.

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I’m trying to think of something funny, or witty, or offhand to write about, because even I get sick of myself and my own angst. One of my favorite entries from a super-angsty time is “Thirteen Stories About One Thing” (title shamelessly stolen from the movie of the same name – which I’ve seen and remember nothing of). So I figured, it was time for an updated version.

ONE

Me: Maybe I’ll buy a 49ers shirt for [the Redskins/49ers game].
Brent: That’s a terrible idea
Me: It’ll be like when Elaine wore the Orioles hat to the Yankees game.
Brent: Yes, and how did it end for her?
Me: I believe there was heckling.
Brent: I believe she lost her job over that
Me: Well I don’t have a job to lose now do I?
Brent: It’s still a terrible idea.
Me: I want to move to a city that with really loyal fans and wear opposing t-shirts. And don’t say Chicago.
Brent: Well if you want to get sucker punched and have beer bottles thrown at you, you could move to Philly.
Me: Philly sounds like a possibility, yes.

TWO

“I want you to come back home. You belong here. You can do anything here, it’s freaking NYC. The advantage is that you have everyone who loves you here; your family and friends.

-Jill-IAN

THREE

Me: I think he was wearing jeans and um…jeans
Ellie: But the important question is: did he iron his jeans
-a long ago reference that I’d long forgotten. This comment made me laugh all day.

FOUR

Regardless of what you end up doing, you did an incredibly awesome thing moving down to DC and leaving the comfort of the job you had before.Hang in there.  You are still awesome and I’m always proud of what you are doing- whether it’s trying to build a life in DC or in NJ.

-Joe (who always knows the perfect thing to say)

FIVE

Brent: i had a dream that i had written a paper for school but i had forgotten to write a works cited page.  i hate everything.
Me: that’s terrible. ms roeser would have kicked your ass. i had a dream that i found a room in a new apartment, except the furniture was staying there, and it was puzzle/trick furniture, that you had to figure out how to open, and i couldn’t figure out how to open the drawers
Brent: The worst. I need to go to dream rehab. You should come with me.
Me: We would alienate everyone there.
Brent: How would this be any different from normal life?
Me: Touche

SIX

On the very first version of Message-Board-of-Note, many years ago, someone wrote: “Love doesn’t stink. It’s fleeting and imperfect and infuriating and very human. It’s an emotional investment, with all the dividends, interest, and risk the analogy implies, and it should be treated as nothing less.”

I saved it in a word file and its survived several computer crashes. The writer is a friend now, so I emailed him because like-like is just as infuriating and very human.

SEVEN

Bitch, get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.
-Keith (my ex-roommate)

EIGHT

We love you very, very, very much and we want nothing but happiness and kindness for you

-From Ellie & David

NINE

Pacey, to Joey: You fall in love and it doesn’t work out, and you think it’ll never happen again. But believe me, it does. In the strangest of places it does.

Jill-IAN, in response: Oh my god, shoot me in the head

TEN

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Note to my mother who sometimes reads this blog: Please do not read this entry.

The roommate and I originally know each other via the Message Board of Note and thus ‘know’ a lot of the same people. To be fair, I know them a lot better than he does, given that I have close friends through the board. Given that my amazing friend just sent me a plane ticket.

The roommate didn’t know about me and OLB (I thought EVERYONE freaking knew about that since OLB quite publicly acted like a jerk and behind the scenes I whispered “Psst. Not only is he being obnoxious, but he also did this.” And then it occurs to me, that I guess I never told this story. (For the record, the women he obnoixously posted about were never me.)

For one, I cannot believe that was three years ago. And actually, most of it, FOUR years ago, since it was 2007 when that drive to Connecticut occurred, and it was Thanksigiving weekend of 2007 that I got dressed for a gathering somewhere, subconsciously knowing something was going to happen, even though I had no reason to think so.

I met OLB on a random drive to Connecticut, for a random gathering of libertarians, who had somehow all wound up on a random spin-off message board. We’d briefly met at a previous gathering, but I thought nothing of him. I guess those hours together in the car were important, because at Thanksgiving weekend that year there was another gathering in the city, and it was one of those nights where you know you look pretty(I had this lacy red tank top on, peaking out from my black sweater. Clearly, some part of me knew something was up even though I really, seriously Had No Idea) and you wonder if the boy next to you is actually sitting closer to you than he needs to be, or whether you’re just imagining it.

(I wasn’t imagining it)

He was smart and emotionally unavailable, so clearly I was hooked. Plus, I thought because he was older he’d be less inclined to play games. Ha. Ha. Ha.

OLB pulled me into his bed, but not his life. I was like his dirty little secret – the crazy girl he was secretly sleeping with. He took me out to dinner, but never out with his friends. The mornings after, he took me for breakfast, and for walks, and then he pushed me on the subway and basically said ‘Get out of my life’

One night a guy from Message Board of Note, from out of town, was visiting. The local contingency got together and drinking was involved. We were a few blocks from OLB’s apartment and a long subway ride away from mine, so I asked him if I could stay over and he said sure.

At the end of the night, it was me, OLB, and this other acquaintance of ours who totally knew what was up. He had known what was up at Thanksgiving – he’s not an idiot. We were all standing on a street corner on the Lower East Side, saying goodnight.

