I don’t mean to go on blogging breaks, but work has been insane, and then, what do I have to say, really? I am still stuck. Oh, and it’s Saturday night, and I have no plans besides picking up some sushi, doing some laundry, and the SVU marathon.

I have basically become ok with the fact that my weekends are like this. I have gotten past judging them as “pathetic” and making self deprecating comments about them. I would just rather be spending my weekends doing nothing in DC (or NYC) and then I would have the option to do something that wasn’t nothing.

I think I might want DC like the way I wanted New York when I got out of college. Back then, I was also craving independence and the opportunity for a social life, to be sure, but I wanted New York because of HWSNBN. I think I want DC, and there’s not even a boy there. I suppose my therapist would say this is progress. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I have just forced myself to not want NYC, because I know that career wise, DC is the only place that makes sense right now. And, given that, there’s no use wanting what you can’t have, or torturing yourself with what cannot be.

HWSNBN still texts me very occasionally. He asked back in September when I’d be in the city next. I said December. He told me to let him know when, but I never did. I didn’t see the point, really, and also all the vain, shallow reasons like I want to be nothing but 100% together if I ever see him again.

So for now, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I have a phone interview on Monday for an organization that pays probably half of what my current job does, and who’s political orientation is possibly opposite of my own. Still, they do some interesting work in the security/foreign policy realm, so I’ll give it a chance to see what happens. Already, in my head I’m making excuses for why this is a terrible idea to even consider, and of course this is mere projection, because the phone interview hasn’t even happened yet.

When I moved to New York, I was actually pretty gutsy. Despite growing up 30 minutes away, I didn’t know the city, and I certainly didn’t know the boroughs. I spent the first half of the summer of 2005 job hunting and apartment hunting in the sweltering heat. I learned the neighborhoods of Brooklyn (where I never wound up living) by google map directions and walking. I learned the subway by following the colored lines on the map with my finger. HWSNBN and I were long over, and I didn’t have any friends in the city. I just did it.

“You have to take a step before you’re ready. Because if you wait to be ready, you’ll never take that step. “

Perhaps I would do well to remember this.

You know.

After all these months of planning out how I’m getting to/from work every day; after all the weeks where my stress level was through the roof because I didn’t quite know how I was getting back and forth; after all the days of waiting around, leaving early, and last minute rushes because my schedule was not truly my own.

You’d think that the last thing that would bother me would be the logistics of getting to the DMV, getting my paperwork in order, and getting to work.  And yet, I’m stressed as hell about Tuesday. I suppose it is always the little things that manage to torture me.

So it’s Thursday, and this means the worst part of the week is behind me. For some reason though, waking up on Friday mornings has been especially difficult. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it. It’s just the alarm startles me out of a deep sleep on Friday mornings and I so don’t want to get out of bed.

I’m ready for Thanksgiving Break.

I suppose that I am attempting NaBloPoMo (hence why I have posted hurried things all week) but now that I’ve said that I will likely FAIL. I know it’s NaNoWriMo, but I don’t write fiction, so it’s not really my thing. I HAVE participated in NaNoWriMo in varying capacities before, but those are some long-ish stories and had very little to do with the writing. (Read: they had to do with a boy, usually)

For whatever reason I am not particularly concerned at this moment with the fact that I have not heard from the Libertarians (I’m pretty much resigned…this doesn’t change the fact that I will cry at official rejection, but at this particular moment I’m in a “life will go on” sort of mindset) or from the State of New Jersey. Maybe someone has been slipping Xanax into my Red Bull.

The Yankee Parade is today. The only reasons I wanted the Yankees to win over the Phillies was North Jersey pride (South Jersey, which is a different country, goes for Philly) and because of how much Red Sox fans hate the Yankees.

Almost the weekend. I have no plans, although perhaps I will watch more of the West Wing. I never watched it in the original run and have no idea about what happens throughout the series (AND DON’T TELL ME) so its like an entirely new show for me. I’m only about half way through the first season, and it’s amusing how dated some of it is – it’s very, very Clintonian.

The roads really were fine this morning, so I can’t complain, although I worry they will be worse by the evening’s commute.

