(no subject)
Oh, it feels like summer. At first I wasn't looking for jobs out of panic, out of a constant dread that my (not unreasonable) expectations couldn't be met by any job I was qualified for. Now the dread is still there, but less so, but mostly I just want to play ukulele and hang out in the park and have a real summer like grown ups don't get to have.
It was noted recently that I'm a little obsessed with being an "adult". You could say I moved up here because I had something to prove, that I've developed more than a few affectations with the aim of convincing people I'm more mature or sophisticated than I actually am. I've realized since I moved up here that I'm pretty shitty at being an adult, which is especially alarming because most of my peers seem to be adjusting to total freedom pretty well. My closest friends have found whatever reserve of maturity it takes to just get shit done, to move forward, and I'm sitting here sucking my thumb and waiting for someone to spell out my future for me before I get on with it. I want a magic bullet, I'd be content with a magic bullet that makes me stop wanting magic bullets.
I wish I could just embrace being irresponsible and selfish and scatterbrained, come to terms with it somehow, work it to my advantage. But there's no real advantage to that, and I'm barely able to function up here. Every time my mom calls she asks me/threatens me to move home, come back to where it's safe and where someone can enforce a sense of direction on me. I'm never going to do it, but right now both options seem untenable.
It doesn't help that I really have no idea where I'm going next. It would be so much easier if I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but nothing sounds good. People my age are married, for fuck's sake, people my age are shaping themselves into what they're going to be for the rest of their lives. We're past the point where we're experimenting with our personas. We were supposed to have them by now, we're supposed to be refining them, and I'm still trying on goofy hats (metaphorically and literally) and hoping one works. I see people all around me who know what they want, know who they are and who can therefore reasonably extrapolate who they're going to be and I have so much respect and jealousy for them. I want to make. That's all I know about the next ten years. I want to be constantly creative in some way. If I never worked retail again, that would be ideal, too.
Really, I've outlined this before to everyone who's likely to read this. My fears of the present and of the future are well documented and nothing new, and in writing a big self loathing livejournal post about it, I'm really just procrastinating looking for jobs. Craigslist is so underwhelming. It's either big time jobs I can't get or it's introductory level positions in horrible places (graphic designer for a start up that specializes in plumbing fixture related mass mailings, anyone?). I'm going to do the retail walk up and down Shattuck and surrounding areas when I leave today, but I'm really not looking forward to pushing unnecessary products on people and getting yelled at by schizophrenics for a living again.
I suppose I should ask again if anyone around here has any leads. Rachel, Valerie, Anna, and Kris were all kind enough to give me leads which I promptly squandered, some more spectacularly than others. I apologize. (I'm not like this at the workplace, sweartogod.)
I guess I should also say that even though this sounds really bleak and sad, I'm not really depressed. My relationship is going kind of startlingly well, and when I see my friends (I'm horrible at contacting people), it's fantastic. There's a lot wrong, maybe more so than ever (after everything that happened in February, I still haven't talked to my dad, which is what really makes me feel like a failure to humanity. Like every time I've stopped talking to my dad, resuming contact only gets more impossible- the longer I wait, the harder it gets to fix lost time with words. Like everything else right now, it's something I've got to just man up and do, but also like everything else, it feels so much more complicated than that.), but most of the time I feel pretty happy, if not exactly functional. I'm starting to fear that I really am depressed, just depression manifested as codependency. God knows it's happened to me before, but usually when I'm depressed I'm sad AND codependent instead of one or another.
I said three paragraphs ago that I should stop bleeding all over the internet and get back to the job hunt, didn't I? God I hate job hunting.
It was noted recently that I'm a little obsessed with being an "adult". You could say I moved up here because I had something to prove, that I've developed more than a few affectations with the aim of convincing people I'm more mature or sophisticated than I actually am. I've realized since I moved up here that I'm pretty shitty at being an adult, which is especially alarming because most of my peers seem to be adjusting to total freedom pretty well. My closest friends have found whatever reserve of maturity it takes to just get shit done, to move forward, and I'm sitting here sucking my thumb and waiting for someone to spell out my future for me before I get on with it. I want a magic bullet, I'd be content with a magic bullet that makes me stop wanting magic bullets.
I wish I could just embrace being irresponsible and selfish and scatterbrained, come to terms with it somehow, work it to my advantage. But there's no real advantage to that, and I'm barely able to function up here. Every time my mom calls she asks me/threatens me to move home, come back to where it's safe and where someone can enforce a sense of direction on me. I'm never going to do it, but right now both options seem untenable.
It doesn't help that I really have no idea where I'm going next. It would be so much easier if I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but nothing sounds good. People my age are married, for fuck's sake, people my age are shaping themselves into what they're going to be for the rest of their lives. We're past the point where we're experimenting with our personas. We were supposed to have them by now, we're supposed to be refining them, and I'm still trying on goofy hats (metaphorically and literally) and hoping one works. I see people all around me who know what they want, know who they are and who can therefore reasonably extrapolate who they're going to be and I have so much respect and jealousy for them. I want to make. That's all I know about the next ten years. I want to be constantly creative in some way. If I never worked retail again, that would be ideal, too.
Really, I've outlined this before to everyone who's likely to read this. My fears of the present and of the future are well documented and nothing new, and in writing a big self loathing livejournal post about it, I'm really just procrastinating looking for jobs. Craigslist is so underwhelming. It's either big time jobs I can't get or it's introductory level positions in horrible places (graphic designer for a start up that specializes in plumbing fixture related mass mailings, anyone?). I'm going to do the retail walk up and down Shattuck and surrounding areas when I leave today, but I'm really not looking forward to pushing unnecessary products on people and getting yelled at by schizophrenics for a living again.
I suppose I should ask again if anyone around here has any leads. Rachel, Valerie, Anna, and Kris were all kind enough to give me leads which I promptly squandered, some more spectacularly than others. I apologize. (I'm not like this at the workplace, sweartogod.)
I guess I should also say that even though this sounds really bleak and sad, I'm not really depressed. My relationship is going kind of startlingly well, and when I see my friends (I'm horrible at contacting people), it's fantastic. There's a lot wrong, maybe more so than ever (after everything that happened in February, I still haven't talked to my dad, which is what really makes me feel like a failure to humanity. Like every time I've stopped talking to my dad, resuming contact only gets more impossible- the longer I wait, the harder it gets to fix lost time with words. Like everything else right now, it's something I've got to just man up and do, but also like everything else, it feels so much more complicated than that.), but most of the time I feel pretty happy, if not exactly functional. I'm starting to fear that I really am depressed, just depression manifested as codependency. God knows it's happened to me before, but usually when I'm depressed I'm sad AND codependent instead of one or another.
I said three paragraphs ago that I should stop bleeding all over the internet and get back to the job hunt, didn't I? God I hate job hunting.