I never lie about my talents.

I’m really good at being depressed. I can lay in bed and turn over in my head all the things I’ve failed at, all the things I’ve given up on, and all the things I regret saying or doing. I can take multiple naps throughout the day. I can stop eating for ridiculous periods of time and still function like a normal human being. I can get angry at myself for things that aren’t my fault, and then transfer that anger to unrelated things when it gets too much for my fragile psyche.

Thirty was supposed to be good. I was going to really start my life. That’s why I went and got my M.A.T. in the first place: I would begin my thirties with a real job with a salary and benefits. That whole “today is the first day of the rest of your life” crap. Instead I was unable to obtain a real job. I work in retail under the direction of a boss who may or may not be incompetent at life/her job. I have no money. I have bills. I depend on the Goat for everything. I have trouble calling my mom, because I have to lie and pretend everything is great so she won’t get any more depressed than she already is. I didn’t lose any weight before I turned thirty, so now I’m kicking myself for being thirty and fat and not getting any better. I don’t like sex anymore than I did in my twenties. I have abandoned writing. I gave up the idea of getting a Ph.D. I’m sort of a big blog of failure.

It’s amazing more people don’t want to be my friends, with all that going for me.

I dragged myself out of bed and to the fitness center, where I ran two miles straight on a completely empty stomach (unless green tea pills and a crazy pill count as food). This is bad for a lot of reasons, but I’m under no delusions about how unhealthy I act, so instead of kicking myself for being stupid, I’m congratulating myself on two miles straight. (I just returned to running two weeks ago, and I haven’t been really steady with it since then.) I haven’t brushed my teeth yet, so there’s that, but still. Dirty teeth doesn’t compare to two miles on the treadmill.

I really want to get my life on track, but I don’t understand where I went so wrong. I’d like to rewind my life to that first week of T.A. training before I began my M.A. program. I want to surround myself with those people again, and I want to try and make something of myself when I was surrounded by support and opportunities.

On the upside, it’s a really beautiful fall day.

I read another book!

(This post is brought to you by the Indian women in my apartment complex who chose nine in the morning as the time to go exercise, preventing me from having a treadmill and running before I go to work.)

Book #2: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

I’m well aware that reading a Dan Brown book pretty much voids my M.A. in English, especially since my concentration was creative writing and all. I’m even more aware that reading a Dan Brown thriller about the internet and technology that was published in 1998 pretty much voids those three semesters I spent working with technology as  G.A. in the Instructional Technology Center. The gods of those respective areas probably aren’t very happy with me. I’m not very happy with me. It was a Dan Brown book, for crying out loud. I have Umberto Eco in time-out on my shelf. I have a book of lesbian literature from the 19th or 18th century that is more than amazing and I didn’t know I even had until recently. But no, I chose to read a Dan Brown book. Published in 1998.

And I liked it.

Say what you want about Dan Brown, and you can, because this is the first Dan Brown book I’ve ever read and therefore really can’t give any sort of an authoritative opinion about him, but his book was sure hard to put down. Oh, it was ridiculous and overly dramatic and I rooted for every single character to meet their untimely end, but I swallowed the damn thing whole. I think there is a point in some books (I experienced it in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) where you will do anything to get to the resolution. Anything. Sell your first born, make a deal with the devil, cut off an extraneous limb, something, anything for the madness to be over. But you’ve gotten far enough that you need to know what happens, even if you don’t much care for the characters or the plot is weak or the whole premise makes you want to shot Dan Brown in the foot. This is why I sat in bed and read until one am Saturday night, finishing Digital Fortress. If the place was going to blow up and kill everyone, I just wanted to get it blown up. I knew that the main characters, introduced as beautiful and in love, would probably make it, and I was sort of tired of one close call after another. They’re beautiful. They’re in love. They’re going to make it. Let them freakin’ make it, for the love, so I can go to bed.

I’ve seen The Da Vinci Code, and I’ve watched a thriller or two in my day, and I get the heightening of suspense and creating increasingly harrowing situations for the characters to get out of. It makes you root for them, kind of, and certainly gets you invested. No one wants to see Joe Smith get killed after he’s survived ten or twelve near death experiences in the past hour and fifteen minutes. Thrillers are hard to read as books, though, because I start to skim. The writing isn’t as engaging as the ridiculous plot, and so I sort of slide through it at times, trying to get to the next conflict, because that’s the interesting part. Digital Fortress seems like it was written to be a movie, and I’m curious as to whether Dan Brown’s other books read the same way. I don’t know if I’m curious enough to go read them and find out, but it probably wouldn’t be too unpleasant if I did.

