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.

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.

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.

Clearly it’s just one of those days.

You may be thinking that my earlier post from today was just venting, and that’d once I got home, away from the crazy College of Ed faculty, and relaxed I’d realize I hadn’t made the worst decision in the world getting my M.A.T.

Have you met me?

I did accomplish almost everything on my to-do list, including (but not limited to) depositing the magic check I’m not sure I know why I got, mailing my mother the pants she accidentally sent to my address, dropping off the recycling, and wrapping My Person™’s Christmas present (to be mailed tomorrow, fingers crossed). Scratching things off my to-do list always makes me feel better, which is why I frequently add things to my list I’ve done but didn’t originally include, like washing the dishes. According to my Super New Year Cleaning Project™, I’m scheduled to vacuum today. We’ll see. I only have a little bit longer before I’d be going against my personal rules against nighttime vacuuming (which I only have until I get a house of my very own). I’d like to think I’m going to be more on the ball about things like my to-do list and my Super New Year Cleaning Project™, but the semester has yet to really start, and we all know my general apathy prevents me from doing things after they start to pile up. Hopelessly in over my head is a state of Zen in my tiny world.

To-do list aside, I’m still in a slight state of WHY THE HELL DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF? It seems to be a lingering malady. I’m trying to convince myself (at least I was while I was doing the dishes and folding my sheets) that if I hadn’t come to the institution of my choosing and taken on my M.A.T., I’d have never met the Goat. This should be comforting. I should look at all this nonsense and go, “Well, if I hadn’t gotten into the shit, I’d never have met the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” Perhaps it’s my hesitation to say, cross my heart and hope to die, that the Goat is It, and perhaps it’s my hesitation to say he’s the love of my life. My hesitation doesn’t mean those things aren’t true, because I believe they are, but I’m hesitant nonetheless. I’m hesitant especially when every day I see more clearly that I made a choice which wasn’t necessarily in my best interest. Perhaps it was physically (Yea! health insurance…if I get a job), and perhaps it was financially (Yea! money…if I get a job), but emotionally it’s been pretty hellacious. It’s hard to continue to live within a plan you set up for someone else. When I’m fed up and scream, fist shaking toward the sky, “Why did I do this?” I can’t look around and go, “Oh, I did this for me, so let’s see if we can find the good in it.” Instead I scream and shake my fist and curse myself for ever trying to make a life for anyone other than myself.

I can’t say the Goat isn’t supportive, because he’s wonderful and supportive and sweet and someone I love very much, but he doesn’t need me to do this. That might be frustrating, because if I could transfer this plan for a life to him and I, if I could just drop him down into the hole the Terrorist left, it’d all be easier. But he and I have to make different plans, new plans, plans for us. We have to figure out how to send me to get my Ph.D and where can we go that he’d still be able to have a job and where can we go to advance his career and does he want to go back to school and should we convert to Catholicism and no, I’m not going to live in some highrise apartment in some bustling metropolis somewhere even though he’d love it. I sit in hour upon hour of lectures in the “Internship Institute,” and I just want to scream that all of this is a culmination of the things I hated working on this degree. I want to come home and call the Terrorist up and go, “This sucks so much, and you better appreciate it because I’m doing it for you.” I want to say, “Oh, thank all that is good and holy this is almost over, and then we’ll be together and we can move forward, away from this time in our lives.” It’s not because I miss him or I want him back; it’s because this was a plan for us. A plan that is almost completed. A plan that now means nothing, because by itself this degree doesn’t make me happy, by itself teaching high school English isn’t my calling, by itself it’s something I concocted for a life that seems a million years ago.

I am glad it’s almost over, because I want to move on. I don’t want to be surrounded by memories, not just of the Terrorist and his presence down here, but of the bad times I went through, struggling to keep up with and make sense of something that I don’t feel is right for me. I don’t know if I can get back what I lost by doing this. That scares me, that I may have nailed my coffin shut trying to do the right thing. We all know how overwhelming my fear of death is. The status quo, living the rest of my life exactly the way my life is right now, at least career-wise, is almost as panic attack inducing as a few moments of introspection on what happens after the lights go out.

