Summertime Sadness

I've been in something of a funk at work these past two or three weeks—not quite busy enough to feel the pressure to succeed. None of the work feels big enough to be worth doing—or else it's too big, but unimportant, and not something I can completely do on my own. I don't like that.

Last week, part of it was PMS, and then yesterday my cramps were bad enough that I let myself stay home sick after lunch. But it's mainly the lingering feeling of worthlessness from the previous weeks, at this point. It seems to me that I've been doing a bad job, so I am a bad worker, so I will do a bad job, can I go home now?

I know that every day is a new day, every day I can start fresh and I can do a great job and cross off a lot of things, even in fewer than eight hours. But if I can fix it any day, why do it today? Why not wait until tomorrow? Self discipline is hard. Fewer hours day after day, and then you try to work long and diligently and it just feels neverending.

Instead I want to read about the Greek island of Milos, where Emma is right now, and maybe chronicle a little of last year's travels in Turkey. Emma wants to take a boat to Turkey, and make her way to Odessa from there. I want to find podcasts to listen to while I work. I want to read Testament of Youth—we saw the movie on Monday night and it was so good!—and also read about nature and cultivation and wilderness, like Cooper's always trying to get me to do for him. Even though it's not like we share a brain, and I'm not going to take notes for him.

I want to leave early so I can rent a kayak before they stop allowing the river journey for the evening, so we can practice for our trip to the UP. I want to watch old Daily Show episodes because we watched it last night, Amy Schumer and Ta-Nehisi Coates with possibly my favorite television person in the world, Jon Stewart, whose show I've barely ever watched between boyfriend number one and now. I'm sad that the era is ended (Jon Stewart, not bf#1), and I didn't even take part in most of it. And the same for Colbert, but that was already over.

When I sit in my new office at the NCRC (right now I'm three days at the old office, two days at the new one), I think of ways to decorate it, to make it welcoming, truly mine. The big window is great; I love it. But it's not enough, especially knowing that for half the year, the trees will be naked and the ground and sky grey. I have an entire shelf above my new desk there, that I'd like to fill with books and maybe a small lamp and other pretty things. But my job requires zero books. There is no reason for me to surround myself with any. What a sad reality. All I need to do my job is an internet connection and this horrible window into bureaucracy and email. Nothing real like a book. And yet I have to sit here every day.

More Than Work

2014 was a year that I really tried to put what I wanted to do ahead of work. That meant giving up my pay to visit friends in Florida and California, requesting long weekends off for my birthday and Labor Day, going Up North for a full week, and taking an unpaid two-week vacation to Turkey and Germany, since I’d only been a permanent employee for two weeks when I got on that transatlantic flight. I got lots of drinks with friends and starting buying myself books again, made a list of summer activities and crossed them off one by one: kayak the Huron, Cinetopia Film Festival, Shakespeare in the Arb, drink lots of sangria (could do better at that one).

It’s a mixed message, because the rest of the time I was working over 50 hours a week—extremely bitter about that fact, as I had not requested that many hours and couldn’t get rid of them. I planned to quit all three pointless jobs to make room for my trip to Turkey. I didn’t have to, though, because I got one real job instead.

2014 was not a year I tried to really work on what I wanted to do. I didn’t submit to the translation contest that spring, or the extra one that summer, although I’d completed a full first draft and liked that text more than any of the others I’d previously attempted; I didn’t keep, or even make, an editorial schedule for my blog like I had intended; I didn’t make any business plans or take any classes or really try to envision my ideal life, beyond fewer work hours, more sunlight and freedom. Instead I read extensively about a lot of successful solopreneurs, creatives, obnoxiously/appealingly/but not too outrageously well-off and hard-working people in the blogosphere, and envied them, and then switched tabs to my money spreadsheet and stared at my savings account’s steady growth, thanks to better wages, controlled lifestyle inflation, and too many hours at those three pointless jobs.

You know what I did at the end of 2014? I cut my monthly contributions to my emergency fund ($16 IS TEMP fund) in half—since my employment was no longer temporary—and started what I named the BIG MONEY fund. Maybe I should call it the Big Dreams fund. Maybe I should stop thinking so hard about my savings, but although the level of my obsession and reveling in these details may be unhealthy, I love it, and I won’t. The Big Dreams fund could help pay to move to another city in a year or two, or buy my own car in a new place (though I'd rather it not). It could help throw a once-in-a-lifetime party and buy a once-in-a-lifetime dress. Maybe it will start a business, or buy a house. Now it’s time to get to dreaming and planning, so when the money’s there, I know what to do with it.