OLB pushed me away and pretended to be walking in a different direction. I was so blindsided/confused that I froze. The acquaintance saw what was up and offered to see me home safely. I was drunk (and now upset) and wound up going home with OLB anyway, where I yelled at him, called him out on what happened that night, and then later, ultimately cowered.

I’m stupid, but I’m not naive. I knew what was up. I had learned a lot of lessons from HWSNBN years earlier. (#1: Do not be with someone who won’t hold your hand in public. Literally and metaphorically) I already knew what it was like to be with someone who’s emotionally unavailable. Who will sleep with you but never tell you you’re pretty. Who will take note of the fact that you’re a headcase, point out your flaws, and later remind you that if you just hadn’t been so god damned melancholy, maybe things could have worked out. Who will constantly cancel on you at the last minute, because sticking to your plans would mean admitting to his friends that he’s seeing you.

I had a crush on HWSNBN long before he kissed me. We were sitting in my living room, and he said “You’re beautiful.” And then he kissed me and in those moments, my world was perfect. Later he told me “I don’t know what guy couldn’t fall into eyes like yours”

A total line, but he said it, I fell, and he still pushed me away. I wasn’t pretty enough or sane enough or together enough or smart enough or whatever enough.

And for all the tears over this, I let it happen and let myself continue to accept increasingly mixed signals, because hell, it was better than nothing. With HWSNBN it was because I’d crushed on him for so long and then he actually kissed me and we’d tease each other politically with “you feed my radicalism.”/”no YOU feed my radicalism”, and at 4 am we’d smoke Camel Lights on my front steps and it felt like Something. With OLB, well…I don’t have any idea. He kissed me, he brought me home, and he made me coffee. And a year later, at the same sort of meet-up, even though we hadn’t talked in months, he walked in and said “You look really nice.” And I proceeded to get black out drunk and go home with him, and engage in what David has since described as “Date-raping yourself”

Somewhere between all of that we made the trip to Chicago for the Message-Board-of-Note meetup. He made the 12 hour drive with me, shared a hotel room with me, and never acknowledged my presence in front of the others. So I coped by getting epically drunk (but behaving quite well. Ellie was driving and was thus stone cold sober and tells me I was fine. As do other people. OLB insisted I was a mess and instead of caring that I was a mess (at this point, I had admitted to him I had a total booze problem) he was just like ‘you’re an idiot and you embarrassed me). We were barely out of Chicago the next day when he blurted out “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

I cried. He listed my flaws. I cried a fair amount of the 12 hours home.

The Thanksgiving relapse happened a few months later and ended with him screaming at me and shoving me on a street corner. And then spending the next few months on Message Board of Note, talking about his relationship drama. In public, he got away with it. In private, fellow MBON people flocked to my side, and as time went on and more stuff developed, more people were like “WTF?!?”

Don’t get me wrong, when this was all going on I was an actively alcoholic head case and no guy would/should have wanted me anyway. But OLB was such a jackass that people were still on my side. I like to think I took the high road – I never made it public, I never called him out on it. But David (x3), Timothy, Ben, Ellie, Ross, Alex, Ali, and hell, even Dru swooped in and said “Yeah. He’s being a jerk. You’re not crazy for thinking he’s being a jerk.”

And years later I am well over HWSNBN and OLB, thank god. I never thought I would be over HWSNBN because he devastated me more than anyone ever had. (“I am a cynic, you are a romantic, but you’re smart enough to be a cynic,” he told me. “And you are really romanticising this.” His dismissal of my alleged romanticism, and thus me was incredibly painful. Ages later, I wrote this. I was able to hold me head high, say ‘screw it’ to the boy I’d moved to New York for, and manage for those first 6 months when I lived in Jersey City and could basically see his building from the balcony.

I smoked the occasional Camel Light, but other than that, I was okay.

And I realize this babblefest has not even addressed The Ex, which is either worthy of a different entry altogether, or not worthy of one at all. Our relationship “changed me” because we were together 4+ years and they were formative years. Mostly though, we were too young. It’s our random friendship that was more damaging. That happened and in some ways I fell for him all over again. As far as I know, he’s in the middle of med school at Georgetown. Which means for a year, I lived no more than a mile from him. On my last day in Glover Park I was packing up some final things and was in a bad mood, and was all sweaty and gross, and thought, ‘watch me run into The Ex right now.’

I didn’t run into him. I haven’t seen him since a week after I broke up with him in 2004. But in the summer of 2006 we had a standing date to speak on the phone on Sunday nights, and texted all the time…and it was fucking ridiculous. And then he got a girlfriend. He tumbled into a relationship with this girl after a long conversation with me where he freaked out about his feelings and I advised. I was in Chicago, a newly minted UChicago student, and hundreds of miles away from everything that had made me happy. One night in October he called me and said tentatively “Oh…so…I have a girlfriend now.” I swallowed my tears (several times) and I smiled through them and told him how happy I was for him.

I loved him. I did love him. I did love him enough to want him to be happy. I do hope he’s happy.

In some way, he must have known it hurt me, because of the tentative tone of his voice on the phone, after several months of us being so close. I called a friend and burst into tears. She’d witnessed all my stupid texting and swooning and she knew I was being stupid. “He has to know that this hurts you,” she said.

