Thursday, December 21, 2006
The other day, my mom made a not so subtle jab when she suggested that at every new chapter in my life I reexamine how I am presenting myself such as my hair and see whether it lines up with the new role I am trying to take such as, in her words, "career man." Why do people in this country think that people are first and foremost their role and then individuals afterwards? I don't want to sell my soul and spend my life conforming to various molds of roles I have to play. Roles to me are instrumental toward personal ends, not ends in themselves. This is causing me a problem as I try to figure out what field I'll go into in a few months. Most people you can ask them what they do for a living and it's a pretty good chance that whatever job they do they will have done for years and will continue to do in some form or other for years. (e.g. I'm a plumber, a secretary, a doctor, etc.) I don't ever want to get stuck in that. I want a job full of mobility. I want to be able to get it in cities/states/countries of my choosing and I want it to continually change over time. Some kind of management appeals to me because it is a skilled position that brings in decent money and would allow me to work in all sorts of different companies that do different things and still be qualified for them. Unfortunately, that is not an entry level job and so I have to start somewhere and then figure out how to get up to the level that I have that kind of mobility. I still need to figure out where the best starting point is and the quickest way up. I just need to get out of the masses at the bottom and I don't think destroying all I've created and being reborn in a tightly constricted mold to shape me is the way to do that.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Well, shit, it looks like I have to drive to Pennsylvania for christmas. It'll be long and boring, but according to my calculations it won't be much more expensive than flying would have been and it will be a lot more reliable than flying standby around christmas would have been. Here's hoping there is no snow!!!
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
So yeah, college is over. Shit.
My mum and her friend came up to Athens on thursday a bit before the big final. I decided I had absorbed about as much of the information as I was going to and so I went with them to show them some of the town instead of studying more. We walked around town a bit after the driving portion. We ran into someone from my psych class downtown and they insisted upon taking a picture of me with her. Cool. My mum's friend had me fold my arms in one of the pictures and stated that it looked more masculine that way. I resented that. I made reference to my purse and my mum said I should call it a bag instead of a purse. I said, "but it is a purse" and resented her remark. I hate such blatant gender typing behaviour. I had them drop me off on campus about 30-40 minutes before the test so that I could get the last minute cramming in so that I could try to remember the items that I knew would only stick for a short time since the long-term storage was full. They then went to the mall to see a movie. I spent about an hour on the sanskrit final and beat them back to the apartment.
The next morning was graduation. We set the alarm early enough to get up. When it went off my mum wanted another 15 minutes of sleep. Her friend took took a long time to get ready. I was supposed to be there at 8:30 and we didn't even leave the apartment until 8:35. Traffic was a mess but we made clever use of side roads and avoided good bits of it. When I got out of the car, mum and her friend told me that I should put the robe on before going in saying that everyone else would show up with it on. I carried it in.
After asking a police officer where gates 3 and 4 were to find my location, I entered the tunnel filled with multitudes of robed bodies and I tried to find someone in charge. Nobody seemed to be yet there was still order. Funny how we all get beaten down to the point that we just simply accept and follow an arbitrary system of order with nobody there to enforce it. Once I found the end of the line, I put the robe on and stood there for a second before realizing that like the rest of the robed pizza box hatted people, I'd simply fallen into the order too. So, I abandoned my place at the end of the line and went in search of familiar faces. I found 3, but most importantly I found the one I was looking for. There was a girl in my psych class also graduating and one day in class she had misheard my last name and thought it started with a 'B' and was happy that someone she knew would be sitting near her at graduation since her last name starts with a 'C'. I had to correct her on the spelling of my name but on this graduation day I wandered until I found her and I stood talking with her and her friend in line. When nobody came through to put us in alphabetical order I simply kept my place and sat with her at the ceremony. For any of those thinking anything beyond friendship was going through my mind, I'll point out that she's married and has a three year old kid. She's just a nice person.
So, most of the ceremony was pretty decent. The main commencement speaker was a bit of a bore. At one point, Jennie, the girl I was sitting with asked if he was campaigning. My parents sat on opposite sides of the stadium completely on accident. My dad probably liked it that way. My mum, however, had saved him a seat on her side. Afterwards, we borrowed a sash from someone to take my graduation pics in since the sash kind of adds flair to the robe. I would have bought one for the flair factor if I'd realized that I would actually get to wear it. The way it had been explained to me I thought I had to give it to someone else rather than wearing it myself.
Then we went out to the car. In the rush of the morning my mum didn't plan for a way home since her friend had dropped us off at the stadium and then left to get to a doctor's appointment. My dad had said in advance that his back seat was crammed and that there was no room for her in the car. She tried to move things despite protest insisting that she could fit. To my eyes it was perfectly obvious that even if my dad hadn't been a stickler for seat belts, there was no way she could have fit. While her situation looked pitiable, I wouldn't help but remember that it was her own lack of planning that put her into this situation. I gave her directions how to get to the apartment on the bus and then showed my dad around campus and the town a bit before heading back to my apartment. He quickly saw the apartment and then had to leave to be on his way.