The entertaining thing about Digital Fortress was that it was published in 1998, and while the whole plot revolves around cutting edge technology, the technology isn’t cutting edge anymore. It comes across as kind of hokey, because they have to say “global positioning computer system” instead of “GPS,” and those new fangled “cellular phones” were giving everyone all kinds of trouble throughout the book. The main point of the story, that the government has created a super computer to break codes, was probably far-fetched and exciting to think about in 1998. Now it’s commonplace, because I expect the government to have all sorts of super computers, and I know that some of the technology that was being used was exaggerated for people who had no experience with that sort of thing in 1998. I really loved when the main character, Susan, says, “I need access to the Web. Is there a browser here?” She’s in the room that houses the government’s top secret database, where all their classified information is being held, and she’s surrounded  by computers. On a large monitor is a visual representation of the “hackers” who are trying to get into the database and the protective firewalls around the database, which are quickly disintegrating. (I imagine this visual as one of those old school cartoons explaining how the sperm finds the egg and then tries to get in.) Obviously there’s access to the internet in this room, but I enjoy that Susan had to ask. I even more enjoyed when another character replies, “Netscape’s sweetest.” Then “Susan grabbed her hand. ‘ Come on. We’re going surfing.’”

Surfs up.

(Next up: I take Baudolino out of time-out and once again try to embrace Umberto Eco, even if it’s a losing battle.)

Ramblings and perhaps a short form book review.

I was super excited to sit down at my completely clean and clear desk in order to make motions toward revisiting this blog, but then I was required to unpack everything from my bag in order to find the insurance card for my car. now my desk is a little bit of a huge hazard, and I am trying to ignore it. If I stop and clean it all up, I’ll lose all my blog writing mojo.

And with that, the timer goes off and I have to get up and hang clothes that are not allowed to be fully dried. Hence my usual lack of desire to even try and write something, as I will be interrupted by something.

I think I would enjoy being  1950s housewife more if I got dressed and prettied up before my domestic duties. Instead I hastily throw on a sports bra under my pajama top and go about my chores looking as if I just rolled out of bed. Sometimes I don’t even brush my teeth, because what’s the point if you’re sucking down coffee all morning? I also think being a 1950s housewife would be easier if I felt like I had some sort of purpose to my day/week/life. The rational side of me says there’s no point to making up a daily schedule of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done, just like I think it’s pointless to get all showered and dressed just to get mucked up while cleaning the apartment. The side of me that wants me to embrace the 1950s housewife says I would feel more satisfied with what I was doing if I did it right.

I’d also be more satisfied being a 1050s housewife if I was getting paid.

Money is a big issue right now, which is why I can’t just skip out to the grocery store and do some grocery shopping and feel like I might not have changed the world or done anything important today, but at least I got the milk we’ve been needing since Wednesday. (Yep, we’ve been without cereal since Wednesday. I don’t know how we’ve survived, to be quite frank with you.) Since I don’t seem to be able to get a real job and am barely making a hundred dollars a week at the job I have (true story: I’ve gone two weeks now not breaking a hundred because my incompetent boss can’t seem to schedule me for more than ten hours a week), spending my free time around the house has become less about being a fabulous 1950s housewife and more about being depressed over sucking at life and being poor.

Alas.

Pajiba is doing another Cannonball Read, this time 52 books in a year (last year it was a hundred books in a year, clearly they’ve begun to see reason). I didn’t sign up, although I probably should have, but I might play along at home. I’m going to cheat, though, and count my first book as the one I just finished, even though the Cannonball Read doesn’t really start until the first of November (also the starting date of NaNoWriMo, another thing I’m thinking about doing but ultimately won’t). Part of the Cannonball Read is to write reviews of each book, and since I have a blog that I don’t use for anything particularly enlightening, I shall write short form reviews for the books I read, until I lose interest.

Book #1: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Not to be rude, but I currently have three degrees.

Back when I was immersed in the agony of my student teaching (or “internship,” if you want to be all glamorous about it), I frequently daydreamed about leaving the world of education behind and getting a job as a secretary (I’m sorry, administrative assistant). The idea of working nine to five and spending my days filing, answering phone calls, and maintaining calendars was exactly what I wanted. But, after sending out countless applications and resumes to various and assorted advertisements for just such a position on Monster.com and Craigslist which got no response, I came to the realization maybe (on paper) I’m not secretary material.