It did, but it didn’t matter.

(“There’s one thing I have to say, so I’ll be brave. I know what I wanted. I gave what I gave. I’m not sorry I met you. I’m not sorry it’s over I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say.”)

The Ex is an Ex for a reason. For a lot of reasons. And it was fucked up when we were ‘friends.’ There is a little piece of my heart that will always, always love him (even though the feeling isn’t mutual. He totally hates me) and I’m completely okay with that now.

I have loved once (The Ex), THOUGHT I loved once again (HWSNBN), and once knew there was no way in hell I loved, but I was doing it anyway (OLB).

In between, I’ve had my share of perfectly nice dates with perfectly nice guys, none of whom pinged my interest.

The way to win my heart is to be emotionally unavailable. I’ll take the bait every time, and no, I never learn.

August 3, 2011

I am on a southbound train from Kingston, Rhode Island. It’s a seven hour ride to DC. My pseudo-cousin Adam will be keeping me company until we hit New York, but after 4 ½ straight days with me, he’s probably had enough.

There is so much going on, and so much I haven’t written about. At first, I thought I’d talk about the events leading up to this, but better to just be blunt: a few days before I left for vacation, I spent 4 ½ days in the hospital, detoxing. Relapse, as they say in AA, is not a requirement.

But it is a reality. Since getting out of rehab I have been more of an anxious, depressed mess than I’ve been in my whole life. We’re talking panic attacks in the shower, fear of leaving my apartment, and vague fantasies of stepping in front of a bus. I was waking up every morning with knots in my stomach and I’d lie there, sometimes for hours trying to make it go away. My doctor and I still hadn’t stumbled upon the perfect combination of medicines to keep me sane, and so I turned to what I knew would work.

Because vodka quiets my head and allows me to breathe. Of course, I wake up even more anxious the morning after, but in panicked moments when I can’t sit still for even 30 seconds, when my legs are shaking on the escalator out of the Metro, when I can’t finish a fucking job application, I don’t care.

While I was in the hospital, I also found out that my roommate was moving out at the end of the lease. We had previously planned to stay month to month through December. So of course, I freaked. I was hooked up to a heart monitor, and I watched my heart rate skyrocket on the screen.

So that happened. And there is nothing I can do but pick myself up and keep going.

The day I was admitted to ER (I went to Urgent Care that day for a completely unrelated injury sustained while drunk, which is another story, and I was clearly in the throes of alcohol withdrawal, so they sent me to ER) I had my iPad with me, so I was furiously emailing people, posting on Message-Board-of-Note, and reading stupid things on the internet to distract myself.

I offhandedly mentioned that when my iPad battery died I was going to be bored out of my mind.

Not only did I get a ton of well wishes from my Message-Board-of-Note friends, I got very pretty flowers from one of the guys in the DC area, and a visit from another guy who lives in NoVa. He brought me stuff to read and food that wasn’t hospital food. And he brought me a brand new iPad charger. And pajama pants. Which was pretty much the sweetest thing ever. My roommate also came by with my cell phone charger; he’s been really worried about me, and I feel terrible for putting him through so much stress.

My friend who visited me, also drove completely out of his way last Sunday to drive me the whole 7 minutes to my apartment. And then drove me to Safeway to drop off my new prescriptions and waited for me while they were filled when I could have easily walked home.

And I may have found a solution to my housing problem, even though it will mean a fortune in self-storage fees. I have a million things to do before the end of August, but having a project feels good. It’s helped me get back into the swing of applying for jobs, albeit very slowly.

So, a few days later I came back to Jersey, went to Trivia Night with Brent and Joe (and lost horribly, due to a Disney question), and then rode up to Rhode Island with the parents. No matter how old the pseudo-cousins and I get, we are still “the kids.” When we go out to eat there’s a kids side of the table. When there’s too many of us to fit around the dining room table, the kids eat outside, the adults eat inside. I spent tons of time at the beach (producing uneven burn lines), walked to Cumberland Farms, spent a morning at the Umbrella factory/visiting old Charlestown haunts, and ate a ton of delicious food. And laughed a lot with my pseudo cousins over memories of all our years in Rhode Island.

This train won’t hit DC until near 10:00 pm, so I’ll probably take a cab home and then collapse. This coming Saturday, a friend who I haven’t seen in about 15 years is coming into DC and we’re going to play tourist. I’m buying dinner for my friend who visited me in the hospital on Sunday. That is ridiculously social for me.

It’s probably sounds strange, but I feel better than I have in a long time. Way better than I felt when I got out of a rehab.

This won’t be posted until Thursday. Friday. By the time I get home, liquor stores in DC will be closed, so I’ll have made it another day. That’s 15  16 days. Gotta start somewhere.

By noon today, I’d finished two loads of laundry and two cups of coffee. One would think that I could sustain this productivity, but instead I’ve mostly just thought about all the things I have to do at work tomorrow, and then told myself to stop obsessing because whenever I worry about the one million things I have to do, I’m always able to complete them by noon.

My most constant internal conflict as of late is whether to resign myself to the misery of defeat or indulge my slightly new age-y belief in the universe.  While I never realized it in my earlier years the choice IS entirely up to me. And why, you might wonder, would I consciously choose the former? It seemingly condemns myself to more despair.