I then took my mum to see some of the areas that I like to walk here including the "zoo" at one of the parks here. The weather was just cool enough and the lighting was good to create a really peaceful setting in the park and we had a good time just relaxing and watching the bear and the otter.
We then came back to the apartment and my mum looked through my movies. She picked to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She had also begun reading the book I was carrying around as well and so after the movie she finished reading it stating that she doesn't like to start a book and not finish it. So I felt proud that I managed to expose her to two examples of the weirdness that I enjoy and that one of the cases was an R-rated movie which she wouldn't normally choose to watch due to her religious beliefs.
Saturday I had to drive her to the airport and figured that I was already that close to PTC so I'd just go the rest of the way. I hung out with Matt until he went to work and then I hung out with Emily while she worked and did christmas shopping. When Andrew got off of work we went to his house and watched Forbidden Zone and apparently I'm one of few of his friends that actually likes the movie. Matt came over for a bit and then left. Andrew then showed me what the allegedly addictive World of Warcraft is like. It's rather similar to things like MUDs that I used to play a lot in high school except that this is graphical. While I could see the appeal of the nice graphics, I think I may prefer the old text based games since they required more imagination and lent themselves more easily to roleplaying and chat rather than just repetitive motions to built experience. I got to sleep at Matt's at about 3AM which he thought was early to go to bed. Guess I have more of a day life than some people. I woke up before he did on Sunday, so I went and had lunch with Andrew and Emily and then saw Nissen for a few minutes and ran some errands (e.g. dropping things off at my mom's house) and then I went to look around for people I knew. I walked a shopping center, a Best Buy, and a Wal-Mart and ran into only Jeremy's brother and one of the renters of my mom's house. So, I called Greg and talked to him for a couple hours. I then went with Emily through a pretty drive which included a bison in somebody's back yard. Our mission was to find the Borders bookstore which Emily simply knew was there only to find that the aliens must have taken it away because in its place was a Books A Million bookstore instead. We went and visited Andrew and Matt at work. Soon thereafter we all split and I headed back to Athens.
I started to go through papers and things at the apartment as the post-college transition but that process was abruptly terminated as more stressors came online. Now I'm going to Pennsylvania for christmas and have to leave on thursday. So much for cleaning. So much for working a full work week to make up for the previous week's missed work. Then Greg and Miranda will be in town for a few days afterwards. Then I may have a couple days in which I could head back to Athens only to turn right back around and go to PTC for new years. I almost might as well leave thursday and not come back until after new years.... guess I can't start the post-college transition until January. How will I take care of my animals that long? Grr.
Then what? Will all of those days be as busy as days like today full of work? Will I really have any more time in my day to change anything? Am I really going to get any rest from the stress I experienced in college or is it going to be just as much but only in more monotonous and less varied pains? Will I even have time, money, energy, or information to even move or will I just keep sitting here too busy to move an inch?
No Rest For The Wicked.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Oh, BTW everyone, I switched to the new beta version of Blogger today. This had the unintended side effect of making a bunch of my posts show up as new in my rss reader ( Google Reader) so if any of you use an RSS reader for viewing my blog and it shows up with like 25 new posts, rest assured that I didn't suddenly get very creative and post that many new ones.
Well, my Sanskrit final is over now.... I left probably about 60% of it blank. The translation portion had about 3 complete sentences with some scattered words and plenty of blank spaces littering it. The forms commentary had some commented, some blank. I didn't even bother to do any of the verb paradigms at all since I didn't know them. I spent all of my study time trying to memorize all of the passages thinking they were worth more points than the paradigms. Fuck it. College is over now.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Well, I feel weird. Today I discovered that tomorrow is operating on a friday schedule. I only have one class on fridays and the lecture portion of that class has been over for about two weeks since my teacher made up the sessions earlier in the semester so that we could end early since she was expecting a child (which she birthed on thanksgiving day). So, the result of that is that today was my very last day of lectures of my undergraduate career. That's gonna take a while to sink in. Now I just need to finish my sanskrit project, do my finals, and pay my 2 year old library fine and then I am done completely. Finals are not going to be any walk in the park though. Most of them will be difficult and the sanskrit one will be hell (~20 pages of sanskrit = 45 pages of heavily annotated translation that I have to basically simply memorize plus some grammar stuff to know). My mom is trying to convince me to reschedule my wednesday exam so that I can go pick her up at the airport, take her to ptc, wait while she does some things at the house, and then drive her to Athens. I have the sanskrit final thursday so my wednesday is intended to be devoted almost wholly to memorizing sanskrit. Is she fucking crazy to think that all that interruption won't have serious negative consequences???