The job market is dismal and I’m poor, so even if I had a secure teaching job in the fall I’d have gone out looking for the summer job. I was thrilled to land the Not-A-Real-Job job a few weeks ago, and I was slightly looking forward to the banal world of retail. Folding shirts and ringing up customers (or “clients,” since we’re classy retail) is just the sort of job that requires little to no thinking I wanted. Earn money and not have to use your brain? Perfect. Give me forty hours a week. Give me overtime. Give me shirts to fold and pants to hang.

Alas, I didn’t get forty hours a week. I got twenty. This is why, after being there until eleven o’clock last night, I am showered and preparing to leave to be there at eight o’clock this morning: extra hours. I’m also not making nearly enough money for the sort of manual labor I’ve been doing recently: hoisting mannequins and other heavy objects into the loft, sorting display hardware, dusting and cleaning areas of the backroom that may have never been dusted or cleaned since they were installed. Last night, probably around ten or so, as I began trying to lay another pile of sweaters flat and the tedious work of tucking all the tags into the sweaters (we’re classy; being able to see the price and size of a piece of clothing isn’t classy), the thought of the two master’s degrees and countless hours and thousands of dollars that have gone into getting me to where I am today crept into my head. Eight dollars an hour tucking tags into pieces of clothing doesn’t really seem fair. Or right.

I don’t mean to complain. Beggars can’t be choosers. I work at a great store, and I get a very nice employee discount (that I can and will extend to all my friends, even though I’m sure that’s breaking some sort of company policy). My legs and feet hurt from all the standing and walking to and fro, I barely got any sleep last night, and I had counted on having today off so I could go get some work done on my apartment (otherwise known as Boxville). I think some of what I’ve been doing is worth more than eight bucks an hour, but other things (like the infamous tag tucking of last night) really aren’t. I do have a job, though, and while there are a thousand things wrong with it, it’s still a job. A paycheck.

But still. Three degrees and I make eight bucks an hour, part-time. Boo.

R.I.C.E.R.

Fancy-schmancy new running shoes, socks that used to be white and are now gray, cankles, and my ever present Ace bandage. You wish you were me.

(Bet you thought, after a prolonged absence of months and months and months, that’d I’d have a much wittier title than that. You’d be wrong.)

Today is a milestone. Six weeks ago, on account of receiving a piece of paper that cost tens of thousands of dollars and claimed I was now a master of teaching (a joke I have yet to recover from), I decided I needed to begin Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™. Again. Since all my shiny new degree did was give me a leg up on my friends if we’re lining up to get into heaven based on the sheer number of degrees we’ve accumulated*, and since it most certainly wasn’t getting me any employment (or even employment prospects), I decided I would make it mean something by letting it be the starting point for yet another war against The Fatness. This time, though, it was serious. I was going to mean business. I was going to take The Fatness™ out back and give it a couple punches to the throat before kneeing it in the groin and leaving it for dead.

So I started running.

Most of my earlier attempts at fighting The Fatness™ and Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ were unhealthy marathons of starving myself and weighing myself every single day, usually writing the ugly numbers on the bathroom mirror in black dry erase marker, so I could be reminded of how much I sucked on a pretty consistent basis. While I enjoy both of those things (constant self-deprecation and starvation), that don’t really yeild results. Not Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ results. I wanted people to tell me to eat something because I was looking a little skinny, not because I was passed out on the floor after skipping two days worth of protein. But I’m not entirely anti-masochism, so I began this regimen of walking, tossing in a half mile of running every once in a while. The OCD got hold of it and made it into training, and pretty soon I was putting in some good, solid mileage, most of which didn’t involve me hanging onto the treadmill and wheezing while my feet tried to keep up with the belt.

I came down with shin splints. I didn’t lose any weight. I began Wii Fit-ing it after my runs, in an attempt to add some toning and strength work. I still didn’t lose any weight. I stopped wearing my baggy cut off sweatpants to run, because not only were they unhelpful in the chaffing department**, I was sweating something unbelievable in my crotch region, and I was embarrassed to walk back to my apartment afterwards looking like I wet my pants***. I started running in spandex (very sexy) and Ace bandaging my shins so I looked like some weird mummy. I spent the good part of moving from 1.5 miles to 2.5 miles reading Catch-22. I broke down and created a playlist of music I could run to so I didn’t have to fiddle with my Not an iPod. I went out and bought fancy-schmancy running shoes to wear to help with my shin splints, and got a lecture from the guy at the shoe store about how important iceing my shin splints is.

