Yesterday, a series of things that Give Me Hope (like FML, but with hope), to put me under the spell of “Maybe this time.”

When I have hope, I love it (albeit cautiously). When I don’t have it, I hate it and want it in equal proportions.

I warn myself not to project, not to plan, and not to get my hopes up. But…they’re already up. And so maybe I should just enjoy it? Because I know by now that it won’t last. A job won’t come through. What is easy conversation via gchat will be stilted and awkward. My email box will sit empty.

But, I drove home from work last night, and swear to god I had not thought of this song in years, but I caught myself humming “You Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees. Specifically I’m thinking of this part:

Totally lame, but in the moment, it sounded pretty good to me, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe being stuck as a glorified secretary whilst marooned at my parents house in Jersey is NOT the career/life/whatever death sentence I’ve been seeing it as. I don’t so much buy into “everything happens for a reason” – I believe it’s human nature to Monday morning quarterback things without even realizing it, to attribute significance to things after the fact – it isn’t so much that everything happens for a reason then it is that we reconstruct the now logical sequence of events once the conclusion has already been reached.

But I guess that right then, and maybe even right now, I have enough hope to think that I’m going to get to a place, or something’s going to happen, and it’s going to give me the ability to see what this was all for.

And so last night, I got myself to the gym, where I listend to Atlas Shrugged on tape. I got up to the part where Francisco has become something that Dagny can’t understand and for the first time in their lives she doesn’t understand his actions, and she’s terribly hurt, but has no choice but to go on, and to live with it, and to survive it. I, much younger, used to think that if Dagny could handle that, than I certainly should be able to handle whatever complication I was currently obsessing about.

Then there was an email; not one I was expecting/wanting, but a good email nonetheless, and a short g-chat conversation.  I went to bed feeling good for once.

And now it’s Wednesday, and there’s coffee tonight with a boy I’m not sure I want to have coffee with (bad signs: hard to pin down for a time for plans and has mentioned an Ex more than once. good signs: very polite. seems to think highly of me from what little he knows of me) but the fact that I’m going to have coffee with a boy is a big step. Actually, his mentions of his Ex are what made me realize I am ready to date: At no time in speaking to any of these guys have I thought to bring up any of my exes. It hasn’t been relevant, whereas in the past, it would have been relevant to everything. I knew I had baggage (and I still do) but I hadn’t realized how much I had to put away until I realized it wasn’t there anymore.

And I suppose, even if nothing comes of any of this, that was a great epiphany. And maybe that should be my proof that everything happens for a reason.

Although I am distressed to hear Christmas music where ever I go, I realized today, that this is the first time in eight years that I am not working some type of retail. No free turkeys, no eggnog lattes, and no hearing Xmas music for 10 hours straight. Now THAT is something to be thankful for.

I’m sitting on my balcony, looking at the skyline, thinking ‘blaaaah, I don’t want to go to work tomorrow’ and not wanting to study for the GREs, and well, I love lists, so:

What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

Or What I Learned In The Process of Job Searching, Apartment Hunting, Moving, and Other Assorted Growing Up Adventures

1) The Job Search is often a number games. Where you got your BA doesn’t matter. What you majored in matters even less. It is a matter of sending out hundreds of resumes, going on dozens on interviews, and even fewer second interviews. I am very, very lucky to have landed a job at a place I actually want to work.

2) New York is fucking hot in the summer

3) I can only like, (I mean, like, like) a guy maybe one every two-three years. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine who goes through men, well, rather frequently, that I just don’t LIKE most guys.  I get Serious-All-Consuming Crushes once every few years. And then they last and last until I either make him fall madly in love with me, or wind up getting rejected. And even after I get rejected I tend to hold on to Serious-All-Consuming-Crush until something new comes along and distracts me. Which happens maybe once every two to three years.

4) No matter how bad a day was, when you wake up the next morning and can see the sun rise over the Hudson, life is pretty damn good

5) Williamsburg and Park Slope, while “nice” are full of hipsters, which remind me too much of Hampshire students to live there. I live in Jersey City, fuck the stigma, my apartment is nicer and cheaper than anything I saw in either of those neighborhoods.

6) I have a little world for myself in Saratoga that welcomes me with open arms whenever I want to make the drive up there.

7) The cliché “sometimes it’s holding on that makes you strong. Sometimes it’s letting go,” is very true. It isn’t easy to do, but sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. Hobbes was completely right.

My best friend knows me disgustingly well. Actually, I already knew this, but I was reminded of it a lot this summer.

9) Hell is the 14th Street PATH station at three in the morning when its 100 degrees and insanely humid out. And you’re very, very drunk.

10) That I will be able to befriend random guys whereever I go because of my ability to take a shot of cheap vodka without flinching.

11) That I might actually want to go to school in Texas, because I love going to country-music bars

12) There are way too many pretty people in New York, and this makes me feel extraordinarily ugly on a regular basis

13) I discovered Strand bookstore, and I feel uneducated wandering through the history section there because there are just SO MANY books that I have not read.

14) I belong in academia. This real world this is a good experiment, a good test, if you will, a good way to make me appreciate academia, when I make a triumphant return to it’s hallowed halls in Fall 2006. I belong in academia, be it at Columbia or in Texas or Oregon or where ever and I will not let the fact that one person told me he saw me climbing the NYC  ladder affect my choices, because clearly, he had no clue who I was anyway.

15) I need to focus. Fall is for new beginnings. So here’s to a lot of GRE studying, Grad school applications, going out and being social, and reading all those books I bought.

“…and so yeah, I’m an idiot,” I said, punctuating the end of a long exposition of something dumb I did.

“Yes. You are definitely an idiot,” Brent agrees.

“I know! And I have like, the need to keep repeating it, because it’s like, I know I’m an idiot and I don’t want you to think I don’t know I’m an idiot.”

“Well, your problem is that you didn’t see how this would turn out.”

“Actually I did,” I confess. “I was just being consciously naïve.”

“Consciously naïve?”

“Yeah, like Cassandra in “I Capture the Castle.” Actually, last summer was consciously naïve, this was just more like, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing, and I shouldn’t do it, but whatever.”

“You really are an idiot,” Brent says, shaking his head.

“I know!”

“Why do you tell me these things?”

“Because, I know they’re like, shameful, and I can’t NOT tell you, and I know that you will agree with me that it’s shameful.”

“Right. I tell you it’s shameful. And give you more reasons why it’s shameful,” Brent says helpfully. “I bring a fresh perspective to the situation.”

“Exactly!”

On The Weekend

Epiphany: Three-Point-Five Years IS My Div III

.

Sentence that I never thought I would say (type): Friday night, I went to Manhattan, had a few drinks, went to a club, danced (like, a lot),
and had an absolutely amazing time.

Mike has been trying to corrupt me since we were about 14, and made it his mission to make sure I had fun doing something other than talking about philosophy or politics, or whatever it was I did for fun in college. We toasted to getting burned, and caught up, and the bartender called me “hardcore” for my ability to take “a triple shot of whatever your cheapest vodka is” without cringing. So my last semester of college WAS good for something.

Saturday was spent recovering. I was exhausted. Mentally 35 years olds such as myself get tired when they act their real age! It’s very uncharacteristic of me. I inadvertedly became the “serious” type in college, buried in books, drowned in coffee, that I don’t think anyone who knew me in passing the past four years would believe that I actually can relax and have fun around the right company.

I’ll never betray my dorky roots, as was proven by the walk back to the car in Hoboken on Friday, but now there is proof of what I always suspected: that I will dance if given enough alcohol.