(
me: omg, have you read about these guys yet?
Blake: that webpage makes me pretty sure it's a front for supervillains
me: heh--offshore hideouts? why have a lair in a cave when you can have a lair with a view... OF SHARKS??
Blake: exactly! easy shark access, very important!
)

Thank God for the internet (welsh ghost slugs! Lego architecture! blog Blake told me to read! Banana Paper! ... i'm still at work, and will probably have to cancel my plans for tonight at this rate. However, there is no possible way i would still need to work tomorrow, so plans for the rest of the week should be on track:

Sunday: Tuscon. House hunting with Elyse & Anton!
Monday: Phoenix. Triphopping Brew
Tuesday: Albuquerque. Ben T! with possible appearance of little brother Ross!
Wendesday: Denver. Ryan and/or JoAnne! (college friends)
Thursday: ??
Friday: Should be back in EC!!
Saturday: Wedding Thang.

Though for now i want the scanner to work & Aaron to come back. Not gonna lie, this whole 'not gonna let you know when you can leave until you can leave' thing makes it really difficult to get the right amount of groceries... and i am huuuuuungry. :(  ¶ 13:07 0 comments

  in the background of all my favorite photos  ¶ 00:04 0 comments

  i've said in a few different formats to a few different people that my job is bizarre, but it's sufficiently bizarre that i really haven't been able to fully explain its bizarreness to anyone, perhaps save Andrea in San Diego. So let's try it.

The job itself it pretty easy. I identify rocks all day as one small bit of the renewable energy industry and get paid for it, so as far as that goes it's the perfect job. It falls almost perfectly on the trendline i've noticed in a few other wage-earning-endeavors that the more a job matters, the less the bosses/coworkers hassle me/the less my time is actually "managed." (ie, at the survey, working on water use issues, there was probably not a given week in which any of my bosses had any clue what i was actually up to, while at Kinko's, i'd type up dumb shit all day long and has every minute was accounted for) Which is to say i matter enough here that for the most part i am left to my own devices.

My problems with this job are not with the job-description itself, but all these awesome lifestyle things that necessarily go along with it. Our locations are remote, my coworkers are... well, we'll get to that part soon enough, and it's more time-dependent than almost anything else i could imagine.

As for the location, Imperial County California is a hellscape. It's unbearably hot, flat and boring. As a geologist, i'm supposed to like the desert (no living crap covering up the good stuff, as Prof. Brown would say), but living here is an entirely different venture. i honestly can't see anything, everything is the same pale tan for miles in every direction, all the buildings are off-white and all the cars are white. i continuously have to squint, and i'm pretty sure the headache i've had for the last four days straight is directly related to that. There are, of course, mountains in the distance 3 ways, but most of the time it's dusty (smoggy?) enough that the mountains aren't visible from Brawley. The other day there was a dust storm, closely followed by a few stray raindrops... but at no point did it actually rain hard enough to stop the dust rising from the ground. Good job, California... obviously the complete lack of rain is why this a desert, but still; after Wisconsin & Washington, practically no variance in the sky seems... well, like a fucking hellscape. And it's only nice out around sunrise & sunset, which doesn't help my sleep schedule. The towns near here, Brawley, El Centro, Holtville, all pretty much fail as "towns."