Maybe it’s worth it. I have trouble saying it is, because I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. The Goat tells me how much healthier all this is making me, and I have to admit he’s right. When I moved from interspersing my miles with running them straight I was sure I’d end up curled into the fetal position at the end of the treadmill, but I was fine. I have more energy. I’m more successful at getting up and being a human most mornings (though there are days, like Tuesday, that I don’t really ever get into that human groove). I’d love to have something to show for it, though, like be down a pant size or have kicked off at least one freakin’ pound of The Fatness™. Instead I’m busy with the R.I.C.E.R. to treat my shin splints, and I’m looking into running a 5k before summer is out. Seeting achievable goals is good, since my primary Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ goal is far from being accomplished.

But today, the six week day, is a milestone, because I did a straight 5k for the first time. I shouldn’t have, because I was really only scheduled to move up to 3 miles today, but I felt okay, my shin splints weren’t hurting, the fitness center actually had cool air in it (for a while there the fitness center had no cool air in it, which is why I accidentally ran 3 miles last week when I got so overheated and confused I read the treadmill screen wrong), and I figured I might as well tell The Fatness™ where it can shove it.

Soon I’ll have to move off the treadmill to do roadwork, so I can prepare for a real like 5k. I’m also planning on selling my virginity on Ebay to pay for some much needed liposuction. Eventually The Fatness™ has to be told to go fuck itself, and I’m not too proud to have it done under general anesthesia. Too poor, but not too proud.

*This is only a likely scenario if all my friends and I die on the same day, which, unless there’s some weird cataclismic event like a meteor destroying the planet or someone committing arson on a hotel holding a conference we’ve all been accepted and are presenting at (which is probably much more unlikely than the meteor), probably won’t happen. So the extra master’s degree will most likely be for naught.

**Those who don’t suffer from The Fatness™ may not understand this, but on some unfortunate souls The Fatness™ makes your thighs touch together constantly, creating unpleasantness when running or walking briskly. It also wears out the crotch area of your pants faster than is financially helpful.

***It really did look like that. Honest. I have considered actually wetting my pants to see how closely the sweating resembles an actual accident, but I have enough laundry as it is.

It’s like a fun game where the winner gets their spirit beat out of them by the losers.

Guess who got in trouble with her mentor teacher AGAIN for not giving the mentor teacher hard copies of the lesson plans for the day?

Guess who stayed at high school until after 7:00 last night to participate in parent-teacher conferences, only to have her mentor teacher never introduce her to the parents coming to conference?

Guess who went over with her mentor teacher, in ridiculously specific detail, the lesson plans for today during the downtime between conferences she wasn’t apart of?

Guess who’s mentor teacher changed the whole order of the plans she had made for today, because it isn’t how the mentor teacher would do it, which was duly recorded  in the notes being taken to plan the lesson and repeated back to the mentor teacher at least ten times before everyone left for the evening?

Guess who, when her mentor teacher gets back from running to the post office during her planning block, is probably going to get bitched at until she feels like she’s been run over by a truck because she’s not doing stuff the exact way the mentor teacher would do it?

I don’t get it, and maybe I’m so wrong I can’t tell, but I really don’t understand why, if we plan together and I’m obviously writing down everything that I’m being told, and I don’t deviate from the plan for fear of getting ripped a new one after the lesson, that it’s a huge deal if I don’t give her a hard copy packet of the stuff I’m doing that day. If she wanted things two days in advance, fine. But we don’t plan two days in advance, making that impossible, since the packing guide she gave me is sort of impossible to follow, time wise. We plan the day before. She doesn’t get to school early enough in the morning (I beat her here every day) to go over and adjust a lesson plan. I make all my copies of hand-outs and what not I’m using the day before, and I show them to her (well, usually their hers or came out of the book, so there isn’t much to show). Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t really understand what good printing her copies of this nonsense does (besides waste trees) if I’m not deviating from the plan that we set up, together, that she has already found fault with and corrected at least twice. Okay, here, I’ll make a concession. If I didn’t have pop quiz time every day where she goes, “What are you doing tomorrow?” and I tell her everything and she asks me dumb questions like, “And how are you going to do that?” or “And what do you want them to get out of that?” (the last one is especially dumb since she told me to plan all my lessons around the material they need to know for the selection test that goes with each piece of literature in the book), spending the entire time staring at me like I’m speaking Martian and don’t have any clue how to teach a room full of students (not true, four years of experience teaching, bitches), then she tells me how such and such won’t work or she’d do it this way and ends up making me feel the only possible option is the way she’d do it (hence the fact every single day the kids have a stupid selection test), if I planned and wrote it down and gave it to her to go over and she made comments and gave it back and I adjusted and she reviewed again, then I wouldn’t be mad. (Yes, that was in fact the longest sentence in the world. Thanks for noticing.) Even when I do make her a print out of what I’m planning, I’m still required to stand there and explain everything on it to her while she reads it, and then if she has changes (and she has never not had changes), she doesn’t make any marks. I’m expected to remember everything she says and go fix it and then go through the whole process over again. I’m a writing teacher. I understand rough draft, mark up the rough draft, return, revise, resubmit. I don’t understand the process I’m currently expected to go through.

