Big Bad World One

In the roller coaster ride of highs and lows that is life post-college, the past few days would be filed under "low." If I had a filing cabinet that is. If I could afford one.

I'll let Mr. Coulton explain it to you in song.

Clicky clicky.

for some reason you can only upload videos if you actually have them on file. Laaaameeee... But seriously, that song's cool.

In other news, I am going to tap into a high schooler and post one of those irritating, vague "is this about me" kind of posts that nobody but me really cares about:

I hate when people are mad at me. I hate disappointing people and making them unhappy. And I really hate when they're mad at me when I think they shouldn't be. Because that makes me mad at them. And then we're in this stupid cycle of stubbornness and waiting for apologies and whatever, and then I watch movies like What Dreams May Come, and cry the whole time, thinking about last words and how we never get a chance to make amends for things, and THEN I think that even if I apologized it would be snubbed anyway because, well, who knows.

In other other news, I am tired of disappointing people who are encouraging. Why don't people stop being nice and encouraging for once? If you say " I know you can do it," and then I can't, then I have negated and let down your confidence in me. So if people would just stop having so much confidence in me, I could only have myself to please or let down. I'm trying, I really am. But I often feel pressured to live up to other people's expectations of me, which match my own (which I can't seem to meet on my own). So yes. Please stop being supportive.

I am a terrible person for the above post. And so, so ridiculous. I'd hide it from prying eyes of the public, but this is my place to be raw, or whatever. Today's just not a good day. Perhaps tomorrow the roller coaster will have reached a peak. I'm working, and then getting a hair cut and going to North Carolina, so it really better!

Good things ARE worth waiting for... But how do you decide when to wait and when to leave?

That was a long title. My apologies. My apologies also for the boring cat videos. Apparently not so much of a crowd pleaser. Duly noted.

So, I have a question. A problem. A conundrum. Sometime last year, I had this plan for my future. I was going to work at the local school and live in one of the cutest small towns I've ever seen. If they didn't have an opening, I was going to substitute and try again next year. Then I started thinking that I was limiting myself with this plan. The jobs are out there, not right here. So I pursued some, with no results, and went back to plan A. Well, really I guess it was plan B, since I've started substituting. There are still openings, even after school has already started. The problem is that, still, they are farther away than I wanted.

I could have a life here. There's a house that we want (though it might get rented out before we get the money together to rent-to-own it). Michael's band is here. Our families are here. But the jobs aren't here. Not yet anyway. Is it stupid to stay here, make much less money than I had wanted, and work my way up from the bottom for jobs that still might not be available next year (actually, I'm pretty sure the BIGGEST COUNTY IN GEORGIA will have something again next year, and I will know more about the application process and have a better chance by then)?

Or should I apply for whatever opens up, wherever that may be? Should I uproot not only myself to pursue something, just because it came up? My career isn't the only one that matters, but I'm in so much student-loan debt, it feels like I'd be stupid NOT to try to get a higher-paying job. And it's not all about money; I want to teach -- have wanted to since the second grade.

How do you know when to wait and when to act? How do you balance "good things are worth waiting for," "slow and steady wins the race," and "nice guys finish last"?

And why do I suddenly feel like Pocahontas in her canoe?

"Just around the riverrrrr bennnnnd"

Saturday Night with Ferris

Last night, Michael and I decided to stay in (which isn't really that out of the ordinary) with our cat friend, Ferris. Ferris started doing hilarious things (which isn't really that out of the ordinary, either), so we filmed him. I apologize in advance that they are all sideways. I don't know how to flip a video.

This first video is a bit blurry, because in my haste to capture the hilarity I forgot to focus the camera. Whoops.

This next video is much clearer, but doesn't get interesting for a few seconds. Then it gets quite interesting, as Ferris and Michael have what is unmistakably a conversation.

No, it's not what it looks like in this last installment of Saturday with Ferris. I know it looks like something you'd have to pay to see on Cat Cinnemax, but I assure you Ferris is just hopping backwards on a hat. he does this with his prey. Then he and Michael engage in a Father-Son game of catch, in which Ferris volleyballs his mouse into the litterbox. Gross.

So that's Ferris. I promise I will not use this blog to fulfill my Catlady obsessions. You have my word, real content in the next post.

Getting long-winded about hate and fate

During graduate school, I did something I'm not proud of -- something that I'm only now beginning to be able to deal with. I hated somebody. I know we say things like "ohh I HATE her," but hate, like love, is a word that we often fling around casually. Those who have people they love know that how we feel about spaghetti and how we feel about our friends and family do not remotely deserve the same word. I hate Twilight. But I hated this girl.

