Around & Around & Around She Goes

[Note: This post is something of a continuation of my entry from Friday, January 14 – follow this link if you would like to read that posting.]

Once upon a time, I was living in the Land of Youthful Ignorance and planning to be an Important Author and Artist. I studied Creative Writing and Literature in college, making sure to take plenty of other extremely useful classes like choir, life drawing, mixed media arts and religious studies as well. During the summers, I worked as a camp counselor and made crafts along with the kids.

Then I decided that I wanted to do something more “significant” with my life. This idea was partly the result of a Bad Dating Experience, which led to a Stirring Religious Experience, all of which I now understand to be the epitome of cliché. (I’m over-simplifying more than a little bit, of course, but sometimes you have to make light of these kinds of things.) So, my next life plan was to become a church employee, providing social and emotional support to college students like myself who had encountered similar Rude Awakenings to Life.

Living with the protection and support of other church members, I was able to remain a fairly blissful resident of the Land of Youthful Ignorance. While I wasn’t able to make a very big paycheck—donations will only pay a fraction of the rent—my parents approved of my involvement with Christian campus ministries and agreed to pick up the financial slack. Not to mention my adorable grandparents, who never came to visit without bringing me a few sacks of groceries and a big jar of pickles for my roommate. So I never had to worry about whether the bills would get paid or that I might run out of food.

But when my love affair with church was disrupted by an Upsetting Religious Crisis, I had to find a new plan for my life. Again. Up until this point, my impressive resume had included employment as a waitress, a summer camp counselor, a church intern and an on-campus dining services employee. Not exactly any jobs that seemed as though they would help me to build a career. At this point in my life, this was a cause for concern—in another year, I would be graduating. I would have a four year liberal arts degree that had trained me to write bad poetry, and only too late into my degree had my boyfriend managed to convince me that as an Author, I wouldn’t even be able to afford Ramen.

When said boyfriend (now husband) suggested that I take a job as an on-campus tutor and try my hand at teaching, I balked. My mother is a teacher, and her many complaints about exhausting days and stacks of papers to correct had made a vivid impression on me. I had already decided that teaching was definitively not the way to go. Yet, the job as a tutor would let me sit in on some of my favorite literature classes with some of my favorite professors. Get paid to listen to lectures on books?! The job had some immediate upsides. And that’s why I took my first teaching gig.

Author. Artist. Childcare Professional. Church Employee. Food Industry worker. Tutor. There still didn’t seem to be a whole lot of direction to my vocational path. Around and around and around she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.

Church Employee. Food Industry Worker. Tutor… and then came graduation—and I still had no clue what to do. In that last year of college, I had discovered that I liked teaching, but didn’t have a degree in Education, so that didn’t seem to be a long-term career option. I had a panic attack while looking at job postings on careerbuilder.com, finding that according to the list of desired credentials that accompanied each post, I wasn’t even qualified to be someone’s secretary. Apparently you need to have clerical experience to get hired for a gig like that—they need hard evidence that you can work the complicated office fax machine. But I figured that even if I did get a job like that, I would spend all day entering data and filing papers. This caused more panic—I pictured myself in a scene from Office Space, taking a baseball bat to the copier.

In hindsight, I have to admit that I was/am too spoiled—all I wanted to do was to play like I was a grown-up, but not actually be a grown-up. I don’t think I really felt up to the task. (If you are interested in this subject, please see my previous entry “The P-Word,” as well as “This Is Why I’ll Never Be An Adult” by Allie on her hilarious blog Hyperbole and a Half.) It has not been easy for me to admit that I have a spoiled attitude, though. Who wants to admit to such incredible immaturity? (Except Allie.)

As I chafed at the idea of working as a secretary, my husband and I came up with a plan—since a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature isn’t that useful on its own, I could go to graduate school! I started studying for the GREs, looking up various Literature graduate programs on the internet, and filling out applications. I was accepted at American University and devoted myself to the intense workload for two years, which took a significant toll on my health. Then after I graduated and we moved to New York, I came to the upsetting realization that I still wouldn’t be able to get a full-time job teaching at a college around here (another subject for another post). Teaching at a high school is only an option if I go back to school to earn a teaching certificate. So I have returned to the same question again—what do I do with my life?

I am back to skimming long lists of discouraging-looking job posts, trying to figure out if I have the qualifications necessary to be hired a rung or two up the ladder from the office filing clerk. Sometimes I want to give up and accept the title of “homemaker,” despite how that offends my (admittedly skewed) feminist sensibilities. And then I have strange thoughts, like “Maybe I should look into a career in restaurant management.”

Around and around and around she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.

Does anyone have some Dramamine?

The P-Word

In hindsight, I feel like my last few posts make me sound somewhat spoiled and bratty, even though I was attempting to be mostly entertaining, and self-depreciating to a certain extent. The truth is, though, that I’m a lot like Sandy (Olivia Newton-John, see image below) from Grease. I have to admit that I’m a huge princess (see the urban dictionary definition here), which is a fairly unpleasant thing for me to accept.