Yet again, I could just be so wrong I can’t tell there’s a right way to do it.

I’m also wondering if I can plan my nervous breakdown to happen while I’m teaching. Except the kids would never know she and her stupidness drove me to it, and therefore they wouldn’t hate her like I’d want them to. I have considered breaking down (because when they question the stupid things I’m making them do because she says it’s the only way to get them to do work and learn anything I almost start crying) and saying, “I don’t want you to do this anymore than you do! I think it’s a waste of time, too! I think it’s busy work! I understand why you hate English; I’d hate English, too, if this was the bullshit I had to do every single day for 90 minutes! I want to have fun and learn amazing stuff in this class, but I’m told you can’t handle that and I have to do it this way. It sucks. It breaks my heart that you hate me and that you don’t even know how great this class could be, and it’s all the fault of that bitch of a teacher I’m supposed to be learning from.” I might eventually do it, because I’m so on their side about the crap I’m making them do I almost choke on the isntructions when I hand stuff out.

You.

Dear Terrorist,

Once upon a time, in a land far and away called Ohio, I was trying to make a decision about what to do next with my life. I had been accepted to two MFA programs, one which was offering me money, and the MAT program here at the institution of my choice. I admit, I wasn’t happy when I went to visit the MFA program that eventually found money to give me, but that was partly because they weren’t offering me money, and partly because you wouldn’t agree to come with me wherever I went. It’s hard to think about figuring out a new place while trying to stay close to a boyfriend who is suddenly very far away. That was one of the reasons I decided to give up the writing and go get my MAT. I knew this place. I had lived here before. I liked it. I wouldn’t feel so alone and abandoned.

I was mostly wrong.

See, what’s important to remember here is that I didn’t just make this choice based on location, or even really on the benefits of this program over the other, post-graduation job-wise. I made this choice because I thought we would be Together Forever™. I thought getting my MAT would be the best thing for Us. Yes, capital “U.” You and  me. Us. You were going to go start your Ph.D. in a year. When I finished my MAT I’d come join you, wherever you ended up. Teachers are, for the most part, highly employable in many locations. And when, yes, when we got married, I would be able to provide decent health insurance for us. Unlike so many of our friends in grad school, I wouldn’t be forced to use the crappy student health care when I got pregnant. I’d also have a salary. We wouldn’t be living on your stipend and whatever I could scrounge up adjuncting or working some crap hourly job in a coffeehouse or a Target. (Remember Target? Remember how you said you wouldn’t move with me because you weren’t going to spend your year off working at Target if you couldn’t find an adjunct job in the area? Like being with me wasn’t nearly as important as being an adjunct? Like having to take an hourly job for a year was the worst thing in the entire world? Yeah. I remember that.) We’d have an actual income, a real income, an income that would help if we needed car repairs or furniture or, God forbid, wanted to buy a house. I knew I could always work on my Ph.D. when you got a permanent job somewhere, because I’d be able to take classes for free (or a greatly reduced fee) and wouldn’t have to worry about finding a school that would accept me and give me money so I could eat and keep my electricity on.

