![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Gloriously Full Day . . .
Oct. 12th, 2007 11:52 pmSo I had a little interviewy thingy with another legal staffing agency. This one was in Midtown, just by Arts Center station, so I took MARTA down to spare myself the expense and frustration of driving and parking intown.
The staffing agency is in the same office building where the courier company I used to work for is. (It's still there. No, I don't really feel like asking for that particular job back.) When the directions said "19th Floor", my thought was "whoa, they must be a big deal" but then I realized when I got there that I'd been to that particular floor before--it's actually a "business center" that sublets small offices and maildrops for various businesses. Back in my courier days, I was assigned about once a week to pick up the mail from a certain mailbox and deliver it to the home office of the owner.
After some initial hesitation, I told the nice girl at the reception desk who I was there to see and she nodded and handed me a clipboard with a million forms to fill out and a copy of the Employee Handbook for me to keep. Ah, the temp lifestyle. It was a touch surreal hearing her answer the phone as I made my way through all the paperwork--her greeting announcing the company name would change, presumably depending on which line she answered.
Once I was through claiming my deductions on the taxation forms and signing away my firstborn (at least I don't have to pee in a cup without probable cause) I read the Employee Handbook and the lady I was there to meet finally came out and took me back to her office so we could have a quick face-to-the-resume chat. It was brief and pleasant. She mentioned that they were actually getting more requests for permanent positions than temporary ones for paralegals at the moment. I assured her that permanent positions were just fine and dandy with me.
So off I went back into the streets of Midtown. I ambled over to Colony Square for a bite of Food Court lunch (I felt like splurging) and then figured, heck, I'll go to the High Museum before I MARTA my way back home.
The museum was still doing its Members Only Preview for the shiny new exhibits that are opening next week. I'd renewed recently, back when I had more cash to spare, so I got to wander said shiny new exhibits in relatively uncrowded conditions.
One was "Inspiring Impressionism", which put Impressionist artworks next to the earlier works that the artists had studied back when they were art school geeks. It was an interesting study of how artists who push things in new directions are much more effective when they have a working knowledge of what went before. (This is why I want to smack creative types who deliberately shun studying the past, for fear of corrupting their precious "originality"--but that's a rant for another day.)
The other was "The Louvre and the Ancient World", which was basically a chunk of the Louvre's antiquities collection with a little history on how the Louvre wound up with such a collection in the first place. Lots of Roman and Egyptian stuff, which rather reminded me of my tour of duty as a security guard for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory. (A job I rather enjoyed, but that only gave me part-time hours.)
So, having soaked up my fill of artness, I made my way back to the MARTA station. The shuttle to Atlantic Station was waiting there, and I decided to hop on it because, hey, it was free and I was curious. Impulse sort of tapped me on the shoulder and I went with it.
The drop off point was right within sight of the 16-screen movie theater they have there and I thought, heck, it's Friday afternoon, I've got nowhere I have to be, I'll take in a movie. So I did.
I settled on The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. I'd never read the book it was based on but had heard pretty good things about it, so I figured if it was a halfway decent adaptation then it stood a chance of being a halfway decent film. Plus, it was starting soonest and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to cool my heels for an hour to wait for a different movie.
It turned out to be quite fun in that 14-Year-Old-Boy-With-A-Mighty-Destiny kind of way. I have no idea how faithful the adaptation is, obviously, and therefore no idea if the minor imperfections in the plot were a function of the original material or not. (Obviously they made changes, since webcams and mobile phones were nowhere to be found when the book was originally written.) And I was pleasantly surprised to find that Christopher Eccleston was in it, being charmingly evil.
Then, probably sated with art and cinema (and wired on caffeine--I had to go and have a movie-sized Coke) I made my way homeward.
I've been working on a site to explain Second Life a little more clearly to people who are just starting out. As anybody who knows me can tell you, I can go on about this stuff for ages, so I set up a website so I can do so. If you were curious, you can check it out here.
Today I took pleasure in acting on impulse.
