Adventures in Part-time Jobbery

**About this picture: This Nashville woman on Craig's List will let you have her desk, but you must take her printer, baby food chopper, and other bag of crap, or no deal. People kill me!**

For the past couple of months, I have split my time between doing therapy with autistic children, working at a high end retail store, and looking for potential writing and/or acting gigs in New York. One nice thing about having a couple of different jobs is you're not at any one place for long enough that you can really loathe it with as much passion as a full-time position affords. By the by, there are some wacky goings on in the world of part-time jobs...

Exhibit 1. Craig's List run-ins. Since my schedule is different all the time, I'm often around during the day and gone afternoon/night, which makes me the ideal candidate for meeting up with potential craig's list buyers. Our first official buyer came last week to grab an extra table we had. I'd ignored some of the first few responses, based on the fact that they seemed possibly crazy and/or they wrote like this: Wud u tk 30 for it. I lke fxn stuff. tks... Since when did long words like "you" and "thanks" become too tedious for middle america to type out? So this one lady seemed really nice and we planned a rendez-vous at our apartment. After we'd set up a meeting time, she wrote back one more email that said, "Do you have any side tables?" What is this, Wal-mart? I don't think so. I was really nervous before she showed up the next morning. What if she tried to pull the "I only brought 30 dollars with me?" scam, or she was a lunatic posing as a normal person. She finally showed up, we chatted for a few minutes, and then she launches into her life story:
"It's kind of funny how I have a daughter," she starts. "Oh yeah?" I ask, innocently. "I had a son that I gave up for adoption but I was still allowed to see pictures of him until he turned 5, but then we he was about to turn 5 I got really sad. So I decided to have another baby!" Which, naturally, would be most normal people's response to that kind of situation. WHAT? And then, "I didn't like the guy who got me pregnant though, so I had to get rid of him." Good move. But wait, there's more: "But then I met my first husband at the hospital. See, I'm diagnosed with bipolar. And he's schizophrenic. I knew it wasn't a good idea so I tried to wait but then I married him anyway. But it turns out he was no good so I had to get rid of him too." Zoinks! We've got a live one! She ended with her goals for the year: "I'm still technically married to him cause I couldn't afford a divorce, so I'm hoping for a real good tax refund this year so I can pay for a divorce and marry my boyfriend, who's in jail." Oh my. The thing was, she was so genuinely grateful to have furniture. She said, "This is so much better than paying 9 dollars a month to rent a center" (I'm not sure why people use that by the way. Can't you just get a temporary one from a garage sale or something? sheesh) and didn't try to give me less money or anything. I decided that sometimes the kooks are the best for doing business with.