Up until a few years ago, I had never thought of myself that way before – I’m not the kind of girl to decorate my bedroom or my blog all in pink, or hang fairies and unicorns on the wall, or bedeck things in ribbons (well, except my set of hand-decorated Christmas ornaments). My Lisa Frank phase was relatively short, and I was never into the Disney Princesses (although I will admit to having a Barbie-doll Belle). It took a conversation with my boyfriend (now my husband) to make me realize that I was spoiled and had something of a stuck-up attitude, albeit a (usually) subtle one. I don’t remember why it came up, but he let it slip that my former roommate had called me the P-word. “Princess?” I choked out, incredibly hurt. My ex-roomie was still my friend – or so I had thought. “Don’t take it the wrong way,” he told me. “She didn’t mean it as an insult – just as a fact. And you really are a princess.”

Awesome. Thanks for the heads up. Nothing like having the love of your life throw you into the cold Lake of Self-Awareness.

His comments got me thinking, though – he provided a few examples of my princess-like behavior – and I couldn’t shake the idea that he was right. I asked another one of my roommates whether or not she thought that I was spoiled. “Be honest,” I told her. She looked at me with both sweetness and guilt radiating from her big eyes, then admitted that she agreed with my boyfriend. “I used to mind that you were a princess, but I’ve gotten used to it,” she told me. “It’s not as though you directly say that you won’t do certain chores, or refuse when we ask you. You just sort of…ignore certain things. It’s more your unspoken attitude that can be annoying. You’ve been getting better, though, and helping out more with the cleaning, so…”

Gulp. There you have it – the judgment is in, and the people who love me best are telling me that I’m a spoiled princess. How is this possible? I wondered. How could I be so incredibly unaware of my own personality? Especially when I pride myself on supposedly being so self-aware…

Maybe I wasn’t so much self-aware as self-absorbed. Unfortunately it can be easy to confuse the two.

In the years following this realization, a lot of big things have happened in my life: I’ve gotten married, moved to Washington D.C., gone to graduate school, moved to New York, and learned how to clean a toilet – not necessarily in that order. I’m pretty sure that all of these experiences have helped me become more mature. But if I’m honest with myself, I still act a lot like Sandy.

Fortunately, I have my own Danny. He may not be quite as cool as John Travolta in tight black pants, but my husband is mature, hard-working and determined, committed both to loving and accepting me the way that I am, but also to helping me become a better person. Of course, I don’t want to change for him – I don’t need a makeover from Rizzo to impress my man. I need my husband’s help to change for my own sake. Hopefully, then, with time and the determination to take responsibility for even the unpleasant things in life, I can shed the P-Word all-together.

Author-with-a-Capital-A

My husband glances over my shoulder at my computer screen as he walks by, asking, “How’s it coming?”

I feel guilty. He thought I was doing research on how to be a grant writer, as part of my many attempts to find gainful employment using my astonishing, death-defying skills as a writer. Something that is not impossible, but not as easy to do as you thought it would be when you decided to be an English major, either.

Instead, I am working on my blog(s). Again.

To be precise, I am not actually blogging. I am working on the HTML coding for my website, tweaking the design and making/adding graphics so that it will be pretty. This type of technical work takes time, especially when you’ve only got a rudimentary knowledge of coding that you learned from a (no joke) children’s book on HTML that you checked out of the library once about ten years ago.

For those of you who have a blog or a website, you know how much time it can consume – so perhaps it is needless to say that re-coding my blog(s) has become a bit of a fixation for me over the past four or five days. Meanwhile, my husband has been watching a lot of football without me (much to my great disappointment, I’m sure you can imagine).

I’ve also been blogging up a storm – I’ve written new entries on A Little Bit of Wonder almost every day, plus I’ve opened up a new “section” of The Wonder Blog (although technically, it’s a different blog) to put up reviews of my favorite books, other blogs and the written word in general. I’m supposed to be job hunting (see previous posts on that subject), but instead I am expressing myself.

“I think it’s funny,” says my husband, in a tone of voice that tells me that he is only slightly amused and also somewhat irritated, “That you quit your part-time job so that you could get a full-time job, but then you spend all your time blogging instead of looking for work.” Refusing to acknowledge my guilt, I tick off the number of jobs that I have applied to in the past week, and then remind him of the fact that I have a very promising interview coming up on Tuesday. Then I deliver the ultimate justification: I am learning how to use Twitter and Blog-networking in order to be more attractive to potential employers. He snickers, but the thing is – I’m not joking. I’ve already filled out applications for several Public Relations jobs that state in the list of applicant requirements that the candidate must have experience with social media – one even explicitly named Facebook and Twitter.

He returns to his football, and I return to my blog.

You see, I’m not newly obsessed with my blog I want to avoid job hunting, exactly – although I do want to avoid job hunting. I think my newly all-consuming desire to write write write has sprung in part from the fact that I have had mono for the past month, and so I have laid in bed watching television and barely communicating with the outside world for most of that time. I managed to re-watch almost four seasons of The X-Files before deciding that I just didn’t care any more (not care about The X-Files?? There is something wrong with me!) and now that I am finally starting to emerge from the exhausted haze that has hung over me for about four weeks, I need to communicate. My husband likes to say that I “have a lot of words” – they come rushing at him when he gets home from work each day. (We’ve actually had to agree that I won’t talk to him much for the first half an hour when he gets home because he finds it so overwhelming.) I think what has happened now is that all those words – four weeks worth of words – have been sitting and percolating in my subconscious, and now they are demanding release.

This frenzied expulsion of paragraph after paragraph isn’t a bad thing, though, because I’ve figured out something else: although I write a lot of different types of things, my blog is the one example of a “story” that I feel like I’ve been able to tell in my own voice. I keep trying to be an Author-with-a-Capital-A, but while I can dream up an extensive list of characters and details for a novel, I always grow dissatisfied with my work once I actually begin writing. After blogging for several days in a row and comparing my satisfaction with this experience to my last attempt to write a novel, I’ve realized that I’m trying to hard to write like Virginia Woolf, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling.

As a composition professor, I give speeches to my students about “finding their own voice” – and yet I’ve only been taking my own advice with some of my writing projects, not all.

So this explosion of words and blog entries has done me a lot of good because I’ve decided to stop worrying about being an Author-with-a-Capital-A and simply tell my story in my own voice. Although I started this blog as “just” an outlet and an experiment, I am now imagining that it could be the basis of my seminal work in the future. I’ll turn my blog into a book – a lot of people have already done it. So even though I’m unsure about the direction that my life is taking in terms of my gainful employment, I’ve felt a lot better about my career as an Author – something that’s pretty important to my concept of identity. Cheers for me.

A Little Comedy, Even in the Land of Terrified Disenchantment

Attempted Job Search #1: Employment in the Field of Editing.

Available positions: Senior Editor/Speech Writer for Global Financial Company, must have general understanding of brokerage business. (Ahhhh, no.) Proof-reader for pharmaceutical marketing communications. (Oh joy.) Content Writer to “develop some very industry-specific content for the automotive and high-performance drivers education markets.” (Uh-huh.) Technical Documentation Specialist for ConsumerReports.org. (Isn’t that the website you consult when you want to buy a vacuum or a car?) Grant Writer for a Medical Research Facility, or “Sector Institute Writer.” (What on earth is that??)

My mind wanders, my eyes start to blur. I am going to have to take a job in some office, proof-reading page after page filled with words like dividends, risk management, derivative, capital gains, or alternatively, words like biomolecular simulation, molecular mechanics modeling, periodic boundary conditions, implicit solvation and subcutaneous injection. Words that all have one important thing in common – I don’t know what the heck they mean.

Welcome to the Land of Terrified Disenchantment.

Attempted Job Search #2: Employment in the Field of Communications.

Paid Advertisement at the top of the page: Earn a Certificate in Social Media at the University of San Francisco Online. (Really? You need a certificate to show that you know how to use Facebook and Twitter?)

Available positions: Marketing/Communications Specialist for a Billing Company. Public Relations Associate for a University Hospital. Senior Information Delivery Specialist for an Insurance Agency. (My eyes start to blur again.) Clinical Research Coordinator for… Office Manager for…

Slightly more amusing is the listing for a “Marketing Director for Nice-Pak Products, the global leader of pre-moistened wipes for cleaning, sanitization, healthcare, cosmetics and personal hygiene.” But wipies??!? Seriously?!

I’ll admit it – I think I’m too good for this job. I'm such a snob sometimes, and I'm not proud of it.

I start skimming the page again, and then I see it –


“World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. has an exciting opportunity for a dynamic Corporate Communications professional to join our Corporate Communications team as a Publicist.”

I nearly choke on the chocolate covered pretzels that I am devouring to keep myself awake during this depressing job search. As I crack up, I can’t help but think of Steve, a friend of mine from high school. He loved the way the wrestlers put on such ridiculous performances—I think he even had one of those gigantic gold champion wrestling belts. He would be so proud if I were a wrestling publicist.

Could I even keep a straight face when telling people what I did for a living? I try to picture myself at a family reunion, amongst my more straight-laced, religious relatives, telling my ninety-two-year-old grandmother in a loud voice that “Yes, I promote wrestling events! Yes, those shows on TV—Raw and Smackdown!”

Now I am experiencing a different type of disenchantment. I won’t necessarily have to become an office automaton. But as a trade-off, I’ll have to sell my soul to the absurd wrestling industry.