A pile of half written posts sit in my drafts folder. Ones that, I swear to god, go past the whining and complaining. This past week has gotten to me, in little ways I didn’t expect it to. This happened once before, just before Christmas. I’m experiencing a similar sort of discombobulation.

And then also; May is going to suck. So much is going on at work. I’ll make some money from overtime, but I also haven’t applied to one job this week and the whole month of May is looking to be the same type of frentic pace. And also; it’s already May.

Last night, in one of my half written drafts, I started to think about a May, a ten years ago May, a May that was dreaded and referred to only in hushed tones, but that, when it arrived, my utter impatience had already forced the issues and dealt with the fallout, which softened the blow and it was anti-climatic. I think of six years ago May, which was eerily the same, in which I viewed more sunrises than in the rest of my life combined and drank black coffee at 2 in the morning. Four years ago May was about silence and quiet regrouping and the beginning of the best of times. Two years ago May was bold faced lies to myself and everyone around me as I pretended to get well.

While one year ago May was just about survival, this May was supposed to be about another beginning. I warned Keithers that I might not have a job by May, that the job market was tough, but really, I’m pretty sure that a part of me was sure I’d have a job in DC by now. In February, May always seems far away and like a time when things will be different.

This May is about false hopes and real, but vague longing and trying not to get depressed about my 27th birthday. May reminds me of New York and makes me desperately miss lunch breaks in Midtown and the way the city shimmers at 9PM on a Thursday and it makes me ask “DC who?” This May is weekends at work, for overtime pay to stash away for a financially secure exit to who the hell knows where, and brings the reminder that I’m not going anywhere this summer except back and forth on the oh-so-familiar curves of Route 287.

April is allegedly the cruelest month, but I can’t find a one word way to sum up May. I just want to get through these thirty-one days. Starting the countdown from today.

May 30, 2005: Tomorrow begins my insane job interview schedule.  And that is all I have to say. When I get in this, forgive the term, mindset, I’m too busy acting to think.

And with that I took a few weeks off of LJ for The Great NYC Job and Apartment search. I found the apartment first, in late June, and then HWSNBN ended things officially, and I kept going on interviw after interview (mostly with temp agencies) for lousy receptionist and administrative positions, mostly at finance places. One place blended in to the next. I didn’t write about it and an interview in and of itself was nothing to mention, because I had scads of them, 99%of which I walked out of knowing that there was no chance of getting the job.

I don’t want to write about job hunting anymore. I don’t want to write about my frustrations, and my moments of hope and plans that may or may not be foiled by circumstances out of my control.

Right now, I’m pretty resigned. I’m pretty much Here for the long-haul. I’m going to stop wasting my time with federal job applications, because right now I don’t have the time or energy to put into crafting the time of answers you need to get your application looked at. When I’m unemployed, with nothing but time, then I’ll dedicate the hours each one of those takes.

Right now, I’m kind of ok with that. I’ll focus my attention on the good things about Jersey. I’ll enjoy the last few months of Joe being around before he heads off the California. I’ll participate in our efforts to rally for another friend. I’ll go to the CFL meeting tomorrow night (maybe…it’s all the way at the eastern edge of the county, which is about as far away from my house as you can get, plus I’d be coming from work.)

I reserve the right to write an entry completely the opposite of this one any time in the next 24 hours to 30 days, because as a woman, I reserve the right to change my mind, and as I mildly angsty almost late-20s something, I reserve the right to turn everything into an existential crises.

In honor (or perhaps dishonor) of Salinger, I am posting an essay I wrote a number of years ago. 2004 to be exact. It’s a bit lengthy for a blog post, so it’s behind the cut. Yikes it is PAINFUL to read things you wrote 6 years ago, and actually SUBMITTED for a grade.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh Billy Joel, how I miss being able to listen to your music. Otherwise, I’d actually have “Souvenir” on my iPod. But after the embarrassingly awful alcohol poisoning incident in 2008, which landed me in the hospital and caused my acquientence to miss the entirity on Last Play At Shea, I have been unable to listen to you without cringing. This is a shame, because you play in the background of so many of the scenes of the first half of my decade. Luckily, Dar Williams sort of takes over at a point.

Anyway, to complete the chorus “Every Year’s A Souvenir/That Slowly Fades Away”

Here are ten of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

A ridiculously overwrought reflection on NYC

Read the rest of this entry »

I started a post last night about how I really didn’t want to go back to work and how I was having this Pavlonian-esque response to Labor Day. My stomach was in knots and I was filled with just this dread that one feels the night before school starts. And I liked school, for the most part!

