today the power was out for 8 hours–between 2 and 6 a.m. (perfect time for an outage) and between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (the worst time for an outage). We’re told to expect more of the same tomorrow. I can’t get any work done without electricity, and the only place where the power stays on is in large modern apartment buildings with generators. **Sigh**