1. The beach at Olympos Valley on Turkey's Mediterranean coast
2. My little desk chez moi
3. Lunch under the citrus trees at Bayram's in Olympos Valley.

Slack Summers

Because I still have no real idea, or at least no set goal, about what I want to do with my working life, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I read about people's money philosophies, life philosophies, shitty jobs they had, dream jobs and how they got them. It seems like most of the time that I manage to post something on this blog of mine—which used to be about living in Europe, and then was a mishmash of having cats and being a person who read and wrote things occasionally—it's usually about work. Not that I ever seem to get anywhere in my career ruminations—I mainly just think in circles, trapped in the web of constant commuting, budgeting, and scheduling.

It's normal for young people to devote a lot of time to their careers. For many people my age, without families and obligations, it's what this phase of life is for.

But I also think it's silly. Part of why I have such a hard time with the career thing is that I've never felt like a job was going to define me, or knew what I should do. What mattered were my books and my plans and my friends. I miss learning. I like to read and eat and make things and see pretty places. (Not that I don't appreciate the fulfillment of a job well done. I just haven't yet found a good job that is worth doing.)

Even as I'm trying to find quiet moments of clarity for soul-searching, job-wise and life-wise, I also wish I made more time to just daydream. That's one of the things summer is for. I used to lie down on my bed and stare out the wide, open window at the sky above the houses and trees. I'd think about living—all the different things I could do once I was done with school, out of there. It was sometimes scary, but it was often a lot of fun. There wasn't so much pressure, or so many boring necessities to consider. No accountability, not like there is now.

Taisia Kitaiskaia describes it beautifully:

One moment you’re wrapped up in all manner of activities and the next you’re standing in your darkened apartment kitchen, an endless afternoon circling with the ceiling fan. The feeling is not unpleasant. It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. ("True Summer," The Hairpin)

*  *  *

Over summer vacation, as the heat got oppressive and the books ran out, as friends disappeared on family trips, grilled cheese for lunch stopped tasting good, and the days wore on, parents would forbid us from saying we were bored. We were supposed to do something about it, not complain. These days, I'm only bored when I'm chained to a place of work that is demanding very little, or even nothing, from me.

Three jobs and no definite priorities (just a lot of contingencies)—that's why I feel boring, so much of the time. Shuttling from one obligation to the next, with nothing worthwhile to report. Sometimes I read an article online that gets me thinking, but those thoughts are dulled as I return to copy-and-pasting or whatever other banal task I'm currently burdened with. Ultimately, the thoughts are forgotten in the shuffle of job after job and the neverending pursuit of responsible adulthood.

I'm aching for those real summers. You don't need to feed me, you don't need to entertain me. Let me read that stack of books, physical and imagined, that I've been building the past few years. I love the breeze through the window. I don't mind shutting down my mind when the afternoon heat gets too heavy; I am fully capable of staring at the cats and doing nothing else. Let me write angsty poetry by the light of the streetlamps outside the window like I used to. Life was real, even if I was doing nothing.

Master of Contingencies

Today I worked three jobs, which isn’t unusual. My plan: three hours at one office, three hours at the next office, then half an hour to get to the restaurant, where I would be the opening host out on the rooftop deck.

I wore my red, lightweight cropped pants with a long, lightweight, pink blouse and a belt. My fake woven-leather flats (my favorite). A navy blazer, a bike helmet. It was supposed to be hot today, hitting 80 in the afternoon, but I’m always cold in the first office, and often in the second, and the chance of rain in the evening hours was variable, hovering around 30 or 40 percent. A blazer is better than a sweater for rain, and better than a jacket for the office (and my jackets aren’t waterproof anyway). 

I stuffed my little red backpack to the brim. At the bottom, my planner and my small notebook, along with a novel to read in case I found myself stranded, unwilling to make my way home, and needed to hide in a café until a storm passed. Then my makeup bag, so at the tail end of job two I could do my face for job three. My workout clothes, in case I made it downtown and was told to go home right away, or close to it—in which case I could go to the Y, and a soggy walk wouldn’t have been completely for nothing. I tied my sneakers by the laces and hung them on the outside of the bag, from one of the straps, because they wouldn’t fit. I also had a little tupperware of apples inside my tupperware of rice and chicken for lunch, which I put off eating until after two so it would tide me over through dinnertime, or as much as it could. I wasn't going to have time for dinner, not with a 3:45 start time on the deck. My water bottle, of course. A pair of cheap Old Navy flip flops I’ve had for six years, shoved down one side in a plastic bag—they’re the most compact and least destructible change of shoes, a slippery but convenient backup in order to keep my real shoes dry in a rainy commute. In the other corner, I had slid my umbrella. On top, cell phone and sunglasses case and extra plastic bag, in case my bike seat got wet and I still wanted to ride.