But anyway, I didn’t finish it, because whining is unattractive and to save myself from future cringing and deleting, I stopped writing. Also, laziness.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am kind of jealous of the people heading back to or starting school today. I love the start of a school year; new clothes, school supplies, and Promise.

Read the rest of this entry »

But instead of memory, or a reflection on the fact that yesterday marked nine years to the day that I first kissed The Ex (and the fact that that was nearly a decade ago…my lord), or yet another navel-gazed novel about how I’m feeling I decided to go for a stream of consciousness blather. I’m not even going to re-read this before I post it.

I don’t know why I’m suddenly fretting about work. Maybe its because before this job turned permanent, I had the luxury of being able to say “well, it’s just a temp job. It doesn’t matter too much if I suck.” I’m also probably being over sensitive, because the experience at The-Job-That-Wasn’t was so dreadful that old habits are dying hard. It took me probably a month being here before I could even ask questions and take the answers at face value.

Four years ago, I wrote: ”These artificial divisions of time turn into benchmarks, ways to measure your life, as you can’t help but turn back and think about what you were doing four years ago today, and what’s changed since then, and what you’ve done in the interim”

I think I stole that from somewhere, but I have no clue where.

Anyway, four years ago, I was still hopelessly, completely enamored with He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (and I was in denial) I was doing NaNo for the first time, and went on a date with a guy I met at the Albany region gathering. His name was Rob and I convinced him to read Atlas Shrugged. I was less than two months away from graduating college and full of schemes and plans that changed weekly.

On election night, I sat in my room in Fain C, yelling election news back and forth with my housemates. I never though Bush was going to lose, so there was no disappointment. Despite the sorry state of affairs I did not believe Bush could be defeated, and I certainly did not think Kerry would be the man to defeat him. I guess that’s why I wasn’t really upset that Bush one, because Kerry really did not seem like any type of improvement.

This year, I won’t like: I will cry if McCain wins. Not only can I not stand him, and the campaign that he run, but like most women (people?) I can’t stand Sarah Palin. I do not want either of them any where near the executive office.

I said it around the DNC that the change Obama wants me to believe in, is not my brand of change, neccesarily. But it is certainly better than the alternative. I also have a lot of respect for the campaign he ran. I started to notice it in the primaries — I think it was in the third debate he had with HIllary — she was going after him with character attacks, and getting angrier and angrier, and he just DID NOT engage her. I thought that was pretty awesome.

Four years ago feels like a lifetime ago. I have talked about this election for four years; it felt very strange to finally vote today. In a little over 12 hours, we should know for sure.

Libertarians for Obama!

For now, enjoy the moment, when all you have to prove is that you can prove nothing at.

If I’m not careful, I’m going to stop writing here before I ever really started. I still haven’t linked to here from everywhere, not even from my own LJ, where I have a whole 5 readers.

I started this with the idea of blogging honestly “for like, the world,” but the idea’s a little scarier in practice. So I’m writing here, in this space that nobody knows exists and suddenly I have nothing to say. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how to write without an audience (because let’s face it. Livejournal was an audience. For HWSNBN. For The Ex. For the people I figured read it without telling me they read it.) It makes me wonder how I used to fill page after page in those Mead Spiral college ruled notebooks back in high school.

Browing through other blogs lately, I read things that are so familiar that I want to give myself a lobotomy. It forces me to feel things and it makes me want to write about them, even if someone has already said all the things I wish I had written, and has probably said it better than I ever could.

I can’t help but thinking about four years ago when the Election is all over the news, because around Election Day 2004 is where things start to get really hazy. This perhaps is a lame way to mark the passage of time, but the run-up to the presidential election naturally makes me think back to the fall of 2004.

I remember how far away December seemed at the beginning of that September, and how when December came, September was far away.  But I also know that I have to move beyond the defensiveness and walls that I built up as a result of all that.

I have to remind myself to slow down, sit down, and get the words out of my head. Even if no one is going to see them. And even if the eventual audience thinks it’s pointless. Even if it means admitting to anyone who reads this that no, I’m not perfect, my life’s not rose colored, and their’s might be a lot more together than mine.

I’m terribly bored at work, so I’m going through my alternate email accounts, the one that are supposed to be for junk mail and such. I found all these emails that I forwarded from my Skidmore account before it was deleted; they’re all from HWSNBN.

