Almost Officially Unemployed

As you guys may or may not know (regular readers, hmmm?) I'm a Mary Kay consultant. Or, I am for now because I'm quitting tomorrow after I finish my economics test.

See, I kind of feel like I'm doing a bad thing there. I've always been this huge proponent of the idea that women shouldn't feel like they need make up to feel beautiful... hell, that we shouldn't feel a need to be beautiful. A desire for beauty shouldn't be such a driving force in our lives. We shouldn't value ourselves based on how beautiful society thinks we are or aren't.

We're so much more important than that.

We should place our value in our intellect, in our caring nature, in our skills as leaders or listeners, in our wisdom or our compassion or our zest for life. In the fact that we get to be mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. In who we are not what we look like.

And yet, here I am, selling make up to women, telling them they need it to cover up that blemish that doesn't exist or that they're not pretty if they have wrinkles or that such-and-such product will help them lose an inch off of their thighs or reduce those fine lines on their hands and elbows and by their eyes. That they need to use our products as a way to stay young forever because youth and beauty equal happiness.

The MK company motto is even, "Enriching Women's Lives." How pretentious is that? As if you won't have a rich, happy, wonderful, beautiful life without their products to keep you young and thin and pretty.

Eff. That.

I refuse to be a part of it anymore. I refuse to be a part of something that would try to tell this woman that she isn't beautiful because she has wrinkles and doesn't wear any make up. I refuse to be a part of something that claims that it's improving the lives of women when all it's really doing is saying, "oh hey, you're not pretty enough, let's fix that." When it's making them doubt the beauty and personality God gave them.

You're beautiful. Really. I promise.

Why Verizon sucks & Mary Kay is awesome

First things first, in my last post I mentioned that I hoped that reformist Moussavi would win Iran's presidential election, but it's been announced that Ahmadinejad has been re-elected, despite the fact that the vote count is still highly disputed. He's planning his victory parade and refusing to guarantee Moussavi's safety.

As far as life goes -- my family might just kill Verizon Fios. See, on Wednesday, we lost internet. We thought it was because of a big storm that rolled through the area, so we didn't complain too much, but did ask them to get it up and running. They said they would soon, probably within the next few hours; one day at the most. Two days passed. Still no internet. So on Friday, my mom and I started making some phone calls, trying to figure out why we had no internet still and finally, after getting hung up on four times, repeating our problem to five different people, and being told "Oh, our computers show that internet is up in your area," five times, we were finally told "Oh, you don't have internet on your plan."

Excuse me? Yes, we do. We've had it for over a year now.

There was much yelling involved from both my mother and I and finally the (admittedly poor) guy on the phone finally said that he could get our internet up and running soon, but would have to switch us to billing. In the transfer to the billing department, we were hung up on.

Saturday. We'd had a dinner party to go to Friday night that we were already late to by the time we were told we didn't have internet, so further calls had to wait until Saturday morning, when my father could ge involved. While I think my mom and I were doing a pretty decent job, he's a much more intimidating person, even over the phone. However, the same basic thing starts happening to him -- during four hours, he was hung up on three times, talked to numerous people, then finally started demanding to talk to a supervisor because, let's face it, this is getting ridiculous. Now, my father is not a yeller. In fact, he's kind of the quiet angry man that just stares at you when he's pissed and you know without being told that you want to get the hell out of that room. But, on the phone with Verizon, he was treading that thing line between 'speaking loudly' and yelling. Why? Because someong finally admitted that all the previous people we'd talked to had lied to us.

Ummm, what?

Now, we never really figured out exactly what we were lied to about because after we figured that one out, we were hung up on again. But when my dad finally got to talk to a supevisor -- I was scared. I'd never seen him that angry. But it worked -- by 4 yesterday afternoon, we finally had internet again. I think they owe us like six months free, but we're still trying to get them to get our Verizon emails working (because they disabled those and won't give them back) so that hasn't even come up in discussions yet. We'll see how that goes.

The only other real thing going on is that I had my Mary Kay Grand Opening party yesterday. It went really well! I sold almost a thousand dollars in product and everyone had a lot of fun. I have to order a few things because we actually sold out of a few things people wanted, so I'm about to start working on that. I'm really excited!