I'm not going to go into what she did, why I hated her, because I'm never going to be able to get over it and deal if I keep flinging mud. Suffice it to say that I felt justified in the emotion, though it was a scary one to possess. Not even the girl who unwillingly stole my boyfriend in high school was on the receiving end of something that damning. And anyway, we're friends now. It worked out.

But this person... Let me back up a bit and explain that it was a hard year. It was like high school again, which I felt was completely ridiculous because we were all in our twenties. But still, every day of class I felt like the band geek trying to sit at the cheerleader table. As you can imagine (and probably know), I was not cool in high school. And, as cruel fate would have it, I am not cool now. Well. By their standards, anyway. So it was a hard year, because most of my college friends had graduated and left me there, and I suddenly went from having a large handful of similar-interest-having buddies to.... being condemned to the Left Side of The Room. Left-siders were.... "other." I did eventually bond with my fellow lefties, but that there was a division at all was a problem.

Graduate school is hard. Nobody really prepares you for how much harder it is than college, and really, it's weird that it is so much harder. Especially for me - because I had grad school and college in the same school. But it is harder -- so much harder. The work is harder (don't let the fact that you have considerably less class hours fool you), the homework takes longer, you put together portfolios, projects, and papers, in MUCH less time than you ever would have dreamed possible in high school. Add to that the fact that I was working part-time AND student teaching, take away almost any trace of a social scene, and you've got a year that is challenging in pretty much every way.

That kind of an obstacle produces a lot of negative energy. Everything was stressful, and when I tried to unwind we were either forced to stay in town because I was working or making the very trying one-hour commute home. All that frustration needed an outlet, and one pretty much presented itself to me in the form of my own personal scapegoat.

I maintain that what the person did was uncalled for, though for the purpose of this discussion what she did doesn't much matter. But what I did in response was equally uncalled for: I took all the frustration with class, fear of not finding a job, loneliness of having no friends, mixed it up in a salad bowl with pretty much anything else that gave me trouble over the course of that year, and mentally dumped it on her head. Anything that went wrong was her fault. Not directly of course -- she couldn't be to blame if I waited until the night before to write three papers -- but somehow, cosmically, it added up. I needed someone to hate, some target for all this negativity inside me -- and she had done something terrible to me already. It just fit. It worked. So, for the rest of the year, she was my focus. Hating somebody takes work, just like loving somebody. When you love somebody, you have to look past all the flaws, the mistakes, the quirks, and love the spirit of the person. Hate requires almost the same process. You have to teach yourself how to be so utterly unforgiving, an un-movable wall of loathing. The difference between the two is that with love comes rewards. You have the comfort of knowing that when they look at you, they too can look past the flaws, mistakes, and quirks and see your spirit. You make each other happy, you grow with each other. But when you hate, there is no good outcome. It's even worse if they're unaware of the daggers you stare at their head, because then you might as well be pouring all this darkness on the floor; it does you about the same amount of good. And sometimes you trip in the mess and wallow, not letting in any of the light around you.

It's not a healthy place to be. But the past year was like trying to fight my way out of a meat grinder -- almost nothing seemed to work out. And now, I am the last the last person from my class to be without a job. It's humiliating, really. But then it does seem to fit in with the meat-grinder year. A year where I never felt I belonged, where I grew to second-guess myself, felt invisible, and then ultimately at graduation more than one person couldn't remember my name. But that's not the girl's fault. She is not where I need to be directing my negativity. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe what goes around comes around. I believe that, if I spend an entire year refusing to take responsibility for my problems that it would follow that I'd have to continue to have problems until I can grow up and deal with them.

Call it God, call it Fate, call it the Universe (and say it's out to get you -- Matt), call it "Ceiling Cat" (though that's usually who you pray to when your feline friend is in trouble), call it whatever you want. I believe in it -- and I believe that the pieces of the Life Puzzle do eventually, somehow, fit together. There are lessons we have to learn, hurdles we have to jump, and monsters we have to fight. Sometimes the monsters are really ourselves, the inner, darker, slimy creatures that we keep hidden most of the time but have to face eventually.

It's funny, because about four months ago I had a plan for the future. I was going to try to work at the local school (a school I LOVE), and if that didn't work out I would substitute until an opening came along. But then I got desperate. I started fearing that I wouldn't have the dream job, so I chased dream jobs all over the sate (and a few other states). Now, at the end of my search I am exactly where I was four months ago. I'm guessing this is what was supposed to happen.