I didn’t go to sleep until 1 AM, partially because I slept late on Sunday, and partially because a tiny part of me was hoping against hope for a snow day.

Woke up at 4am to see that the plows had already been by, and that it had stopped snowing, which completely killed any possibility.  Fell back asleep with a gnawing in my stomach.

Bleh. I feel like a 12 year old wishing for a snow day. Once you hit high school, snow days become a lot less fun.

I am one of two people in my office. Actually, there are a few more people here, based on cars in the parking lot, but I don’t see them anywhere. I’m walking around with no shoes, but I do that fairly frequently, so I can’t claim it’s because no one is here.

I used to like days in the office where no one was here, but now I”m just getting bored and cabin fever-y. I should be using this time productively, like to write, or to create the elaborate file system I’ve been planning on creating, or something other than mindlessly clicking through the same half a dozen websites, but motivation, I do not have it.

I’m going to get some lunch in a few minutes, because even though I have an extremely well stocked fridge at home, and even though I took my time this morning because I knew no one would be here, I still managed to not pack lunch. So hopefully the cafeteria in our office complex is open, because I really don’t feel like driving anywhere.

After a break to regain my health and sanity, the job hunt has begun in earnest and omg, and it is SO MUCH WORSE than it was last summer. There is NOTHING.

There’s nothing in development or research in non-profits, anywhere, not that I expected to stumble upon my ideal job, but there’s NOTHING.

And all the legal assistant/paralegal stuff I’m thinking of reverting to is all 3-5 years experience or listed by an agency, most of which are scams.

I’m already discouraged

I am proud of myself, because I recognized a “Something-That-Could-Be-a-Problem!!!!!!” 3 weeks before it would be a problem, and now I am the hero of the department for pointing it out. So yay on the work related front, especially because I’m slowly starting to feel things click.

Everything else, meh, just meh. I hate that it is October and I can’t even wear my cute fall clothes because it’s still all hot and humid and icky out. I want cool, crisp weather. I love cardigans over collared shirts and it is way, way too hot for that.

So basically, right now I’m just accepting that things are kind of meh right now. They aren’t going to be like this forever, especially because I will make an effort to make them all not meh. Right now I’ll strike a balance. Accept that I might be a little anti-social right now, but I’m going to do xyz differently. Blah blah blah psychobabble.

This too shall pass (Emily, come visit me in NYC and I’ll get my second tattoo officially) and feeling meh is certainly no death sentence and such.

I was so close, less than 36 hours away from leaving Hyde Park when…car troubles.

I’m not getting out of here until Wednesday. I have to call Grad Student Housing first thing on Monday and find out how much I’m going to be fined for moving out late. I have to cancel my job interview for Tuesday.

And I’m going to pout, because I reallly just want to go home.

I fell asleep last night at a very decent hour which was much needed as I’d not slept well the past few nights. Only to be awakened maybe an hour or so later by a massive thunderstorm and the wind blowing rain through my open window screen. Grr. That’s what I get for describing the weather as “entirely too nice out.” 

I’m gonna go drink a giant cup of coffee. I miss the horrible coffee from my building at work. $1 for 24 oz of caffeinated slug. I should stock up on energy drinks of my way home. I have recently discovered this one made by Arizona that actually contains like 3% juice and even has some Vitamins so I don’t feel bad drinking it. Mmm, delicious Taurine.

Well I slept later than I meant to, because I took Tylenol PM to get to sleep, then didn’t go to bed until one, and then I kept waking up from really short, realistic dreams. The kind of boring, realistic dream that tricks your mind into not knowing its asleep until you wake up. I am still kind of groggy and am gulping down some coffee before I go over to campus for work and getting mass amounts of readings done. (Well, that’s the plan. My level of productivity has dropped to zero since turning in my draft.)

So I’ve started looking for jobs, just tentatively since I can’t do much until I’m back in the New York area. You know that song from Avenue Q, “What can you do with a BA in English?” Well what can you do, with an MA in Social Science? Although I’m told a social science degree is infinitely more valuable than an English degree, which seems silly. My undergrad degree is in Government, not Political Science, and there IS actually a difference, but in most of the fields in my program, unless you’re doing heavy quantitative stuff, everything seems more like a humanity than social science, with the exception of maybe Psychology. 