The deck was closed tonight. It stormed; it threatened tornadoes. I made it to work, mostly dry, although I had to abandon my bike halfway there. I clocked three and a half hours working inside, and I am very tired. 

I Changed My Mind

The verdict is in, and my previous thoughts are overturned: cover letters are the worst.

I say this because I wrote, not one, not two, but THREE cover letters before Thanksgiving, for three jobs I was totally qualified for but that weren't all totally generic and essentially beneath me, and I heard ZILCH.

And now I am trying to write another one, but I feel like I need to do something different because, again, no one liked the last letters! But what can I do different. How do I make you hire me for this lackluster job no one could possibly really desire. But I do want it, I do, I really do! (Really, please, make my next twelve months less of a giant, gaping, mysterious hole!)

I have to go to work number three in two hours, and before then, I also need to call someone, who then will tell me to call someone else, about how my identity has still not been verified for the healthcare exchange application, and isn't this life FUN?

Today's an all caps, all cramps kind of day, I guess.

In other news, my computer is by a window today, and although the window is extraordinarily drafty and chills the keyboard, the heater goes all along the floor under my desk, and it is warm and great. Thank goodness for fingerless gloves and SUNLIGHT.

(Also I now have over 30,000 Delta SkyMiles, thanks to my newest credit card, so, watch out, world, I'm halfway to Europe FOR FREE.)

You Can Drag A Horse to Water But You Can't Make Her Write a Meaningful Sentence (Or Can You?)

Or Cover Letters: Not That Bad?

For me, conceptually, cover letters and resumes are The Worst. Meaningless salutations ("To whom it may concern"), formulaic paragraphs that relate my personal identity to some boring job posted on the internet? Some unknown human is going to read this embarrassing letter? "Kill me now" is my official stance on job applications. I'm obviously not alone in this.

For some people, who I imagine must be both highly motivated and mostly or completely unemployed, cover letter tweaking and dispatching is a robotic nothing experience that they do for many hours each day, until they are offered a job or have to start working at a coffee shop. These people, I imagine, know what they want and have some baseline of qualifying skills, so they are just doing essentially the same thing, over and over again. They aren't casting about in the dark for any possible handhold, like I have been, and so they can be robots--whereas I must fabricate a bridge to each opportunity and hope everyone involved will join me in my wishful thinking, accept my persuasive tactics long enough to hire me. Writing the sentences, or even the basic sentiments one by one can be like forcing myself to tiptoe across a floor totally covered in broken glass, trying to land on the few safe centimeters of space.

Kill me now.

But I've been practicing this process for a while now, off and on, and so there aren't so many gaps to fill in the resume. I've had one cover letter that got a response, so I know now that I'm not fishing in a lake that is biologically dead, just one that's heavily over-fished. And what I've learned, with all this, is that resumes and cover letters can actually make me feel better about the lackluster jobs I've been spending all my time on. I realize that these jobs where I spend so much time doing nothing have actually imparted a number of useful skills. Despite the downtime, I have had many responsibilities.

So that one successful cover letter of my life thus far. This specific posting didn't require a cover letter, but I figured, I can do this, I can do this (just fucking do it), I can write a few sentences about why I want this tiny part-time job in the few minutes before I get out of work and walk to other work (an exciting Friday night). At the interview, she asked me if I was interested in going into that field, and I said I wasn't sure, but maybe. I wanted to find out. She told me she liked my letter, that it was confident. I got the job. (This was in September.)

The job is only nine hours a week, though, and so I hope they won't care too much if I find something that pays for a full life. And next time I get an interview, I will say YES I want to go into the field. Let's throw ourselves off the cliff, guys. We can always back out later when the going gets mind-numbingly awful. Or before then--file that under "Things I Need to Work On."

Gone Fishing

Okay, not really fishing.

I am also not kayaking in the slough/slue/slew with sea otters and seals. That was two summers ago.

