8/11/01: What the Goddess Says, and Where,
and How Often, but Not Why
My birthday is soon or happened recently. This is the 23rd birthday, for those of you who are keeping track of these things. I hate my birthday. I have, historically, always hated my birthday. That's why I'm not telling you when it is. It always sucks ass. My parties never work out, no one ever remembers my birthday, nothing nice ever happens. It’s like the most evil New Year’s Eve ever. You’re supposed to have fun, and that makes it so you can’t. The Goddess and I worked out a deal, though: I have a secret birthday when good things happen to me and I make it a point to be happy all day like it’s my birthday, but since no one knows about it, no one can ever forget about it. And since I pick out all my presents, they all kick ass.
Here, you shake your head. Loretta is off on another useless bloggy rant, and it sounds like she maybe wrote it in the wee small hours of the morning. Well, so be it, children. Look at it like so: If I can get this out of the way, maybe I can start being amusing again. Hmm?
I should be in a better mood. Lots of reasons why I should be, only a few reasons I shouldn’t be. I guess the good stuff first: I’ve recently turned a sort of corner and made a bunch of new plans for myself, and it’s pretty exciting. Remember when I was babbling about going on the Appalachian Trail? Well, I didn’t forget about it, even if I stopped talking about it. I just didn’t know how I was going to fit it in with all the other shit I had to do. But now the Goddess stepped in and said, “You know what, honey-child?” (The Goddess always calls me honey-child, because she knows stuff about me you don’t.) “Honey-child, you don’t really need to do a whole lot of that shit. I’m just going to take it out of your appointment book. You’re going to have to learn not to write in your appointment book in red ink.”
So, now, no job. That means if I want to stay up late and watch re-runs of Star Trek: The One With Picard, I can. It also means that I have to figure out what else to do with my time. Kind of like how maybe you’ll watch TV forever until a heat-wave makes them run warnings not to use your electricity too much, and then you remember that you like to read or play guitar or engage in other electricity-poor pursuits.
Another point I would like to make: for those of you who would like to keep track of these things, this is the second job in advertising I’ve lost in the past year. So, clearly, Someone believes that I am in the wrong industry. That was an inside joke, kids. It is more than past time I change industries.
So now, new industry, new plan. Are you all excited to hear about it? Sure you are. I work various temp jobs from now until March 15th, when I leave for Georgia. (I already got myself part-time work with one of those SAT cram school places. Yay!) In that time, I will get in physical and equipment-al fitness to walk the Trail. I will also apply to grad schools. Then I will walk the Trail from March 15th until a)I get to Mount Katahdin in Maine b) I get horribly injured or c) my time runs out, viz: It is late August again and time to go to school.
I’m aiming for an MAT – Master of Arts in Teaching. Or possibly an M Ed, a Master of Education. I’ve been babbling to people about teaching for a while now. I don’t know if I ever told you guys in specific. I meant to, honestly. I must have told some other website twice.
So that’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is, well, like I mentioned, losing the job wasn’t much fun. I had changed to a new position in the company that I actually liked, and then they “eliminated my position.” Really, they wanted to give that position to someone else, someone with more experience.
Right when it happened, I said to a friend, “Well, I guess it’s true when they say that God can’t open a window without closing a few doors,” and she thought I was saying it wrong, and she didn’t get the joke. What I was referring to was the fact that, concurrent with losing my job, out of fucking nowhere, all these guys had appeared. Three guys asked for my phone number in one day! And there were a couple more I was stalking/being stalked by to various effect.
And then all that didn’t seem terribly important anymore because something slightly more interesting came along. Or rather, came back, after I had banished him for three years. And then a couple of days ago, that interesting thing came to a crashing halt after a limping slow-down, meaning, he called it off in favor of a different, more recent and long-term, girlfriend. In other words, he wanted to give the position to someone with more experience. And I’m left here wishing for some sort of clarity, to figure out what the hell any of that meant. Much like you are, reading that paragraph over.
Now, when I lost my second job in advertising, I realized that, while it may be true that advertising didn’t want me, the more important issue is: I didn’t want it. Maybe losing this guy for the second time will be enough to teach me that it can’t work because it isn’t supposed to, because I need someone completely different. Because I think the Goddess always gives me a second chance to understand her, if I ignore her the first time she tries to give me a talking to.