Which gets me to my next issue: here. There's not a good bookstore or coffeeshop an hour in any direction, which would be bad enough normally to make me crabby, but beyond that everything is an order of magnitude more difficult than it has to be. Upon reading the last paragraph, you may have logically enough asked me, "Well, Sarah, if it's so bright in Southern California that it literally gives you headaches, why don't you get sunglasses?" The answer is that i have tried; more precisely i started trying almost a month ago. i'm used to EC/Madison/Bellingham, where a google search, asking someone, or in the course of a car ride somewhere one can find the things they're looking for. Here it took 3 full days so far to get glasses ordered (and, i might note, that i was responsible enough last time i got new glasses to save the prescription, so the normally-difficult stage of scheduling/remembering to show up for an optometrist appointment was entirely avoided), and then yesterday i finally got the message that my glasses were ready. Today we're waiting for cement to dry, so i was able to leave the site for awhile, and i drove into town only to find--after a 45 minute drive--that not only is it Saturday so they're not open (which, had i looked at a calendar, i would have realized wouldn't help)--that they'll be closed not just one day but until Wendesday afternoon next week for Memorial day or whatever. i have similar sob stories on my hopes to acquire stamps, a hard hat with ear-muff thingys attached (i SWEAR this object exists, i've seen it!), canned air, and an oil change, among other things, but i think we all get the point: i spend way too much time doing things that were easy/not so time-consuming elsewhere. Apparently they don't believe in helpful websites with things like store hours down here, my co-workers that are articulate enough to ask questions of aren't from here either so they don't know any more than i do where a good car-fix'um establishment or whatever is, and driving is both time consuming and stupid. People should just, like, label their businesses. Why is that so hard?

The absolute weirdest thing about this job is how little i talk to my coworkers. There are, at any given time, at least a dozen other people on site, but most of them are in their trailers... doing who knows what, really, and some are on the rig floor (which is the one other place after my own trailer and the shakers area that i do visit, but i don't exactly go up there just to chat) and the roughnecks are wandering around, driving forklifts and hauling things around with chains and so forth. And then there seems to be a whole bunch of people who sleep all the time in their white trucks, and i really don't know what's up with that. Some days when things are going on, i eavesdrop quite a bit on the rig phones, which is honestly the only way i even know any of their names. It's super frustrating, because i'm the only girl here, everyone knows who i am. But there's like 20 guys, mostly Mexican, always dressed the same and covered with mud and/or grease, and all hidden behind sunglasses and/or drowned out by background noise whenever i do talk to them, that way too often i have no idea who they are even if we have talked before. i've worked with 4 different rigs on 5 different wells, so this one is finally the second time i've been with the same crew (so at least i recognized someone my first day here), but that makes for at least 60 different people between the different rigs that i've probably been officially introduced to and then never spoken to again. Plus, since we're doing some of the math, there are all the other auxiliary people, from the fisher (whose whole job is to fish for a lost bit and sleep in a white truck in between) to the dude who sprays water on the dust to, today, at least 5 guys in 'Crane Services' trucks... i could really go on. i am amused by how specific some of these people's jobs are, i mean at the last site there was 3 guys whose entire job was to X-Ray broken pipes. Seriously. So maybe 20 other random people in a given week at a site, again all of whom remember me and who would probably be kinda insulted that i don't remember them. Back to the people who are always here, at least there are somewhat distinct 'looks' for any given job description; the roughnecks are usually locals in their 20s and really strong, the toolpushers are usually in their 30s, and the drillers are in their 40s or 50s and have beards and are overweight. Mudmen can be in their 30s to 50s, but they spend a lot of time at the mud coolers and mixing buckets of stuff; plus a lot of them used to be Mudloggers too, so they're pretty often good people to ask questions of.

The thing i don’t like about all this that i didn’t anticipate is how weird working with all men is. Coworkers have honestly done double-takes when they first meet/see me, and I have some pretty fun stories that would probably be the basis for a good sexual harassment talk in any office setting in America. (At the last site i had a conversation that abruptly ended as such; Dude: "I should get back to work before they think I'm down here flirting with you." Me: "Heh, you know, you can talk to me and not flirt." Dude: *honestly confused*) I really really miss people in the north; in the past few weeks i went from having gone on maybe 2 dates in my entire life to mastering the Gracious Exit. And the thing is that when i hung out with those guys in question, i didn't view it as a date; i mean, both at home and in WA, i have several male friends that i've spent substantial amounts of time with and never had any 'so are we going to date or... what?' issues with. The thing that irks me the most is the seeming impossibility of making friends here; it’s either dates or no conversation whatsoever. At home it would never have occurred to me that if i didn’t sleep with someone they would never talk to me again. i’ve been to Mexico, i’ve been to Spain; but i didn’t anticipate how the cultural difference would affect me; and i never thought that the Tourist vision of machismo is really pretty tame. There's definitely a difference in that aspect of culture down here, and i'm not a fan. So i’m still trying to figure out how to deal with this. Am i hardcore enough to work in a male-dominated industry? Should i be angry that most of my interactions involve my relationship status or be flattered that they think i’m cute? Also, working with all men means talking about football more than i could possibly care about and getting asked for advice from the ones who are in relationships (how the shit would i know, dude? i don't know your girl... just don't be a jackass and it'll be fine).

