I moved to New York City last October, and the search for work has been never-ending.  My greatest success so far has been an ushering position I got through some friends.  They hours are pretty irregular, aside from regularly taking my Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, and that doesn't really make for the most relaxed or ordered life.  I'm grateful to have the work, though.  Nevertheless, when I got the opportunity to do some physics research again, by surprise, I was really excited -- even if I was only offered minimum wage.

Now, for the second time since I've moved here, I've made it a month into a research job only to find out that I'm not on payroll at all.  I'm hoping to sort it all out next week, when the person in charge of payroll gets back from vacation, but there's always the fear that there won't be the money to pay me.  If communication was so good as to put me in this position in the first place, I'm rather afraid that someone didn't check if they could hire me at all.  At my last research position at Columbia, I suspect that's what happened, and why, two and a half months into my time there, I was finally handed a contract which said I wasn't allowed to work more than three months.

Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty down -- and have been a while now.  Having three part time jobs to keep track of, none of which come out to much in the month, feels like getting kicked over and over, and you don't get time to take a break and come up for air.  Every turn has meant pushing the whole way to find any work at all and then pushing again to get myself paid for it.  I can't say I'm impressed with hiring at the colleges of NYC.  It makes me angry, and it's one more challenge I really don't need now.

Hopefully I'll get paid for the month I've already worked, but as the summer comes and the tutoring and concert seasons start to fade out, I need to find a new summer job, and I just feel like I've been kicked too hard.  I don't know where to look.  All of the job search sites seem to only have listings with skills I don't have, experience I don't have and degrees I don't have.  More than ever, I want out of this country -- at the very least, this city.

Hoping to post about other things I've been working on once any of them hit a point worth talking about.