Oh, and when did I forget how to write? it used to be I could write a paper by pulling quotes and stream of consciousness explain them, etc, and then go back and edit and make the writing fairly solid. I don’t think its a matter of Skidmore grade inflation — when i read stuff I wrote three years ago it still sounds better than what I’m producing now. I had both Brent and the younger-wiser-sibling look over parts of my thesis because I was just staring at, knowing it wasn’t good writing, but not knowing exactly what was wrong or exactly how to fix it. Brent’s diplomatic comment on the thesis as a whole was “Well. It certainly has potential.” I don’t know, I guess a year and a half out of school is enough to destroy your writing skills? Blah. I cleaned up the draft of the thesis the best I could and I’m trying really hard not to think about it until I get the comment back. Although I should probably be working on the “Schmitt was a total Hobbesian” section that I plan on adding. That and, making the younger-wiser-sibiling read the WHOLE thing and paying him in the form of cheap scotch. I am the best sister ever. 

I was thinking today about The Tempest. I don’t know why. I hated it when we had to read it freshman year of high school, because I hated my freshman English and the way he taught it. Loved it when we read it for Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom and now for some reason I’m in the mood to read it. Or if nothing else, find my notes and see what I thought of it three years ago. 

And on that completely unrelated note, I’m going to head over to campus

I wrote a long entry on all the things I missed about New York, specifically about this summer there yesterday, but then deleted it, because I was being unneccesarily maudlin. I realized that “this-time-of-year” is quickly approaching. I don’t know how I feel about that; I don’t see any ‘other shoes’ that are in danger of dropping, but one never knows.

I’m in the middle of writing final papers. I have a lot of words down on the page, but still need to do a lot of editing. In my Machiavelli paper, I think I quote Schmitt and Agamben almost as much as Machiavelli. My liberalism paper is kind of silly, but again, words are on the page, its just a matter of ordering them. I talk about sex a lot. And I’m meeting my goal of turning in 15-20 pages of my thesis next week, because I will graduate in June if it kills me.

As I very crudely put it “An MA in less than nine months, this is way more productive than getting knocked up.”

Grad school really is a freaking roller coaster. My good mood and positive attitude lasted approximately 16 hours. Now I am anxious over something I screwed up for work (the dread of waiting for your boss to come talk to you about what you wrong. In this case, the dread is going to last until 4 PM tomorrow when I next see him). I am also back to stressing out about empirical/statistical methods courses to the point of nausea.

I WANT  to be able to get into a PhD program. If I don’t get in where I want, am I going to regret not taking this stupid class that was recommended to me? Is it going to be one of my big “if onlys?” I’m trying to put this is perspective, but I’m having a difficult time, because being at U Chicago is like having blinders on. At U Chicago, they think they are The Authority on everything, and so whenever ANYONE in a position of authority tells you anything, you think you have to take them on their word, regardless of what you may think/feel.

(It’s funny. One of my “issues” is I have a lot of defense mechanisms that are often unhealthy. U Chicago has massive defense mechanisms issues, because outside of academia, people forget about U Chicago because it’s not among the Ivies. U Chicago is an amazing institution, and the name carries a lot of respect in academic/law school circles, but not to the general public. U Chicago thus overcompensates by proclaiming to by the Final Word on everything. I mean, I’m sure all schools do that to an extent, but Chicago is ridiculous about it.)

Maybe I should just lower my standards and accept the fact that no matter what I do I will not get into my Super-Secret-Dream-School. But then, what if getting some empirical methods experience is the deciding factor in considering me there, and blah.

And now it sounds like I’m basically whining because I don’t want to take a class because it’s hard and it’s boring and whatever. I mean, I know I’m going to have to do these things within a PhD program eventually. Maybe I should just suck it up on the Comparative Politics front.

Maybe I should just not take the class I think I need for my thesis; maybe I don’t really need a whole class on The Prince in order to incorporate Machiavelli into my thesis. And then I can take Florentine Republic next quarter anyway. Maybe.

Ug. I need to talk to someone who is not my precept about this and get a second opinion.