When I look back on my drama with HWSNBN, I’m usually quick to blame myself for being so idiotic. But when I saw these emails, I was reminded of just why it was always so ambiguous. “Please don’t go away,” he begs in one email. Another he signs with “Yours, somehow.” One simply has the subject “Thinking of you” and the body is “That’s all.” And “I could never be with a woman who is even remotely religious, which is part of why I’m so happy with you.” And oh God, the conversations on AIM from Spring Break.

I need to stop reading now, because now it’s just getting scary and kind of depressing. Because I wasn’t so idiotic for seeing potential and chasing it, not when he made me believe it was there so bluntly. And that was all four years ago, another terrifying little tidbit.

I wasn’t in love with him, but I sure as hell thought I was. It’s weird to have such a black and white reminder of what played out, and weirder still that it was so long ago, and even weirder that it did not quite go as I force myself to remember it went.

And for some reason, this all manages to depress the hell out of me. I have no idea why.

MAKE THIS MONTH END.

Basically, I’ve written this month off as a total fucking waste, and that’s okay and stuff. But damn, just END already, October. Please?

Last October, 2 important things happened.
1) I realized a PhD program was not for me. Yeah, it took months for that thought to actualize, but I knew it as early as October..considering classes started on Sept 25, I unfortunately figured that one out too quick.

2) Ryan called me around 7 AM on a Sunday morning and we had a 5 hour conversation abotu relationships. I learned a good deal about myself and confirmed my romantic past and future, and it was incredibly bittersweet. Because I was speaking to my ex-boyfriend, who I actually don’t speak to right now, and we were telling each other these honest honest things about our love lives and how we would be, and etc. and part of me knew that it was the last time we would speak like that, and I was right. And I don’t even think about it that much, honestly, but when I do, like early morning walks down Third Avenue to work the utter sadness it brings me is pathetic.

When I was 16, I took a leap of faith. I took it because it was “right.” This is the first time I have put right in quotations. Most of you don’t know the story, but I got involved with Ryan under very unfavorable circumstances, knowing it would be very difficuult, and knowing it meant having to deal with shit that you don’t usually volunteer to deal with. I still cannot, even in the most filtered of entries, tell the details, which sounds more cryptic and dramatic than it is, but part of me cannot break the silence, nor can I wish silent condemnation on myself for my choice.

The leap of faith I took has had its share of consequences on my life, I had never ‘questioned’ it as a correct step.

For the first time in my life I am dangerously worrying, what my life would be like it I had (probably rightly) chosen to throw away potential with Ryan. If, on that weekend I learned his bit of news I had been able to say ‘Well…nevermind then”

It took me eight years to admit I may have responded in the wrong way.

And so I also want to let go of those eight years, because I wish I knew where I’d be without them, even though that is impossible on several levels.

As in, “i loved you Ryan, I really did. But I should have walked away from you when I was 16 and had the opportunity. And I’ve never said that before. Not even when we first broke up. Not even last fall when you got the new girlfriend. But I loved you and for the first time I wish I never had. And I hate that, but it might be the most honest thing I ever felt.”

Can’t you just feel the angst?

I’ve been listening to the song “Hey There Delilah” incesssently, because my roommate plays it on his guitar all the time, and being a musician, I’m sure its sort of an anthem for himself, but like any love song it makes me a little sad, because I have no one with which to associate the love song.

Which made me want to listen to Bon Jovi’s “This Ain’t A Love Song.” Go figure. That plays, and then “These Days” comes on after that, and it’s freshman year of college and I knew then what I know now, on some level, and this song is so palpitably putting me back on the road in Amherst and Hadley I just don’t know how to put it into words. Arg, my memory and music. The entire album “Maybe You Should Drive” is definitely Amherst/Hampshire for me. What’s creepy is I remember driving North on 91 when i was actually, you know, moving up there, and the song “Jane” playing and I listened to that CD over and over again that year. Which of course I’m now playing, and “Love, Intermittendly” which is another Ryan memory, because what the hell in my music collection isn’t?

This doesn’t even begin to cover the range of angst I’ve experienced this month, but I”m gonna bite down on the inside of my cheeks and shut the hell up about all of it, because it’s not worth it, or helpful right now to try and be articulate about.

Okay well. This month is almost over. I’m not on the road to a PhD and I don’t have a boyfriend and won’t anytime soon.

I also have a really good apartment and a really good job and I really need to focus on both instead of being a slob, not doing laundry, and treating each day as a day to get through instead of a day to day build on each other.

Tomorrow is a brand new month and while it’s technically a meaningless milestone, tomorrow won’t be October and I will try to start again from Square One in New York because I have to, because I want to, because I need to.