Hot and humid today, and now, as it approaches evening, I can see thunderheads gathering over the mountain. Hopefully it will rain some tonight and cool off. I didn't take into account before moving to the tropics that they can be...well...tropical.

Despite the recent arrival of my income tax refund, I am still short on money. My fondest wish, currently, is to move out of my sister's dorm room. I have not yet reconciled myself to the idea that it's entirely possible to live off the land here (though it does look good on paper), so I spent today, like most weekdays, looking for a source of income.

Kelly Services called yesterday and said they had a sure-thing position lined up for me, working graveyard shift in a call center. Trouble is, the next training class for it doesn't begin until the middle of May. Nevertheless, in the hopes that I might be able to get some interim work with them, I rode TheBus to downtown Honolulu. There I killed some time before my appointment goofing off on foot in the vicinity of their office and calling a friend back in Baltimore from a pay phone. With still half an hour to pass before my scheduled time, I went in anyway and got started on the mound of paperwork that Kelly requires. Application form, drug testing release, background check release, I-9, Federal and state tax forms, and more besides. I think I may have signed something entitling them to my firstborn.

At some point when I was clearing myself out from under this pile of paper, my interviewer had returned from lunch. I presented her with the paperwork, my ID, and my resume. She reiterated that the call center job was a can't-miss opportunity, that they were desperate for warm bodies to coordinate conference calls, and that my body would suffice. She gave me a standard battery of clerical tests for the meantime. We discovered that my typing speed is 93 WPM at a near-perfect rate of accuracy, and that I am also qualified to operate Microsoft Word and Excel. With that, and a vague promise to call me if something in my line came up, I was out the door.

It was still pretty early, so I got myself back on TheBus and rode to what I had been told was the general vicinity of the Hawaii Humane Society, for which I had seen a want ad. After a lot of hiking around and retracing my steps in my uncomfortable job hunting shoes, I found myself at their office. I made the happy discovery that from there I could see the building in which my sister (and by extension, myself) lives, thereby saving myself another bus fare. I went inside and filled out another application, only to learn upon turning it in that they wouldn't be even interviewing for 3 more weeks.

I meandered down to my sister's building, which was trickier than it might have been, as the H-1 was in the way. There I gratefully changed into something more comfortable and put in a little work on two freelance gigs that I hope to develop.

One is a computer science tutoring gig, for which I whipped up a flyer that I will print up and post around campus. The other is a little more interesting. I'm having cards printed by VistaPrint that say:

Do you have problems? (Of course you do.)

Tell me about them. [Ground Control], Psychological Counselor

...with my phone number and e-mail address. While my formal training in psychotherapy amounts to exactly nothing, I am known for being fairly sympathetic and I have an excellent "listening face." If I can get people to pay me $50 or so an hour to listen to their troubles, and offer some common sense advice, I won't refuse. I plan to go down to the University library and suck up a few books on psychological theory before I start handing out cards. If any of you are psychologists and outraged at the idea of a civillian practicing psychotherapy without a license or degree, remember that bartenders and priests have been doing it for centuries.

Well, in the course of this writing, it has passed from evening to full-on night. Time to get a little dinner and hit the copy shop. I will node another daylog in the near future to share the results of my experiments.