Isn't it great how my life jacket matched the kayak? Isn't it great how I'm wearing that attractive visor? Cooper's life jacket adds a nice pop of red to the photo. And we're smiling, which is misleading, because much of the time I was threatening his life because he wasn't steering us exactly where I wanted and we were falling behind my cousin, who is a seasoned kayaker (we are not). It was a real workout to get back to where we started as the tide was coming in, but we succeeded in the end. We had just celebrated our second anniversary, so it was a good time to start bickering.

Today is not about recreation. I just found a job to apply for that I feel good about, so I'm getting this blog thing off my plate so I can concentrate on it for as long as necessary and get an application in today. Yikes.

(Good riddance, temporary position. Knock on wood.)

Job Talk

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I operate as a person, and what I want from life, my friends, a career. Not really job titles or specific areas so much—I'm floating hopelessly, completely ungrounded—but what the work environment would be like; how many people, how much responsibility. I've thought about a whole wide range of work-related things, but these thoughts come and then go again, mostly without being recorded.

This week, I worked about 47 hours, maybe more. Last week was around 54. This is silly because I don't think I want to work even 40 once I have a real career with benefits and decent pay. I know that you have to work hard to move up, and I also know that high-paying jobs are more likely to demand extra hours of you. But I'd like to work my way up to a nice amount of pay and then cut back my hours, say to 30 or 35, and get paid a proportional amount. (I'll go into why in a minute.) So far, I haven't set myself up for greatness—I started at the bottom of the job-ladder and haven't hopped my way into anything remotely ambitious so far—so I should probably be scrambling to increase my income as much as I can, as quickly as I can, instead of dreaming of what I would do with my sizable chunks of free time in this easy future. (Of course, everyone I read on the internet says that as long as you're learning things and doing things, it doesn't matter what you're doing in your twenties—but don't sit them out and don't do nothing! That's why I quit my old job for a temp job: to learn something new.)

But I also know my free time is really only going to shrink in the future. Sure, one job takes less time than three, but my friends are going to have kids someday, and I'll want to see them. I'll probably have kids too. I want to travel once I have more flexibility with my income, and also start seeing my parents regularly, immediately. (Maybe I should not be so certain of this future financial solvency, these easy family developments; I hope I'm not jinxing things!) Even recently, those weeks in October when I worked just a little over 40 hours, it was hard to keep up with my friends and my laundry, my cats and my kitchen. Plus I have a boyfriend I'd like to spend meaningful time with sometimes.

I've never felt passionately about a career. As a kid, I picked them willy-nilly. I was going to be a ballerina, but I never danced. I wanted to be a piano player, having never taken a lesson (and though I did eventually take lessons for eight years, and really loved it, by then I was too scared and too behind to consider it as a career). I liked school, so I'd be a teacher. I liked reading, but almost never wrote good stories in school. Then I wanted to be a writer, assuming I'd have to have a day job, too. I didn't want to study writing or English in college. By then, I sort of thought I'd just end up with some sort of office job like my mom, but hopefully with more security—she was let go my senior year of high school, just in time for all those college bills, and didn't get re-hired for three years. I'd do my work, get paid, save for retirement, have a 2-income family, and I'd be ahead of the game. When I wasn't at work, I'd read books and watch movies and go to exciting places.

But there was that other part of me that assumed I'd have this magic moment in college where everything would click and I would have a path and goals and meaning. I needed for this to happen, and then I did my best to avoid figuring anything out. I want to rewrite, really examine the story of my college years. I feel ambivalent about them. They might not really matter, though. More important is what I've gotten out of the past few years as a poorly paid, but fortunately working person.

Just Fucking Do It, and Be Nice About It

I think just fucking do it is self-explanatory. It's not always easy, but once I'm motivated, most things in life are pretty straightforward. It's getting to the point where I commit that's hard. In the future, I would like to just do the task at hand instead of working myself up a mountain in preparation for simply jumping off the cliff. What I mean is: once I've started the sentence, I have to complete it. Once I'm holding the cats' toothbrush, I'm going to grab someone's face and shove it in there. (Yep. The cats' toothbrush.) To reach the point where it's effortless, I've been trying to build momentum by bringing myself to the edge of the cliff repeatedly and immediately throwing myself into the abyss every time.

Maybe you didn't realize that asking questions of superiors was such an undertaking—that just means we're different kinds of people.

Last night, I was at the restaurant I work at for a short shift. I knew I'd have enough time to work out afterward, and this time, I even remembered to grab my shorts and sneakers when I left my apartment. I told multiple coworkers that this was my plan, and they held me to it. When I left work at 9:15, I headed west instead of east, and then I had no choice. I didn't go home; I exercised; it was good.