This is one of those times where people who haven’t lost their faith pray. Instead I feel pressure behind my eyes, and if I had the energy I’d shake my fist.

No hope.

I fear for the future when my students write things like this:

“Over the past decade same-sex relationships meaning gay or lesbian have become main stays in society. People have learned to accept it and others have become full-forced against it that violence and protests seem to be the end result. These types of relationships have not only created enormous controversy but should not be allowed for the better that men and women were put on earth to intervene and create offspring not love the same gender. Experiencing with the same gender is not the same as having a full-on relationship to the point where marriage may be in the future. Although people are to believe in what they want and go about that on their own, the attraction to their own sex does not fit into society and will never be accepted anywhere.

“From the get-go allowing same-sex relationships to happen and result in gay marriage kills a families stability. Most of the time families are destroyed when a mother or father finds out their children has become homosexual. Even worse when the mother and father finally come into reality they force the child to move out and do not want anything to do with them. Having to go through a change like this is hard for the parents because when people ask about their son, what can they do but say he turned homosexual.”

Is it wrong that when I read this sort of nonsense I start hoping that this kid winds up with a gay son or daughter? Because I do.

I commit vacuum cleaner sin OR Why I’d make a lousy wife.

I’m not the best at vacuuming. I do enjoy spelling vacuum, which is why I’m always so inspired to write about it after I finish, but I think when it all comes down to it I’m just plain lousy at this part of domesticity.

The headlight on my vacuum has died, so no more vacuuming in the dark. I’m not really sure why vacuums have headlights, and while I could look it up on Wikipedia or use The Google, I’m just going to pretend it’s so you can vacuum in conditions of low light. I never really do any cleaning in conditions of low light, nevertheless the dark, but I still feel slightly inadequate that there isn’t a trusty headlight shining ahead of me as I plow through the apartment behind my vacuum. I also accidentally vacuumed over some slightly moist carpet that I had just cleaned after a puppy pee accident, and the vacuum sucked up the Resolve rug cleaner and puppy pee smell. Since then the vacuum has left a peculiar odor when it works, except now it’s much more just a bad smell than the distinct mix of Resolve and urine it was before. I normally have to light a Febreze candle in order to combat the vacuum smell, a shame since I used to enjoy the scent of a freshly vacuumed carpet.

My main problem is the fact I commit vacuum cleaner sins. I’m constantly in need of a new bag for my vacuum. I tend to forget to check it or schedule a change, and then it goes too far and the vacuum is spitting out more dust than it’s sucking in, but I won’t have a bag because if you don’t regularly change them you don’t remember to buy them at Target. I’m pretty sure 80% of my vacuuming really isn’t doing anything but putting vacuum marks on the carpet, but then I check the bag so rarely I can’t even guesstimate that percentage semi-correctly. I vacuum on the linoleum, and not just the little patch of it in front of my door (put there by the apartment people in an attempt to keep the carpets clean, but news flash, apartment people: it doesn’t work) that’s surrounded by carpet and hard to not vacuum over. I do my kitchen floor and my bathroom floor, usually out of pure laziness (and the fact the puppy can’t keep from barking hysterically at any sort of Swifer product I try to use in those areas). I jam the vacuum under things it really doesn’t fit under (like the bottom of the counters in the kitchen), get it suck, then yank it out. I do a little thing I like to call Heavy Lifting, where I vacuum my bathroom rugs by lifting the vacuum up in the air, setting it in the center of the tiny bathroom rug, and pushing it off. I do this in all directions until I think the rug is clean. I hold the vacuum up in the air while standing on my coffee table or bed in order to get the hose to reach the ceiling fan (extendable my ass). I also have left it on and sitting in one spot, which I’m pretty sure isn’t appropriate.