And speaking of what's supposed to happen, I can't help but feel that the past year might have been a meat-grinder because it wasn't the right thing to do. I applied to exactly one MFA, didn't get in, gave up and pursued another degree -- one I got in without really trying. What if, as a dear friend puts it, the Author of my Story wants their protagonist to do something else with her life? What if the fact that I was given an offer that was then taken away due to a technicality, and then walked into a minefield of a sample lesson presentation -- what if those are walls that have been put up to give the character of my story a detour? What if I need to spend more money, more years in school, and get an MFA, pursue a different path? I'm not going to do anything crazy or drastic right now -- but I can't help wondering if nothing is working out because it's not supposed to. I absolutely loved my student teaching experience, and the actual learning part of the year was incredible. But what if I'm supposed to be somewhere else? Maybe this isn't the plot the Author of my Story really had in mind when the first pages were penned. And maybe one day, I will figure out what kind of Story this is supposed to be.

On humble pie

Growing up, college was never optional. Of course, there was that time when I denied that I would ever be going to high school -- but then that was when I thought you could be a grandmother without being a mother, and I wanted to skip all of that "having kids" business and be some kind of cool aunt. Have the kids without actually having the kids. So it goes without saying that I didn't quite understand how the world worked when I thought high school was out of the plan. I don't remember college ever being an if. It was always a when.

And for the past five years, virtually everyone in my world has been of that mindset. As hellish as the social environment was over the past year, we had one thing in common: We were graduate students. We had fought our way through our undergrad years, earned that incredibly expensive piece of paper, and had come back for more. But not everyone lives in that world, and since leaving academia I have repeatedly embarrassed myself as I attempt to relate to people -- and fail miserably.

The first instance was at the Harry Potter midnight premiere. From behind me I heard what I assumed to be a collection of friends my age talking about having recently graduated. I seem incapable of remembering my own age. In fact, when I worked at CVS, just 2 years from the legal drinking age myself, I found it shocking every time I carded people who looked my age only to find that they were legitimately old enough to purchase their six-packs. Back to the theatre. So, from behind, I hear "Who else just graduated? YEAH class of 2011!!" I turned around and smiled, glad to have the opportunity to forge a connection in the hour we waited for the movie to start.

"I did!" I raised my hand.

They cheered for me. "From where?"

"Grad school!" I said, offhandedly. "Oh," I added, like it mattered. "Milledgeville."

They cowered. Immediately intimidated, they sank in their seats feeling upstaged. I tried to assure them that it really wasn't as impressive as it seems. That I'm bouncing around between parents' houses, unemployed, reduced to borrowing money for gas. That I was even at the theatre at all was nothing short of a miracle/charity case. But they never regarded me quite the same after that. I wasn't just an adult, I wasn't even a college student. I had finished graduate school. To them I must have been so old -- because to me at that age I would have been so old. I turned around and prepared myself for the movie, realizing that when I was their age, it was five years ago. They had just graduated high school.

Sometimes I wish I just graduated high school. That I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, that it didn't yet matter. That I had four years ahead of me, guaranteed to be much less "on my own" than I ever thought at that age. That, though it got old fast, cafeteria food is better than no food -- and that Music Education wouldn't stay my major for long. To think of what I didn't know was ahead of me at their age -- and to know that they don't know their own futures either. Who of their numbers will go to college? What will they major in, and how many times will they change? Will they take out loans as I did, allow their debt to pile up until five years later, "old" by their own standards not so long ago, they too can turn around and intimidate a group of new adults at having finished graduate school, not knowing that what the young ones were talking about had been high school.

------------------------------------

The second instance makes me appear even more aloof, even more unintentionally elitist. I was at wal-mart, putting money on a card to use for gas. Wal-mart, by the way, takes 10 cents off a gallon if you put gas on one of their gift cards. Anyway - So I stood at the register and the cashier turned to a fellow employee and handed her some money. The woman on the receiving end tried to protest, but the cashier insisted. "Let me know," she pressed, "when you get back on your feet. I am happy to help."

Having been yelled at while driving only the day before I couldn't help myself praising her for her kindness.

"Well, I've been there," the cashier replied, punching in my total.

I laughed a little, thinking I could relate. "Yeah. I'm living there now. I just finished grad school so I have NO money in the bank. My mom's buying me gas." I held up the bill.

"I just got out of bankruptcy so I know what she's goin' through," the cashier started. "She's not out of it yet."

Oh. I just smiled. Right. Because some people have real problems. Because some people have kids to feed, mortgages to pay, expenses they never imagined themselves not being able to make. Pardon the cashier for not having any sympathy for the spoiled ex-grad student, who will, eventually, have a job that can pay a mortgage and gas and groceries. Whose parents are generous enough to let her stay with them, whose parents spare what little money they might have for gas so that she might go somewhere -- anywhere. This wal-mart. An interview. Maybe one day a dollar movie. Who whines because, after five privileged years of studying, a job didn't march its way out of the woodwork and land itself in her lap. Because life doesn't work that way. It's hard right now, but it can always be harder -- and for many, many people, it already is.

Okay. New tactic.

Tonight I turned both knobs the right direction after taking a shower at my mom's house. Allow me to explain why this event is both landmark and tragic. You see, at the grad school apartment, for reasons beyond the realm of human logic, the cold and hot knobs must be turned in opposite directions. So at the end of a shower, both knobs must be turned away from each other. This was always confusing when I would make trips home because, inevitably I would turn them the way I was used to, which often resulted in scalding myself (something that NEVER happened in the grad school apartment, because I rarely had enough hot water for a full shower. Ever.). But tonight I got it right. This means that the grad school apartment's shower knob directional patterns no longer occupy the "normal routine" space in my brain. Which means that I am, at least subconsciously getting used to not living there anymore.

I miss that apartment so freaking much.

Look how pretty...

But, soon enough there will be a place for us to call ours again. I watched HGTV for... about 6 hours today, and I found myself getting really excited for the future. Because one day, I WILL have a job, and Michael WILL have a job, and we WILL have a house. Unless, I guess, the world ends before that. But really. Did the world end in 2000? No. So will it end in 2012? Unlikely.

Anyway. My days aren't as unproductive as they might seem. In fact, I have a system. Allow me to share it with you:

I start by visiting Teach Georgia. I run my standard search. I then visit GISA, NAIS, and SAIS, all sites dedicated to independent and private schools. Then, I pull up a map of Georgia Counties, find mine, and visit the web pages of each county surrounding my home county. Then I pull up the web pages for the counties that are one more layer away from my home county. If I find anything, I apply. In the mornings, I use what I call "The Window of Productivity" to make my calls. The Window is a special time of day, after most school officials have had time to settle into their offices for the day, but before lunch. Roundabout 10:00AM-12:00AM. After that is lunch. After that is what I call "The Incommunicado Period," because after lunch stuff gets crazy and you will never get to speak to a principal. When calling human resource departments, it is a little different. They usually will speak to you after lunch, but it's best to utilize The Window.

So after The Window, I run my searches... about 2-3 times a day, because you never know when something will come up. And I have come to a decision.

I think by now I have applications for most of the counties around mine. Sorry to those who have had to write all those recommendations, honestly. I am. If something comes up within 30 minutes of home, I am going to apply, but outside of that, I am not going to worry anymore. If I have to substitute for a while (maybe not even a year. You never know when someone is going to quit or leave, or... whatever else), it won't be that bad. We will probably still be able to afford the one house we wanted to rent, provided Michael gets something gainful enough. So, it should work out okay. Maybe not easy. We might not get to travel or do anything fun. But we'll have a place of our own-ish.

In the meantime, we are going to do what we can to make the bedroom into our own -- oh I hate to use this word so much -- space. It's a little like dorm living, and we know I have done plenty of that, so it shouldn't be too hard to do it again for a little while. I really wish I could screw my hammock to the walls. That would be so cool. But also very damaging, so it's definitely not going to happen. The house we want though... Oh it is so cool - It has a special place on the front porch for a hammock -- little hooks for my straps to loop right in. And one day, it will be ours (sorta). Or if not that one, then a different one. One day, SOMETHING will be ours.

This morning, I looked in my purse to find a note from my dad. It said, "Things get better if you let them. -Dad" My Daddy is a wise man.

cliches about "hanging in there" are dumb.

I've never been one of those "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" kinds of people. Mostly I'm more "When the going gets tough, the weak sit and whine about it for a few days, then eventually keep trying when they reach the point where they realize that doing nothing actually accomplishes nothing." But I wouldn't say I necessarily "get going" right away. Unless you count watching HGTV and trying not to cry for several days as "Going." And I don't.

Wah, Wah, emo, emo, middle class girl complains about having to live at home after college - because I'm sure NOBODY else has to do that, ever - wah wah wah.

The job train has once again stopped in Notown, and I'm very close to jumping off it altogether and wallowing in Pityville for a while. I'm sure I'll find that stamina again, but as schooltime draws nearer and nearer, chances that I'll get a desk with an apple on it and a shiny name plate on my door grow smaller and smaller.

This year has just been SO bad, you'd think it would start looking up, right? I mean it pretty much has to get better eventually.... Right? Right guys?

And now, random typing of keys to indicate my level of frustration with life in general:

ksednaoioawefoweafeiownfnxsnegoiawhsakjejjiwfjeafejafefkeowief

Ever notice how many j's come ou when you do that? It's weird that J is a home key. I never really considered it all that important.

Anyway, as there is no news and definitely no good news, I'm just gonna end this here. Back to the hunt tomorrow.