That one was actually pretty painless, but if I'm at home in my pajamas, going to the gym can sound like a huge chore. I need to work on framing it better, like Emma and I used to do. Sure, we complained and avoided it a lot, but we were also proud of the hours we put in at the gym and talked about our new lifestyle constantly. Working out is actually relaxing, and it's selfish time, time devoted to bettering oneself. I'm lucky to have the time and the means to spend an hour at the gym, and maybe to relax in the sauna afterward. Though it can be boring to exercise alone, it's not that boring, and afterward I always feel accomplished. So I should just fucking do it.

Be nice about it is about controlling one's life-narrative, and that was going to be in the title—perfect lifestyle/motivational blogger lingo—but then in my Gchat conversation with Emma I caught myself about to complain that I needed to pee, even though I'm across the hall from the bathroom, and I was like, just deal with it, dummy. (Which doesn't quite mesh with being nice about it, but sometimes the truth hurts.) Anyway, controlling the narrative. My favorite bloggers often mention the importance of writing your own story, staying "accountable to [your] own story." They blog to remember and frame the changes and accomplishments in their lives; in turn, the blog motivates them to do more things that are, you know, worth blogging about. Which isn't to say that this kind of blogging should be all positive. In the five years that this blog has existed, I've realized that glossing over or completely leaving out the things I don't think I want to share or remember doesn't necessarily make the whole "story" more fun or upbeat, and doesn't really make me feel better about them. For example: it's easy to dismiss two years of employment at a fast casual restaurant, because really, show me a college graduate who wants that job. On the other hand, that experience wasn't meaningless to me. That was two years of my life.

So by "being nice," I mean that I'm trying to conceptualize my life in a way that is fair. To stop pushing past elements that really matter to me in a big way. To stop needlessly justifying behaviors that get in the way of my happiness, and instead be more realistic in my day-to-day goals—and more imaginative and precise in the longer-term. The words I think and say make a difference in my life. When I catch up with friends, I say these sentences again and again, updating each person in turn. I spend most of every day working silently by myself, so I repeat these thoughts to myself, too. Words can be dangerous.

*  *  *

I took a pretty big risk in October. If it didn't pay off, life would go on; if it did pay off 100%, I could have ended up with a full-time job that paid at least 50% more than my current jobs. What happened was this: through a friend, I had the opportunity to interview for a temporary position at the university. The interviewer and I discussed how I was ready to move on to something new, and how I thought I could gain valuable experience at the new position. I was offered the job on the spot, and I accepted it, knowing that I could apply for a related permanent position. To accept this job, though, I had to stop working at the law firm, where I had been for two years and where they even had started to pay me on holidays. The new job is thirty hours a week, compared to the law firm's twenty. And it pays better! The plan made my boyfriend a little nervous. It made my mom very nervous, I think, but for my mom, I always put a good spin on things.

I did think it through. Even if I didn't get the job, I would have more experience working at the university, which would help me secure a better university job in the future. I could reasonably bargain for higher pay at future positions, though I might not get it. In the meantime, I would keep working at my other university job (only nine hours a week) and at the restaurant, so I wouldn't be totally unemployed if the new job didn't work out. I also decided to save that extra 50% per hour, the pay bump that won me over on the whole thing, in case I didn't get enough hours come December or January. (I would much rather being spending those dollars on fun things!)

From the vantage point of the interview, it wasn't a horrible plan. I kept telling people, oh, if it doesn't work out, at least I have these other two jobs and this money saved! I said that so many times, though, that I started to think that it was this new job, or nothing. If they didn't hire me on permanently, I was doomed to being a restaurant host thirty hours a week for the rest of my life, and blow through my meager savings.

False. I get like fifty new job notifications every week. I'll find something, and I don't have to settle immediately. This is an opportunity to change my day-to-day life. And it will be okay.

But for a while there, I was getting truly panicky because I had presented my future as a binary where I was either offered a permanent position that I increasingly didn't think I wanted, or I was (much more likely) only going to be making $900 a month, working all the weekends, unable to do anything fun. I guess I can't really explain how my positive spin on the situation turned around and freaked me out so thoroughly, but it did. Maybe I secretly thought it was a terrible plan—once I started freaking out about it, that's what I was saying to my boyfriend every night—and the panic just had to break through.

In any case, I really don't want to spend the money I'm saving now on rent next year. I really want to find a better job that is somewhat appealing to me. So that is what I am going to do (if I don't run away to the woods first).