You never said, “Oh! Yes! That’s wonderful! We will be Together Forever™, and I want you to do this potentially disagreeable thing because it’ll benefit Us in the future.” I want to make it clear you didn’t do that, and you didn’t tell me what to do or encourage me to do something. You didn’t discourage me from one choice or another. You didn’t really do anything. You didn’t say, “You’re a great writer, and I don’t want to see you give that up.” You didn’t say, “You’ll be a great teacher, and yes, if we stay together that would be so helpful.” You let me choose for Us and plan the next few years of my life for Us. It wasn’t until I was here, at the institution of my choice, sad and regretting my decision, realizing this might not have been the right thing, wanting only for you to say, “Yes, we’re going to be together, and yes, this will be good for Us,” that you walked away. You left. You decided I was too needy and too wanting a ring and was too fat and too stupid and too unhappy for you to spend any more of your life with. You walked away.

You left me with this thing, this decision, this program that, even in the early stages, I knew wasn’t right for me. I was stuck. I was so depressed and so terribly disraught that the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with didn’t love me. You were completely over our entire relationship in less than a month. Less than a month! That’s ridiculous. It took me almost a year. It was amplified by the fact the longer I spent in this program, the more I realized I wanted out of this program. Everyone kept telling me I had put in too much time (even before I had put in a full semester) to quit. I crossed my fingers and wished upon every single star in the fucking sky that you’d decide you missed me. That you’d see I wasn’t a psycho, I was someone in a bad situation who really wanted to be given a little hope it was going to be worth it. But no. You walked away. You never looked back. You didn’t care what happened to me. I wasn’t your problem anymore.

Right now I’m pissed. I’m so angry I could hit and punch and kick something, break something, because I got stuck here. I had nothing to look forward to, nothing to be waiting for, no future with someone I loved, no big relief that it would end and I would move forward. And now I’m not moving forward at all. I’m stuck in an internship that makes me angry and sad and hopeless. The job market in the area is pretty much non-existent, especially for someone like me who already has a master’s degree. The higher education job market in the area has also tanked, thanks to the economy, so I can’t even go back to being a lowly adjunct. I have no money, I haven’t had any money, so I wasn’t able to bypass the getting a job process all together and go get my Ph.D. No money for applications and retaking the GRE and all that nonsense. And I’ve completely and totally stopped writing. I’ll never get published or move toward being a Real Writer, because if I do get a job I’ll have no time (just like I haven’t had time for the past two years, no time and no inspiration because my soul has been so crushed doing this program), and if I don’t get a job I’ll still have to get some sort of hourly position (with no health insurance), maybe at Target (how ironic).

I hate you for leaving me, and I hate you for letting me get stuck. I do. I hate you so much I almost can’t stand it, because I was just trying to do something for us. For you. I wanted you to be happy, I wanted you to have a good life, and I wanted to do everything I could to make that happen. I would have done anything for you. If you had told me to stay in Ohio with you, adjunct another year there before you left for a Ph.D. program, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. I didn’t have to leave. I left to try and make a better life and all I got was two wasted years. I have wasted two years of my fucking life here, in a fucking program that hasn’t benefited me at all. I have nothing to show for it, and now I’m now that I’m struggling through the last bit and wanting, with every breath in my body, to just fuck it, I realize there’s not even the reward of a job. And I blame you. I fucking blame you for my depression and my anxiety and how horrible I treat the people I love.

I’m sure you’re fine. I bet you’re happy. I bet you have an incredibly attractive and thin and smart and funny girlfriend who you’d do anything for. I bet you have everything you’ve always wanted. I wish I could make you feel what I feel for one day. I wish you could have this fucking monster in your head for one day.

Love always,

Me

The anger is simmering.

I’m not exactly sure that’s how you spell “simmering.” I suppose it’s right, because Firefox didn’t underline it in red when I just typed it. Nice to know I’m still somewhat competent at something, even if it is remembering which words have double letters in them when you add -ing and which do not.

It’s good to have something.