There’s something to be said for resignation. It’s realistic. I’m 27 years old and all I’ve ever been is a glorified secretary. In eight months of job hunting I’ve had a few phone interviews and a few in person interviews, none of which have gone very well. I don’t have internship experience, connections, and I suck at networking (and don’t try as hard as I should.) The odds stack up and demotivate me further. What’s the point? Why should I do what feels so unnnatural?

There is an insanity in me though, one that nags at me when I’m blindly clicking through job listings and not applying to one of them. There is still the wily brand of hope that I have written about so many times here. It seems to be purely irrational to indulge in it. There is no reason at all to believe that things will get better, just because. The universe has proved itself to be completely random, and since I’m now of the opinion that I’ve used up a great deal of my good luck in my earlier years, there is no reason for me to just have faith that things will get better. I have been at this for nearly nine months. Getting interviews doesn’t make me any closer to getting to DC, anymore than one can be a little bit pregnant.

There is no reason for the madness of my hope, and yet I often find myself with it anyway. When I’m in my car, and my iPod shuffle hits the right song (lately, it’s been hiting Dar Williams “Better Things” quite often) it’s so easy to hope. It’s so easy to get in the state of mind where I think all this whining and angsting and waiting is both worth it, and happening for a reason, even though I believe that we assign reasons after the fact.

I don’t know which is better anymore.

And so we choose between reality & madness

It’s either sadness or euphoria.

I was in good spirits on the way to work this morning, but somewhere between my iced coffee and my inability to compose a blog post it became a very blah day. I am really tired, there’s a huge balance on both my credit cards, and my suit jacket is just going to have to make itself useful even without the dry cleaning.

There is a reason for all this, of course. I hope it’s worth it. That’s all I’ll say right now.

Why is today going so slow, and why am I so tired? I got a decent night’s sleep! I suppose one good night can’t make up for the past 10 days, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

There are no words for how insane next week is going to be. I’m trying not to think about it, because it’s going to be miserable, but if I can keep myself from thinking about it, and keep myself from dreading all the anxiety producing events, maybe it won’t be as bad.

One day at a time?

Nah! (I just emailed Brent: “I am going to hate the world until approximately this time next week.” And it’s true!

“Why stop there?” he asked.

Also a valid point. But I do like my dose of new age-y optimism that I am sometimes able to maintain. I just can’t fake it till I make it in the next seven days. I’m already exhausted.

Why fight it? Some days, it’s just not worth the effort.

.

I unexpectedly dissolved into tears of I-don’t-know-what while on the phone with Joe on Sunday afternoon. Michael’s attack, which I know he did not intend as cruel, upset me, because it played on my fear of being completely misunderstood, and thus thought naïve or ridiculous or whatever.

Thank God for people who understand me.

Joe reminded me that there are going to be weeks like this, where I’m going to wallow. And when I told him about all of Michael’s suggestions, he agreed that they were a little over the top. And that, regardless, I shouldn’t do anything that feels blatantly unnatural.

Essentially, Joe, who knows me better than almost anyone, believes that in order for this job hunting thing to work for me, I have to be myself. That all the rules and suggestions and nouveau ways of job hunting are not going to work if I’m being inauthentic. And while it’s true that the definition of insanity is going the same thing over and over and expecting different results it would be equally insane to try to morph into what I think someone else wants me to be.

I’ve tried it with boys. It doesn’t work with them and it’s not going to work with jobs.

And this is why Joe is the comforting, Morgan Freeman voiceover in my life.

Later, I was talking to Brent, about important subjects such New Jersey politics, bureaucracy, the last 30 minutes of the movie The Net (I love that movie. Vintage Sandra Bullock), I told him about my conversation from Saturday:

“My friend Michael has the delusional idea that I am Dagny Taggart style ambitious, where in reality, I am unconfrontational and not aggressive”

“Yes. Not enough moxie IMO”

“Yes. Actually that’s EXACTLY it.”

And besides Brent and I, I think Joe is the only other person on the planet who will get why there are points involved for the use of moxie.

You can skip this entire post. Job hunting angst. Lots of whine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spontaneous date was…ok. He was nice. A geek (not a nerd…there is a distinction. Geek can still be good.) But not intellectual. And…not really my type and I didn’t feel any attraction. This alone would not be enough to NOT give him a second chance, but he’s a smoker. I don’t think I can date a smoker. Actually, I KNOW I can’t date a smoker.

And I feel guilty, because I’m pretty sure he liked me a lot more than I liked him. He asked at the end of the “date” when he could see me again; if I wanted to have dinner one night next week. I felt put on the spot, and evaded a little about my schedule. So I ultimately made no firm plans, but I think I indicated dinner would be possible next week, without meaning to.

And I texted him to say “Thanks for lunch” (because I thought that was just being polite. Should i not have done that?) he replied with “I had a great time, and I”m really excited to see you again.” So now I don’t know what to do. Because I got home, and the niceness of the conversation was not enough to make up for the disappointment of not hearing from the boys for whom the ball is in their court. (I probably butchered that sentence)

So last night, it was all summery and it made me miss the city, and think about how if I were in the city, dating would be so much easier. Which is probably not at all true. But there is still this whole “live with my parents” factor. And while there were very good reasons for me moving in two years ago, the fact that I’m still here two years later IS stigmatizing. But I still can’t GO anywhere, because career things are still in limbo.

