College

The “Plan”

/ Ashley / Leave a comment

I went home after work last night continuing to feel sorry for myself. I blame it on this damn weather and my best friend moving 900 miles away. I think those are acceptable excuses to be down, no? They are. Anyway, after talking with Bill for a while (and being pathetically weepy for what feels like the 20th time this week), I blurted out an explanation for why I’ve been so down lately.

I’ll sum it up the best I can. Basically, I feel great and on top of my game when I have specific things I need to do. A schedule is good for me. I like when activities suck up chunks of my day, and as of late, I don’t really seem to care what those things are, as long as my day is eaten up. So I like having work to go to, which is why I work about 25 hours a week and I’m taking 17 credits. I can usually handle this load. The trouble comes when I have down time. So far this semester, my homework load has been pretty light. The reading I’m doing for my classes goes by quickly (Driftless by David Rhodes, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Candide), then I’m left to my own devices. This is when my mind gets active. I feel purposeless and then I want to relax with Bill. Trouble is that he’s 900 miles away and busier than I am. So then I’ll try another social outlet. The trouble comes later, when I find that I’ve accomplished nothing for myself. I haven’t read anything I want to read. I haven’t written anything I wanted to write. I just fill my days with activities to get by. It’s not a great feeling. I haven’t found a balance of social and personal time, and it’s surprisingly exhausting. I’m realizing that I have to take time for myself, for my projects and my goals.

So, I’m starting my own projects. I’m going to do research about freelance work. That will include reading the book that I mentioned yesterday, as well as hopefully finding and pursuing some freelance writing opportunities. November is coming up also. November is National Novel Writing Month (from here on, it will be abbreviated to NaNoWriMo). I am going to actually participate this year. The idea is to write 50,000 words in a single month. That averages to about 1,700 words a day, which is about 2-3 double-spaced pages. That is completely doable. When you think about it, that’s really only about 90 pages, which isn’t really even much of a novel, but it’s more than I’ve ever completed. To prepare for this, I’m going to start digging in some other reference books (this, this, and this) I bought years ago and never bothered to finish reading because, as I’ve already established, I’m sort of a moron.

I also have a seminar paper to plan and read, so I will have plenty of things to occupy my time. There will no longer be any excuse for me to throw pity parties.

Pity Party

/ Ashley / Leave a comment

I was at my gyno’s office the other day, and I had this conversation:

“What do you do?”

“I work two jobs and I’m going to school for English.”

“How long do you have left to go?”

“This is my last semester.”

“That’s exciting. Are you going to teach?”

“No.”

At that point I wish the conversation would have just ended. But of course it didn’t.

“Oh, so what do you want to do?”

“I’d like to get into editing. I’d like to sit around and write stories all day, but I have to pay the bills somehow. I might do some freelance work too.”

That’s my standard response tossed with a little something extra. The freelance business is something I’ve never said before. But apparently that’s what I’m looking into now. It seems like something I should do, right? I like to write. I can bullshit things. I’m quite good at it. In a few months, I’ll have a degree to prove it. Also, cool people have done that. People that contribute regularly to This American Life. They travel all over to hunt down stories. I just wonder how that actually happens. I mean, how do you actually track down freelance jobs? I’m sure these are all things I should have figured out before I tell people that’s what I want to do. Not that an OBGYN nurse is really going to hold me to whatever I said while a doctor is examining my lady parts.

Anyway, this conversation is just one more addition to the pile of anxiety that has become my life. Is this normal? I’m assuming if it’s not normal, it’s at least not unusual. I’m sure anybody about to graduate with a liberal arts degree goes through this to some extent unless they’re headed for grad school or have some fantastic editoral position already secured. I used to think that business majors were sad people who had no passions to pursue. Turns out they’re just the smart ones who have a decent game plan. Their degree is an employable one. What the hell are liberal arts people supposed to do? Write academic papers on the true cult of feminity or Jane Austen novels? Nobody cares about either of those things. In fact, unless you’re in academic circles, you probably don’t care about what anyone with a liberal arts degree has to say. Unless you’re doing research for a freelance job, right?  So maybe all those succsessful academic people can assist me in my newly declared freelance career.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m freaking out about. A few years ago, I bought a book titled “The Freelance Writer’s Bible”. I never read it, but that should tell me everything I need to know, right?

Ugh. I’m sort of a moron.

If I was there

/ Ashley / Leave a comment

I was living my life the way I want to right at this instant, I’d be on the patio of some cafe, drinking coal-black coffee and smoking a vanilla clove. However, since I’m living in a place that has very few cafes (and even fewer with patios) and vanilla cloves are no longer available for purchase in the United States, I’m in my bedroom, drinking coffee with milk and eating a hard-boiled egg.

I’m trying desperately not to throw myself a pity party, because in the grand scheme of things, I know that my life is pathetically easy compared to what it could be. With that disclaimer, I’ve given myself free reign to complain like a trust fund brat. I didn’t sleep well last night. I had too many blankets and I kept tossing and turning, too lazy to get up and remove the sherpa one against my skin. Prior to that, I was crying over videochat with my boyfriend because I had confrontation with my cousin/roommate over a petty point. I overreacted and consequently made it a bigger deal than it really needed to be. Without going into details, I’ll simply say I decided to act like a selfish, entitled child whose self-righteousness borders on Nazism.

Immediately before the tiff with my cousin/roommate, I was feeling sorry for myself because my boyfriend lives 900 miles from me. It was one of those nights where I just wanted to cuddle and be distracted from my own melodrama. Perhaps it’s debris from being single for the majority of my high school career, but I hate to hear girls’ rants about their boyfriends. I don’t care what she’s complaining about, if it’s not one of my close girlfriends, if I hear a girl say “Oh my god, my boyfriend…” my first instinct is to tell her to shut up, that there are bigger problems in the world. So when I get whiny about my own relationship, I annoy myself. That’s an interesting sensation to to experience, self-annoyance. In the last few years, I’ve adopted the philosophy that you’re responsible for your own happiness. If you take that just a step further, you can say you’re also responsible for your own misery. That being said, I’m great at being a hypocrite, because I complain constantly. It’s practically a hobby of mine.

Now, I’m going to ride my bike the mile to the campus where I’m enrolled in classes. I’ll sit through a biology lecture, then return home for lunch. Next, I’ll endure a two hour biology lab, then finish up my day with a meeting for the Wisconsin Review. There, I will establish my power as a fiction editor and tell the readers they ought to look for quality fiction to publish. At the end of the day, I’ll put on sweats and read a couple novels for my English classes.

Yeah. I live a hard and tumultuous life. My whines are completely justified.