I’m angry today. I’ve been angry all week, actually, which isn’t at all the way I like to roll, but the anger is a change from the sadness and the general anxiety over how my life is headed in the complete wrong direction. The anger started on Monday, when my mentor teacher told me I was being disrespectful, but after making me feel like crap and then leaving for all of 3rd block so she couldn’t tell I fixed/adjusted any of the teaching things she told me I was sucking at, she came back and became my bestest friend in the whole wide world. We chit-chatted for forever, about my RA and having children and weird things that your body does when you’re pregnant. Inconsistency makes me angry. Had she come back and apologized for making me feel like crap, said she was having a bad day or whatnot, then the friendliness wouldn’t have been so, well, angering. If she had come back, still acting pissed at me, and remained pissed for the rest of day, that also would have been acceptable. At least be consistent. Anyway, I got home and thought over the whole thing, which made me angry again. I probably said mean things to the Goat on the phone when I talked to him. I know I was yelling. All of the sadness and anxiety and upset turned into anger. I yelled about being a bad mummy to the dog and about being so fat I almost couldn’t leave the apartment in the morning and about hating my internship and not wanting to be a teacher and not having the guts to just walk away. He was trying to listen, to be supportive, but he really can’t. Well, he can, but it isn’t going to help. We haven’t been dating long enough for him to say “You can get through this” or “You can walk away if you want, I’ll support that decision,” because he’s never been through a really rough patch like this with me. He doesn’t know my default is to say I’m going to give up and then never really do anything about it, but he also doesn’t know that this situation is extremely different from all the other times I’ve said I was quitting and never did. I feel wrong depending on him or asking him to do things, because we aren’t married/living together/been together very long at all, and there are things I’ve asked him to do that he hasn’t done. It isn’t that he’s not dependable, it’s just that he’s got his own life. He’d argue this with me (probably will, actually), but I think that subconsciously he’s struggling with the amount I’m asking him (literally and figuratively) to deal with.

Anyway.

Yesterday I was angry that I was at high school until quarter to six, and angry I was hungry and stopped at Sonic on the way home. I’m terribly upset with myself that I haven’t been taking care of the puppy, so when I get home and she’s climbing on me and she wants me to play with her and pet her I just have this tremendous guilt.

Today I’m angry because I went to the education job fair at the institution of my choice, only to find there really aren’t any jobs for me in this area. There are probably jobs for me in this state, but they aren’t within commuting distance of Goat. I’m all tangled up inside over this whole thing anyway, and it’s difficult to realize either I might not have a job in the fall or I won’t have a boyfriend. People at the job fair, representatives from schools I suppose I want a job at (not that I really want a job teaching high school), glanced at my resume, saw that I’m coming to the table with the second highest starting rank on the pay scale (master’s plus 30), and quickly tossed my resume aside. I got no interviews, I got no one who seemed remotely interested in me, and I got a bad taste in my mouth for job fairs. Apparently many of the schools are having their own job fairs, so they were happy to say “Our job fair is on [insert date here]. You’ll need to come to it,” and place the resume they’ve been handed in the huge stack of resumes they’ve already been handed. I assume there was a lot of recycling going on this afternoon when those representatives got back home.

I’m so angry, in fact, I need to write a letter.

Boats

You probably don’t know who The Lonely Island is. You might know who Andy Samburg is. You also might live under a rock. Anyway, the Lonely Island is basically Andy Samburg and his comedy buddies, Akieva and Jorma. They have last names, but I don’t feel like looking them up. It’s mainly the stuff they did before SNL hired them and made Andy Samburg a household name (not that I want to acknowledge that SNL has the power to make anyone a household name anymore). My person™ introduced them to me lo these many years ago, through a little something we like to call Episode One of The ‘Bu:

(The only other episode of The ‘Bu it’s essential for you to watch is Episode Eight.)

The Lonely Island did a pilot for a sketch comedy show on Fox called Awesometown. I like the theme song.

I consider “Just Two Guys” the opus of The Lonely Island:

If you don’t like it we can’t be friends anymore.

The following showed up in a post in my Google Reader. While it isn’t nearly as amazing as “Just Two Guys, ” I think it’s pretty fabulous.

There is never a bad time to decide you want to be Angelina Jolie.

The Huffington Post posted this brilliant commentary on the crazy Octomom, pointing out she is looking more and more like Angelina Jolie: Does Nadya Shuleman Think She’s Angelina Jolie?

“Both women are 33 and are mothers to arguably, at least for now, the two most famous broods in the world. They also survived divorce, longed for children and chose to become single parents.

Consider this: In photos of Suleman pre-octuplets out Monday, she looks noticeably different. She has had what appears to be lip implants or filler injections to pump up her pucker. She’s also evidently had a nose job. Both nose and lips now mimic the features of Jolie, as others have pointed out. Scroll for photos and a closer look. Suleman already had brown eyes and has now grown her dark brown hair all the way down her back.”

I know that when I decide to spend all the money I don’t have on unnecessary fertility treatments to expand my already expansive broad, I will follow it up by unnecessary plastic surgery to help me follow in the physical as well as motherly steps of Angelina Jolie.

I hope I have everyone’s support.