Blah. The parallels to five years ago are frightening. And that foray into dating just ended in frustration. Granted, I have learned a lot since then, and there is no boy I am trying to make jealous.  But I don’t know. I don’t know if its just my frustration over the job hunt creeping in — I was telling Keithers last night about how it is so incredibly disheartening to spend time crafting cover letters and putting applications together to hear absolutely NOTHING — and making me feel uncertain about other things.

Edit: A minute later, an email from one of the other boys appeared. “Sorry for not getting back to you. Want to have coffee next week?”

And so I’ll wait at least 24 hours. And then I’ll say “Sure.”

You wouldn’t know it from my entries but I start each day with optimism. I wake up, brew a travel mug of coffee, and I drive to work with a good attitude about my hours in front of me. By now, I recognize that this optimism is unsustainable; despite my better efforts, it’s often gone by 11 AM.

Today was no different, except I’m writing this at 9:20 am, and won’t be able to post until later because OUR INTERNET IS DOWN. I don’t know what the issue is; internal stuff is working fine.

(this happened once at PLI and I wrote this post about how I wanted time to slow down anyway. I know it is terribly unhealthy the way I envy the girl who wrote that, but I do)

I don’t understand how our IT department cannot solve this, as it has been down for 90+ minutes.

[ok. Internet is back. Thank god]

And apparently, my optimism is crushed once I check my email and find no response from jobs or boys.  I don’t understand boys. I really don’t.  I mean, I would never describe myself as “hot.” But I’ve always been confident in the fact that I’m quite passably cute. But with this online dating thing, are they fleeing based on my Facebook photos? Evidence seems to suggest this is possible. Evidence also seems to suggest I am neurotic and over think things. However, given that NOTHING has worked out in the past 7+ months, maybe I have even more flaws than I realized, and I’ve just been walking around in this haze of self-deception.

At this point, anything thing is possible.

Every single morning, I wake up, believing that this could be the day. The job offer might come (which now has dissolved to “maybe I’ll get an interview…” and finally “maybe they’ll be something worth applying to posted.” Or, I might actually hear back from someone in my (admittedly small) network. Or maybe just SOMETHING good, something that is going to move my life forward will happen. Today could be the day.

I think this every single morning. It’s in my head from the minute I wake up. It’s in every song I skip or linger on my iPod shuffle. Every single day, there is a part of me that genuinely believe today is when it will finally happen.

 And every single day, for the past 6+ months, I’ve been wrong.

I’ve tried really hard to be happy (or at least “okay”) with the seemingly neverending string of disappointments. I really do try. I constantly remind myself of the good in my life and how things are not as bad as they could be. But those mind tricks are becomming less and less effective every day. I could give it a rest, sure. I could stop looking for the summer, try to relax and have fun, but what good will that do me? I will still be HERE in September, a place that I started to put together an escape plan from almost ten months ago.

And June is already half over. Time is moving at a ridiculous pace; and it’s such a valuable resource, and despite all my efforts, I’m losing it.

So Saturday morning I found out I owe my therapist $290! Awesome! And then I went to work and dragged boxes of files around, discovered MORE files that I had to deal with, knocked over a box, got paper cuts all over my hands and tried not to cry.

I got sushi, because sushi makes most things better. And then I sulked for awhile, called Joe (to apologize, as I was really bitchy to him on the phone earlier) and we went to The Diner, because we are those sad people who graduated high school NEARLY TEN YEARS AGO and still go to the local diner when we can’t think of anywhere else to go on a Saturday night. At least The Diner too has evolved and is no longer the hang out it once was; we were the only ones there under the age of 50.

Sunday, I slept late, because I desperately needed it. And it was Mother’s Day, and my mom was in a bad mood and I tried to ignore it/her. And then I put together file lists for work. Thrilling.

I did not write any coevr letters, or look at federal jobs or do anything that may Get Me Out Of Here.

I DID have a good talk with Joe on Saturday night, and while it does not neccesarily make me feel better about things, it was still somewhat encouraging. We were also both texting Brent with nonsense (“there should be an E-True Hollywood story about LTTC”) and taking bets on whether he would get the abbreviation. Because these things are fun. Yes.

And now it’s Monday morning and I’ve been here since around 8:00 and it’s quite chilly for May, and I’m supposed to get my windshield replaced so I hope the guy shows up. And I hope that my mother is out of her bad mood by the time I get home, because I am stressed, cranky, and trying VERY hard not to take it out on anyone.

I teared up in my car on the way to work this morning. Again. I’m not even sure what song it was in reponse to, or if it was even in response to a song. I am kind of a mess.

Yesterday sucked. I think it was probably my worst day ever at this job, to the point where I was in tears.I rarely cry at things that aren’t movies, but the trifecta of stress, frustration, and general overwhelmed-ness, built up, and for a few minutes, I cracked. Yesterday, I definitely felt that my job sucked, and I was just angry about the situation.

And then I pull back, and there is STILL this reluctance to complain, because it’s not as bad as The-Job-That-Wasn’t. I was sort of relating this to a co-worker last week, that no matter how upset I get about things at work, it was so bad at The-Job-That-Wasn’t, that I really can’t let myself get too bereft. She likened it to an abusive relationship; (“at least this job doesn’t hit me!”) which is overstating the case quite a bit, but accurate in a black-humor way.