Today I learned the Empress Josephine (a.k.a. Mrs. Napoleon Bonaparte) was quite the collector of antiquities.
The staffing agency is in the same office building where the courier company I used to work for is. (It's still there. No, I don't really feel like asking for that particular job back.) When the directions said "19th Floor", my thought was "whoa, they must be a big deal" but then I realized when I got there that I'd been to that particular floor before--it's actually a "business center" that sublets small offices and maildrops for various businesses. Back in my courier days, I was assigned about once a week to pick up the mail from a certain mailbox and deliver it to the home office of the owner.
After some initial hesitation, I told the nice girl at the reception desk who I was there to see and she nodded and handed me a clipboard with a million forms to fill out and a copy of the Employee Handbook for me to keep. Ah, the temp lifestyle. It was a touch surreal hearing her answer the phone as I made my way through all the paperwork--her greeting announcing the company name would change, presumably depending on which line she answered.
Once I was through claiming my deductions on the taxation forms and signing away my firstborn (at least I don't have to pee in a cup without probable cause) I read the Employee Handbook and the lady I was there to meet finally came out and took me back to her office so we could have a quick face-to-the-resume chat. It was brief and pleasant. She mentioned that they were actually getting more requests for permanent positions than temporary ones for paralegals at the moment. I assured her that permanent positions were just fine and dandy with me.
So off I went back into the streets of Midtown. I ambled over to Colony Square for a bite of Food Court lunch (I felt like splurging) and then figured, heck, I'll go to the High Museum before I MARTA my way back home.
The museum was still doing its Members Only Preview for the shiny new exhibits that are opening next week. I'd renewed recently, back when I had more cash to spare, so I got to wander said shiny new exhibits in relatively uncrowded conditions.
One was "Inspiring Impressionism", which put Impressionist artworks next to the earlier works that the artists had studied back when they were art school geeks. It was an interesting study of how artists who push things in new directions are much more effective when they have a working knowledge of what went before. (This is why I want to smack creative types who deliberately shun studying the past, for fear of corrupting their precious "originality"--but that's a rant for another day.)
The other was "The Louvre and the Ancient World", which was basically a chunk of the Louvre's antiquities collection with a little history on how the Louvre wound up with such a collection in the first place. Lots of Roman and Egyptian stuff, which rather reminded me of my tour of duty as a security guard for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory. (A job I rather enjoyed, but that only gave me part-time hours.)
So, having soaked up my fill of artness, I made my way back to the MARTA station. The shuttle to Atlantic Station was waiting there, and I decided to hop on it because, hey, it was free and I was curious. Impulse sort of tapped me on the shoulder and I went with it.
The drop off point was right within sight of the 16-screen movie theater they have there and I thought, heck, it's Friday afternoon, I've got nowhere I have to be, I'll take in a movie. So I did.
I settled on The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. I'd never read the book it was based on but had heard pretty good things about it, so I figured if it was a halfway decent adaptation then it stood a chance of being a halfway decent film. Plus, it was starting soonest and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to cool my heels for an hour to wait for a different movie.
It turned out to be quite fun in that 14-Year-Old-Boy-With-A-Mighty-Destiny kind of way. I have no idea how faithful the adaptation is, obviously, and therefore no idea if the minor imperfections in the plot were a function of the original material or not. (Obviously they made changes, since webcams and mobile phones were nowhere to be found when the book was originally written.) And I was pleasantly surprised to find that Christopher Eccleston was in it, being charmingly evil.
Then, probably sated with art and cinema (and wired on caffeine--I had to go and have a movie-sized Coke) I made my way homeward.
I've been working on a site to explain Second Life a little more clearly to people who are just starting out. As anybody who knows me can tell you, I can go on about this stuff for ages, so I set up a website so I can do so. If you were curious, you can check it out here.
Today I took pleasure in acting on impulse.
Today I learned the Empress Josephine (a.k.a. Mrs. Napoleon Bonaparte) was quite the collector of antiquities.