I honestly believe that if I had a Dyson, I wouldn’t commit vacuum sins. Of course that’s a complete lie, but the million dollar price tag of every Dyson model is probably going to prevent me from finding out. When I thought the vacuum might be dying (before my dad explained a dead headlight is nothing more than a dead headlight and doesn’t necessitate repair or replacement of the vacuum itself), I was window shopping at Target and deciding on the vacuum which had the picture of the adorable fluffy dog on the box. I don’t really know who makes that vacuum or what it does, but the dog was super cute. Not as cute as the puppy, but still, really cute.

The carpet in this apartment is pretty rotten. I think I have a lot of vacuum anger because of the carpet. Granted, I didn’t ever have a dog before this apartment, and dogs may just be carpet destroyers, but this is a little ridiculous. Stains magically appear in places where it’s absolutely illogical for stains to occur. The wear from walking around is very bad, something I noticed when I rearranged my bedroom and the new walking paths were almost immediately beaten down like I’d been walking on that spot for fifty years. I’m itching to call for carpet cleaning, but as it’s not an absolute necessity I’m trying to hold off. It’s embarrassing, though, because I don’t want people to think I’m dirty. I’m not. I’m just bad at vacuuming. And I’m bad at owning carpet.

I’m not sure, but this really could be a deal breaker if some guy decides he wants me for a wife. Maybe that’s why Ex-Boyfriend-Kurt left. Hmmm.

(And yes, I did just vacuum my apartment at 9:30 at night. My downstairs neighbors can suck it.)

The new “home” office.

I’m not going to deny my love for Panera. They have delicious treats no one can consume without immediately gaining then pounds, healthy foods that are less delicious but still tasty, and foods in between the two. Since I usually suck down enough coffee while at Panera to squelch my appetite for the rest of the day, I order up a cinnamon crunch bagel with cream cheese for my breakfast/lunch. The cinnamon crunch bagels do not really have a hole in the middle, preventing the leaking of cream cheese if you’re being a big cream cheese pig. Panera also has free WiFi, which is more than I can say for some places (*cough* Starbucks *cough*).  I get as much coffee as I can possibly suck down, with the option to switch to a soft drink or iced tea if I’m discreet about it, and even though I’m compromising my already rather flimsy morals because Panera doesn’t carry free trade coffee, I feel Iike I’m probably ripping them off enough with my abuse of the beverages and the fact I never really buy anything more expensive than a bagel.

There are some downsides. This particular Panera only has a total of three accessible outlets, and they aren’t spread out in a way that might make up for there only being three. (Other Paneras are more user friendly, though, so I’m going to forgive them. Sort of.) Panera isn’t a library or even a coffeehouse, and the employees and customers are generally engaged in conversation. As someone who is used to the quiet back room of Donkey, where a loud word or two got the culprit dirty looks from half a dozen students engaged in various levels of concentration (those med students can cut you with their eyes), the hustle and bustle of Panera can be a little much. The tables aren’t nearly big enough if you’re trying to organize three million note cards for a twenty page paper, and those that are are probably being used by people actually eating and drinking and having a dining experience. I can overlook that stuff, though, because there isn’t a good alternative in the area. Cupps (which wasn’t big enough to be a student coffeehouse, thankyouverymuch) closed. Durango is okay, but they don’t have fair trade coffee, their bagels are small and expensive, and I don’t know if they have any WiFi, free or otherwise. Unless I want to sneak coffee into the library (not easy as their one entrance faces the always staffed reference desk, potentially a HUGE disaster), I can go into “work” (where I’ll end up doing something “work”-like, regardless of whether I’m on the schedule or not, because there always seems to be something to do when I’m not actually there to “work,” while there is never anything to do when I’m on the clock), I can work at home (not going to happen, my friends), or I can go to Panera.

The thing that drives me batty, though, is that there are people who are obscenely taking advantage of Panera. I’m facing two people who aren’t here to get some work done while they drink their coffee and have breakfast or lunch. These people have turned this corner of the restaurant into their home office. Mr. Guy here has even brought a printer with him. Ms. