Life Likes to do This to Me November 20, 2008

Ugh, ugh, ugh.  I got laid off from my really great job on Monday.  I spent the first twenty minutes after I got out of work crying in my car, which makes it hard to drive on an interstate at night.  I spent the first 10 minutes of getting into my apartment crying, and then I spent (thankfully) 0 minutes crying when I was on the phone with The Lawyer.  I think my voice sounded weepy, but oh well.  I was very upset.  I spent all of Tuesday filling out multiple online applications, since that seems like the only way to do these things now, and I spent a decent amount of time feeling like shit and crying on Tuesday.  By Wednesday I had gotten over the mopey stage and continued filling out apps and submitting resumes.  This has resulted in 2 interviews, one “we’re reviewing your resume and will contact you if we want to interview you” and one sort-of job offer.  This lack of job is truly terrifying.  Thank goodness I started working part-time last week at a law firm that is partnered with my former place of employment.  The bad news is that it’s 40 miles away.  So I only go there 2 or 3 times a week to work all day.  Hardly pays the bills.  Besides, I really loved the place that I used to work, and I was happy every morning I got up to go there.  All I really wanted was to work there full-time.  I miss those people terribly.  That’s another reason why I was crying so weirdly.  I mean, getting me to cry is difficult at times.  I’ve been so stable lately that it was shocking to me that I was crying so much.  Anyway.

Here’s how I got screwed over.

There has been talk of hiring me full time for a long time now.  There would be meetings where they would say that they were going to talk about hiring me, and then nothing was happening, so I was living in suspense for a month.  Then, they finally had *the meeting* and subsequently said nothing.  Again.  But then the regional VP said he wanted to talk to me on Monday.  I was super nervous, and the screwy part is that I left the meeting both encouraged and totally distraught about my newly found lack of job.  He sat me down and said that good wouldn’t be the word to describe my work; awesome would be.  In his 15 years of working in the financial business, he has never had this high of a rate of client retention, and that’s because of my work.  He said he sees a future for me in this business, and he wants me to get licensed as a financial planner.  And then he laid me off.  It’s because of this stupid contract that they have between the employment agency and their company.  If they want to hire me full-time officially with their company, they have to pay the employment agency an astronomical amount of money, which is not in their budget right now.  So the only solution, since they want to hire me, is to lay me off until the contract runs out (6 months from now) and hire me again.  So they gave me 2 weeks worth of pay as severance to help me stay on my feet until I find another job, and they gave me a recommendation.  They can’t even give me job leads because of this stupid contract.  That stupid agency really has their balls in a vice grip and has screwed up my life and ability to pay for things, like food.

All in all, though, they were really good to me despite this whole thing.  The severance pay and the rec helped, and it’s encouraging to have 2 interviews lined up 24 hours into the application process.  All this happened at a bad time, because I am in the big applications push, and the credit card company keeps calling me because I can’t pay my credit card bill this month.  That added pressure doesn’t help.  They seriously call me 10 times a day.  It’s also helpful to have this other part-time job on the side so that I’m not completely destitute.  But I’m pretty sure that I’ll be eating Ramen for a while.  I know that I’m already losing weight, and I’m pretty sure I don’t eat more than 1000 calories in a day.

It’s just stressful to be looking for a job and trying to apply to grad school and wondering how I’m going to pay the bills and have people after me and all the other stuff.  I seriously didn’t think that taking a year off would be this hard.  It’s insanely difficult.  It’s been rewarding in other ways, but the job issues that I’ve been having don’t make life very easy.  I really thought that I would be making better money than I do now.  Sometimes I wish going to live at home for a year wouldn’t have been an option that would’ve driven me insane, but such is life and choosing to be on my own to keep my sanity and be independent.  It’s really been a stretching time, although I’m feeling farther from academia and from the life of thought that I used to live because I don’t have time to think when I have too many other things on my mind.  Sometimes I feel like I’m getting dumber and that I’ll have to settle for a life of less than what I want just to survive.  It’s terrifying.  Absolutely terrifying.

At the same time, though, there are people who believe in me and who are encouraging me to keep pushing to get what I want.  The rest will come.  I have to believe that at some point, I will get a job and will eventually get around to getting what I want.  I have to believe it.  Otherwise, life would be too depressing right now.

I’ve Been Kind of Blah Lately November 12, 2008

Lately I’ve felt kind of boring as a human being.  I don’t know if this has anything to do with the utter exhaustion I’ve been experiencing over the past few days, but I feel zombie-ish.  I’m hoping to use this weekend to recover.  I’m actually not doing anything this weekend, and I have no plans.  The Lawyer was actually going to be in town this weekend, but it turns out that he is going away again, so I’m free.  I suppose this is good considering that I am, after all, exhausted, and I need to finish my personal statements and writing samples, so I suppose that late nights and dating and the things that come along with that and which use up lots of energy would be inconducive to getting apps done.

But I suppose the thing which surprises me most is my even-keeled mood.  Remember the days of yore when I was the main target of everyone who wanted to entertain themselves by getting a reaction out of someone?  Those days are gone.  The Lawyer keeps trying, yet he is amazed by my lack of reaction to his various gestures such as surprise ice, ass-grabbing, etc.  Thankfully, though, he does not attempt to get a reaction out of me by saying something stupid.  I suppose this would be the best tactic.  I don’t know if I’ve ever reacted to the other stuff.  I can only blame this evenness on the residual effects of Lexapro.  Sometimes I don’t like it very much because I feel very boring.  But then I remember how I used to be and I change my mind.  Besides the Lexapro, though, I’m also no longer at Evangelical Institution, which had me in a constant state of being pissed off 24 hours a day.  The only time you can catch me angry now is when I’m commuting to work.  Most people can’t drive.

Last weekend was very strange.  I went back to Evangelical Instution so that I could get paid for doing a job for Collegiate Activity, and I really didn’t like being back there.  Not only was it weird to see how things had changed in my absence, but I also felt oppressed all over again.  I didn’t like it.  Plus Collegiate Activity is so far in my past that I’m completely over it and wouldn’t care if I never did anything with it again.  I only went so I could get money for grad school apps.  A good thing, besides payment, which resulted from my weekend was that I visted The Lawyer at his parents’ farm outside of a certain city on a certain river.  It was just us there, so various *things* happened.  These *things* keep getting better with time and practice as well.  For reasons besides these though, I really enjoy spending time with him, and he bought me a book, which is pretty much like buying me flowers.  We also lit a fire in the fireplace and read the NY Times and books until we started getting sleepy.  It was truly an enjoyable evening.  I’ve always wanted to date someone with whom I could sit around and read.  I mean, the man’s reading Paradise Lost for crying out loud, and last night we had a phone discussion about how it’s possible to have different experiences when reading the same book at different times.  There is the age difference, though, which worries me sometimes (the fact that I could possibly be rejected because I am “young”, not because I have a problem with it), and there’s the whole fact that I’m leaving in less than a year.  These things are unfortunate because I’ve never felt like I could really date most guys my age and the unfortunate fact that personal goals and school get in the way of relationship opportunities.  I can’t change my plans, though, and it’s not as if I would this early into the game.  But these facts do creep around in the back of my mind, and I’m sure they’re in his too.

I suppose the reason why I’ve been blah is that I’m just tired.  Also because I have yet to find out whether or not I get to keep my current job full-time.  The VP told me that he wants to see me tomorrow for 15-20 minutes, and I have no idea what this means, considering that he made it sound like he just wants me to help with something, but I have reasons to think that he might tell me what is up with the job:

A) They had a meeting on Tuesday in which they were supposed to discuss me.

B) Everyone’s been kind of “well, you know, it wasn’t that exciting” when I asked them how the meeting went, but considering that they told me beforehand that they were going to talk about me during the meeting, it might just be that they’re not at liberty to say.

C) The VP never asks me to help him with things.  He has assistants for that.

So tomorrow night is probably going to be a night of debauchery either way, unless he actually just wants me to put some shit in a spreadsheet.

I Don’t Feel Like I Have to Convince Myself Anymore November 11, 2008

There is strange liberty that comes from being absent from Evangelical Institution.  I spent most of my time there disgusted with the general population, some of the things they believed in and most of what they did.  I spent a lot of mental energy coming up with research that disputed what they said.  I think the most surprising thing that comes out of that research is that a lot of the more “avant garde” professors appreciated what I was doing, yet I don’t think they knew that the research I was doing was gradually leading me away from faith and religion.  I feel like I can be honest and say that lately, I’m just not really sure what I think about Christianity, other than that what I think is that it has too many problems for me to really buy into.

Retrospectively, I spent much of my young adult life trying to convince myself over and over again that Christianity is definitely true, and that as a system, it doesn’t have very many problems.  I also spent a lot of time trying to fit into the “Christian culture” and find a niche there.  Both of these reasons are probably why I went to Evangelical Institution.  But all of these things ended up creating an inauthentic self, one which was constantly divided between what I wanted to be and what I really was.  And it really had nothing to do with the idea of Christian redemption, because at the time, I really believed that redemption was possible, but I still felt like I wasn’t really this person who was standing there being this Christian.  I’m not sure that I’m ready to renounce religion altogether, but I can finally be honest with myself about religious matters without having to worry about feeling completely out of place.

There was a point in my life when I was ready to end being a Christian.  But then I had a moment of clarity, shall we say, when Christianity started making sense again.  It felt good at the time because I could finally feel normal again in an environment where normativity is almost as much of a value as Christ himself.  But I still spent a ton of my time doing research on things in that culture that I didn’t like and didn’t think made much sense.  Par example, when I was writing my paper in Women’s Literature about Biblical roles for women, and even the radical conclusion I came up with didn’t feel authentic.  I felt like I was copping out in some way.  I would probably throw out that paper now becuase it doesn’t say what I really think.  I thought that if I wanted to be a Christian, I had to think x, so I concluded the paper that way while still sliding in enough radical ideas to get by.  What a waste, considering that paper traded off with early drafts of my thesis.  It’s sort of sad to think about how much time I spent at that school trying to be something I was not.  I’m so glad I’m out now.  I’m looking forward to grad school so that I can be on some free ground that isn’t burdened by normativity and privileging of one way of thinking.

On the other hand, the idea of redemption is not all that bad, and I tend to like literature that has some redemptive ideas in it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re Christian or support Christianity.  A lot of people think it does, but having redemption in a work doesn’t necessitate Christianity.  I find it interesting that a lot of the ideas that I was taught in class have led me to conclusions that wouldn’t be supported by the person who taught them to me.  I find this interesting indeed.

I’m not oppressed anymore, damnit, and it feels fucking awesome.  I’m done with trying to force myself to believe something.  If I can be intellectually honest with myself and believe it, then I will.  But I’m not going to try to force myself anymore.

No wonder I had so many mental problems in college.  Seriously.  No wonder I was so depressed all the time!  No wonder I had issues with studying.  IT’S NOT BECAUSE I’M INHERENTLY DUMB OR INCAPABLE OF DOING GOOD WORK, IT’S BECAUSE I WAS BEING INTELLECTUALLY OPPRESSED.  This takes off so much pressure on grad school.  Don’t ask me why, but it does.

P.S.  I can also realize (which I did several months ago) that The Jerk and I had issues not because of religion, but because he was a jerk and manipulated me, which is why my instincts were telling me to turn around.