It’s not just the job that’s getting to me. My undergrad is having a 5 year reunion in June, and there’s a facebook group for it, and I stupidly looked through pictures people are posting and got depressed. I knew maybe one person in any of the pictures, but they’re all having typical collegiate fun and reminiscing and blah blah blah I-Had-A-Lousy-College-Experience. Some people are traumatized by their high school experiences and you just want to tell them to get over it. Some days, I’m still not over the fact that I missed out on the college experience. I don’t have friends from college, I don’t have pictures from college, I don’t have memories from college. It was 3.5 years I got through as quickly as I could. Most of the time I am over this, and have made my peace with it.

Occasionally, the resentment and anger at myself creeps up and then I just start thinking about how I wish I could have done it all differently, and how different my life could be right now (different how, I’m not sure) and really, it’s just messy self-pity that really shouldn’t be indulged.

Also, “Welcome to Whereever You Are” came up on iPod shuffle on my way to work and it made me teary. (“You’re caught between just who you are/and who you want to be”) Clearly the stress is getting to me.

I made plans to go to a Monday meeting, with the intent of “running into” Just-In-Case. Partly because when I actually ran into him a few weeks ago, he told me I should. In anticipation of this (and also, just because I felt like it) I fixed my hair and dressed all nice. I wore this shirt, because Keithers described the color (Fantasia Blue) as “I want to have sex with that.” I recieved several compliments.

Just-In-Case, was of course, not there this Monday. Typical. At least my hair still looks pretty today.

The days are dragging this week. I feel like Toni Collette in Clockwatchers, which is a wonderful and very underrated little film. The movie was made in 1997, so while the internet existed (we had it at my house. My family had internet before Al Gore, probably) it certainly hadn’t infiltrated every aspect of the workplace like it does today. There’s one line in it

Sometimes it hits you how quickly the present fades into the past, and you question everything around you. You wonder if anything you’d ever do would matter.

Which pretty much sums up what I feel some days. I was driving to work this morning and it’s already almost March. 2009 was the year of Just Surviving. Last March, I said that I knew it was going to be hard, that “this year” was going to be really, really, really hard but that I would get through it. And now I have, and it’s like “ok, what next?” and while I clearly have some ideas of what I want for “what’s next,” the present is speeding away as I try to make the future happen.

This is quickly veering towards angsty-existential crises territory, where it seems to go a lot these days. I think back on when I was temping, at this time, five years ago. Sure I’m older and wiser, but I am so jealous of my 22 year old self sometimes. And then I remember what it was like trying to get a job just out of college, practically having to beg someone to give me a chance, and well no, I’m not jealous of that, but then again, is it really that different from what I’m doing now? That I’m offering to answer phones and make copies for an abysmal salary just so I can finally work somewhere that I feel relevant?

That was a major run on sentence.

I guess part of it is that deep down there is still this fear, that maybe This Is It. That all I am ever going to be is a glorified secretary. And while that’s not the worst of fates (or pays) it’s certainly not what I ever wanted or imagined for myself. Maybe I just Don’t Have What It Takes. To do what, exactly, I’m not sure, but for now I use the sentiment broadly. It seems entirely possible that it isn’t going to matter how many carefully crafted cover letters I send out or how smart I am, or how capable I am of doing any of these jobs; I might never get one because of all that is still missing from my resume. And maybe, it’s missing from my resume, not because I choose wrong or differently, but because I am just not the type of person who saw those chances, or opportunities in the first place. David is always pointed out that every ponderance of “what would have been if I had taken another path” requires you to question whether you, being the type of person you are, could have done anything different anyway.

This started out as a lighthearted post. I swear.

It’s funny how doubt hides itself. It follows behind you. It waits in every corner. You never see it coming. But you feel it, on the inside. Maybe it was just that office. Or maybe it was bigger than that, it was all around. A million eyes. Watching. Judging. The whole wide world even. You feel so small.

-Clockwatchers

One of the main reasons I haven’t wanted to get all angsty about the Great-DC-Job-Search (other than the fact that whining is not an attractive quality) is that I don’t want to listen to people tell me that I’m being fatalistic, or that I CAN do it, or making suggestions about what I should try.

Here are the facts: I never had a fancy (unpaid) DC internship when I was in college. I could have one summer, but it would have involved paying for houses and not making any money. I chose instead to go home for the summer and work. There were lots of factors involved in that decision, and at the time, I wouldn’t have been happy in DC, but I am paying for it now. I have NO DC experience, and this is somehow relevant even for non-Hill jobs (I don’t want to work on the Hill). The Libertarian Fellowship was so important to me because it was a back door into DC. A shortcut, so to speak. I knew that the chances of me getting a job in DC the old-fashioned way were/are very slim and that that fellowship would have given me an in.

The other thing is the type of experience I have. I have a Masters degree from a very good university, where I also worekd as a research assistant. But my resume also evidences that I’ve been a glorified (and at times, not even glorified) secretary since college. I was lamenting this with Virginia, a girl who graduated a year before me; job postings want you to have 3 years of experience, and the only experience you can get is admin work, and then that’s not good enough.