As for my other-coworkers, that is, the peoples also employed by the same company as me/most of whom have the same job as me, they are all pretty awesome. Simret (okay, there is one other female out here, but she's married) is awesome, and Aaron our tech is awesome. They both hate this area, possibly even more than i do, and in conversations with them we've discussed a few things to deal with all the crappiness down here. Both of them, somewhat like me, i suppose, are down here for a reason: to make money. Simret is actually pretty inspirational, once you get her reasons for doing this job out of her; she wants to make enough money that by the time her husband graduates (he's doing a phd in some... malaria thing? medical, in any case) she can take some time off and raise their son in whatever new city he gets a job in. The major advantages of this job, of course, are that there's really few other ways at our level of experience to make so much money (save mining and... ewww... oil). Simret's a girl on a mission, and she knows her stuff and is apparently immune to some of the less pleasant aspects of this job. Aaron... well, Aaron is very expressive of his dislike for Imperial County (sometimes taking wrath out unnecessarily on broken metal things, but that's a whole nother issue), and pretty much every time he's here (to fix things i break and/or cannot identify), we spend a lot of time talking about how awesome the northern midwest is though i tend to emphasize Wisconsin and he Minnesota (which brings me to the only thing in football i've ever cared to hold an opinion about: Packers: 3/Vikings 0. Take that!). i actually find it pretty interesting, Aaron reminds me of Meldahl sometimes... which is to say, like Meldahl, i enjoy that he exists, he enjoys fishing almost too much, he says weird shit about other weird shit and it is amusing, but in normal life i've never gone out of my way to make sure Meldahl is gonna show up to every party or whatever. We just have nothing else in common other than believing that the midwest is a superior locale than the southwest. It's just interesting that he's my best friend, precisely because he is my only friend here. i think he has an even worse time down here because i'm pretty used to the fact that my friends are far away and can communicate with enough of them anyway, and i have a lot more transportable hobbies (reading, knitting, etc) where his favorite things seem to only be possible back home (fishing, hunting, etc), and he's been here even longer than me and apparently doesn't know too many locals either (on the other hand, some of my other issues don't affect him). Right now i'm working opposite Jack, who also talks so little i know nothing about him, and i haven't met the other guys at the other site.

As for the time-dependent bit of the job, how busy i am completely depends on what's going on... which may be true of many jobs, but everything here is a process. Regardless of whether or not samples are coming up i should always hang around the site (during my shifts 7-7 that is). Some days they're drilling fast, and i'm running back and forth barely keeping up, with no time in between to even properly analyze stuff, and some days it's slow, like an hour between samples so at least i keep up appearances of working but am really not working too hard. Then there are days like this, waiting for cement to dry or whatever, so 12 hours+ of nothing that requires my attention, and i can do anything i feel like, including for a fun bonus today drive into town. This part is pretty nice, i've read more novels lately than i should admit to, but on the other hand it gets crazy. i mean, i enjoy lots of free time, but there does reach a point where i really don't want to read anymore. Pretty much everyone who i normally talk to on the phone has heard all about every detail of my existence, and everyone who uses gmail is probably aware that suddenly i want to chat every time they're logged in. There are days when nothing happens and the only person i talk to is my mom, which is clearly not healthy. i'm trying to keep myself busy with projects, lately researching stuff for RGE's new life goal (much more on this as it progresses!) and so forth, but sometimes i feel like i'm in solitary confinement (or a really bad version of Groundhog Day with no snow or pianos). i wish i knew more people down here, but the 12 hour days prevents joining any clubs or going out or whatever... sometimes i find it bizarre that it's been a full year since i took that dance class with Allison, and it's been almost a year since i decided i was going to do some martial art--and even more bizarre that i've pretty much failed to follow up on either of those things, as much as i want to. I'm also pretty divided about whether or not i like the 'schedule,' working weeks to months straight and then having weeks off lets me travel and lounge about pretty often; but it's not a good plan when there's things i'd like to be doing that require 'normal' schedules. Suffice it to say i am very excited that this is a shallow (thus short-term) well and i am very excited to be going home in a week or two.

mmmmm... there's other bizarre things about all this, but i think that's enough for now. i mean, i live in a hotel mostly populated by onion truckers, i randomly get free gatorade, i've developed a pavlovian response to 'Mudlogger!', if i have computer issues i call our programmer in Singapore, i haven't seen most of my actual-coworkers in person in months, and i'm learning a whole new lexicon some days and practically forgetting how to talk other days. i don't know if i can overall say i love or hate this job, i like the job, and i'm starting to hate all the circumstances that go with it. There is a certain excitement about it, geothermal is the only game in town down here with the whole not enough water situation (though i'm pretty sure Californians brought that one on themselves and shouldn't whine about it like it's some huge surprise); with the whole economic thing we can pretty definitively say it's one of only a handful of industries that will grow in the near future (my coworkers think that as far as Imperial County is concerned, i think that on a larger scale). If i want to, there will be other sites all over the world that i could work at someday. On the other hand, is being this far away from home really worth it? That's becoming a very real question.  ¶ 19:56 1 comments

  One of the best sentences ever:

So it’s pretty amazing because in this one spot you’ve got everything wrong with the culture; you've got ecocide, genocide, misogyny and golf.  ¶ 16:42 0 comments

  Derrick Jensen is writing a column for Orion now!  ¶ 07:37 0 comments

  It's so hot here that in the time it takes to walk to my car & back, my black carharts are warm enough to hurt my legs if i sit down right away.

i cannot imagine this place in a month or two....  ¶ 10:58 0 comments

  more amusing phone calls

Dad: The wedding's June 6.
Me: Does that mean you want me to be there?
Dad: If you can. I don't expect everyone to come to all my weddings.
Me: Got that straight. Or maybe third time's the charm?

This one will be better than the last one, because 1. i don't have to wear the most disgusting dress known to mankind and 2. there is no possible way Robin could implode my life like Julie did.

In any case, i'm probably going home for the first half of June. OMG, more highway driving... :(  ¶ 10:17 0 comments

  San Diego! Omg i'm in San Diego!

i used couchsurfing, which has thus far been an incredibly great idea, and have been staying with a girl named Andrea for the past two days. Friday i found Imperial Beach, which has a dog park (yay!) and is next to a navy airstrip (boo!). Saturday i found Mission Beach, which has a boardwalk and lots of people playing volleyball, met Andrea, met her friend Michael, and attempted teach her how to knit (we may need another round of it). Yesterday we went to the cliffs by La Jolla, which are AMAZING, and saw hanggliders and crazy hikers and it was awesome, and have eaten burritos for pretty much every meal. Oh, ALSO?? Andrea has a motorcycle, which she let me drive some yesterday...!! i may do another round today, it was marvellous!

That is all. Still deciding what to do today, but am mostly just excited for having functional internet, seeing beaches (OCEAN), and meeting people. Tis great.  ¶ 13:32 0 comments

  Cement job, take 4... whatev, i am outta here tomorrow.  ¶ 07:19 0 comments

  Cement job, take 3... christ on a cracker, betty.  ¶ 17:09 0 comments

  Cement job, take 2... christ.  ¶ 07:11 0 comments

  Me: "I've basically been reading a lot, and realizing that too many people are just fucking stupid."
Tony: "Me too, except replace 'stupid' with 'evil.'"  ¶ 10:55 0 comments

  In the Futurama future, is fusion cracked or what?

(i clearly need another hobby)  ¶ 07:47 0 comments