Do you know what I would have done, as an intern, in DC? I would have made copies and filed and answered phones. Yes, I recognize that location is everything and there’s more to it than just the clerical aspect. But I hate that that looks more important on paper than what I do now (and I do all those things and a whole hell of a lot more). I hate that my only option is a lateral move into another admin position – that that is my only hope of getting into DC, and that is still a small chance.

I don’t want to hear about how I just have to be patient and try and whatever (yes, I know I sound whiny) because these are not the off-the-cuff ramblings of a frustrated job searcher. These are just the facts. They are something that I have been painfully aware of for a long time. To an extent, this knowledge may have kept me from job hunting in DC in the past – fear of rejection/failure and all. I know the odds and they are not good. Add in the recession and they slip to sub-zero.

So I don’ t exactly know what to do. My motivation is sapped. Writing another cheery cover letter makes me want to stab my eyes out. I know that everyone searching for a job must feel the same way. It’s a disheartening process, to see these jobs that I would be perfect for and not get a resposne to my carefully crafted applications. And then I read the barrage of job hunting advice that’s on the internet about networking and promoting yourself and finding your job through twitter (and how you’ll never find a job the traditional way, not in this world) and it’s even more confusing about what to do.  What am I supposed to do? Blog incessently on my RealName wordpress account (I don’t use it, I just snatched up the name) about the places I want to work and why they should hire me? Because I do have 2-3 places in mind that I would LOVE to work.

I don’t know. I know that my frustrations are the same as almost everyone going through the job hunt. But I feel so trapped. I feel that the decisions I made five years ago are haunting me now and that this is my life. A future something great destined to spend her life answering phones and ordering office supplies. I like my job and for the most part I do way more than that, and there is nothing inherently wrong with those things.

But I want to be something other than a glorified secretary. I don’t want to have to answer someone else’s phone. That’s my dream. Right there.

The utter laziness of this weekend (in which I did not even do laundry) disgusts me. Occasionally the sloth-ness of my existences gets to me and I spend Monday feeling icky about my hardcore indulgence in one of the seven deadly sins. I am hoping to rectify this by doing my laundry tonight and perhaps straightening my room, but the number of hours I spend sitting on my bed with my laptop is really obscene.

I’m getting punchy. Maybe I would also feel better if I cleaned my desk, but instead I am choosing to whine unattractively.

It’s not that I hate the person I am now. I’m ok with her, the girl who has developed an unhealthy West Wing (or more accurately Josh/Donna) obsession, the girl who reloads her email every 90 seconds, the girl who eats far too many of these delicious crispy pretzel-cracker things. She is better off than the person I was a year ago, even if I have to refer to her in third person. But sometimes, I am just so sick of her, and she is so sick of her surroundings, and we are so impatient for it not to be this way.

I know of all the suggestons and solutions , the if you don’t like where you are or what you’re doing then it is up to you to change that. I’m working on that, I am – the Libertarian fellowship was certainly a huge part of that. But it’s a slow process and it feels like a lot of hurry up and wait and go nowhere fast, and so for now I’m just stuck being the girl I am now, who has nowhere to wear all her pretty new one-size smaller clothes.

In April, I will have been in suburbia for two years, when it was supposed to be for a few months. In May, I will be 27, and before I know it, another summer will speed by. Time is going to fast and I’m not keeping up with it, and while I’m doing as much as I can to find a way to get to a place where I want to be, there are only so many avenues and outlets. There’s a recession, there’s reality, and there’s logistics.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into such an existential angst fest, but my whining should be recorded. For posterity’s sake.

Complaining/wallowing is something that I have trained myself not to do in the past 7 months. Part of it has been that if I started to think of everything that I COULD complain about I would never find any time to be reasonably content. Part of ithas been, because I didn’t feel so stuck or so impatient a few months ago.

Part of it is because part of me still wants to believe that I can train myself to feel what I want to/think I should feel, when I want to feel it. It’s a good party trick, one that seems to work perfectly well when one is in decent spirits. The execution sort of falls apart when it’s week number umpteen of the same old-same old, and it’s all you can do NOT to dissolve into a whiny, complaining baby.

I don’t want this space to become an angst-fest. I don’t cry prettily. But I don’t want to coat it with the layer of gloss and veneer that made the entries of my Livejournal shine with alleged contentness time and time again.

Part of me is calculating. I am “grown-up” enough now to know that This Too Shall Pass; to remind myself that even in the depths of this utterly exhausting same-old-same-old there have been some very good things too; to write this and think that one day, maybe one day not too far in the future, I will look back on this angsting and be thankful for it because it got me to the place that I’ll be standing in that one day.

And then part of me thinks that that hope is delusional and misplaced, because how can I know? How can I think that I will get out of here, that I will find something better, that I will be happy, really happy like I used to be? How can I be so delusional as to think that one day I can live in New York City again, that I will fall in love, that I will be okay?

Depression is a tricky thing. In a strange way, I miss the very old days, when I didn’t know it was Depression, when I didn’t know how therapy could work (if I’d only let it) and when I truly did not believe that there was anything better for me out there. It was a dark time in my life, and I would not want to relive it, but I had blinders on, and sometimes I miss tunnel vision. With tunnel vision, it is impossible to hope, but then, it is impossible to be disappointed.

This is the darkness I sometimes find myself in, and I never know how long it will take to find a clearing. And because I don’t know, I’m afraid to let my eyes adjust to the dark and I create these artificial sources of light. I’m afraid to get lost in the woods, because if I get turned around, I might encounter a blackness that goes deeper than the vague grayness that I have known, mastered, and conquered time and again.

So I try not to complain, and I try not to worry, and I try not to angst. I try not to be that melancholy girl that I was back in college, the one who ruined things for herself because of her inability to see beyond the black, for her delusional belief in the terminal uniqueness of her dramatized misery.

But sometimes even the strongest of walls can’t hold what is hiding behind them, and that is why on an otherwise ordinary Thursday, I am angsting my way through an entry, rolling my eyes at myself, thinking about Thoreau’s take of  “lost in the woods” (because I am an overeducated elitist) and thinking of the song “War on Drugs” by BNL, and how I first heard it in January 2004, and how it represented that something, SOMETHING had to give, and soon.

It’s going to be January 2010 soon. Something has to give. And Soon.

I should finish (start) the filing at work. (Filing is the opposite of life affirmation)

I should refamiliarize myself with major foreign policy issues, instead of just the sound bytes. (Just remember it’s foreignaffairs.org, not foreignaffairs.com)

I should organize my email and old invoices and a thousand other things (So I can go back to kicking ass & taking names at work.)

But mostly I just wait for another email in my inbox, another person’s new blog post, and for 5:30.

I should vacuum my room and change my sheets. (I’ve got to learn to not be so slovenly)

I should watch those West Wing DVDs. (I’ve always heard that I’d like the show)

But mostly, I just wait, for 10:00 PM on Wednesday, when the hard part of the week is finally over.

I should go to Midland one of these Saturday nights. (Maybe I’ll run into Scott the Libertarian again)

I should tag along with Katie one Friday night (Getting out of the house is allegedy healthy)

I should call Emily (Even though I think she tolerates my company about as much as I do hers)

But mostly I just wait for the end of November.

I should try again to make friends here. (Even though I like my version of the weekend. Lame, and sometimes lonely, but MINE)

I should try to wear all the new clothes that I’m acquiring. (Even though there’s no dress code, and only a dozen people left in my office)

I should try to mentally prepare myself for not even getting a phone inteview. (Especially since I suck on the phone, and even if I got one, there’s a chance I’d blow it anyway)

But mostly I just wait. For the email, telling me whether I have the phone interview or not, for a day when someone will actually see me in my cute clothes, and for the day that I get out of Jersey.

I can talk myself out of making plans for DC in June and look for jobs in New York, just in case, and I can make believe that I will have some semblence of a plan no matter what, but right now I can’t concentrate on a foreign affairs article, and I can’t drive to hang out with acquintences and leave when I please until I get my license back, and I can’t look for a job until I find out about the Fellowship.

So, mostly, I just wait.

I whittle away afternoons in two minute intervals (games of Wordtwist) and nights with SVU reruns, and buy clothes for the job I don’t have yet.

I wait.

I am listening to the Kelly Clarkson song “Already Gone.” Every time I hear it, I wonder what my life would have been like if The Ex and I had broken up at the end of high school instead of making it almost all the way through college. Because that’s really what I want to be thinking of a Sunday morning.

I’ve mostly spent the weekend angsting over my application. This fellowship is the first thing I have wanted — really, really wanted — in a very long time. Yes, I wanted my current job – I wanted it to go from temp to perm, but if it hadn’t, it would have been due to bureaucratic issues and no reflection on my worth. Plus, there wasn’t such uncertainty – I knew I was doing a very good job, I knew my boss liked me, and so I wasn’t afraid to basically demand the company hire me. (In retrospect, I don’t know when/how I decided to grow a spine, or where that spine has gone since then)

Here, I have no idea if I’m doing a good job on the application. I have no idea if I am what they are looking for. I have no idea how I match up against other candidates.

I’m not good at admitting when I want something. But good lord, I want this. I want this because it would be my dream job in every sense of the word. I want this because it would force me to live in DC, the city I have refused to move to because it’s not New York, but would probably hold much better career opportunities than New York ever could. I want this because although I like my job I don’t want to be here the rest of my life. I want this because I need to get out of suburban Jersey.

I want this. And that in of itself is pretty terrifying to me.

Saturday night, the anticipation of which garnered so many words here in the past couple weeks, was an unmitigated disaster. It didn’t help that it was At-This-Time-Last-Year, and that David wasn’t there to keep me from being stupid. I should be convincted of first degree “doing-that-thing-where-you’re-nervous-about-seeing-an-ex(of sorts)-but-you-want-to-pretend-you’re-totally-ok.”

The only moment I am proud of is the moment he walked into the bar. I met his eyes and held them and didn’t look away. “You look really good,” he told me.

“Thank you,” I replied, and didn’t break the stare.

The rest of the night is a string of awfulness. It may not have been as bad as Chicago this past summer, but it was bad.

Basically I feel horrible right now. I am so mad at myself, because I was doing a lot better – or so I thought. He is a trigger for me, obviously, just like HWSNBN was.  I don’t know how I’m going to get through this day – I know I will, but right now it seems so unmanageable and so much bigger than me.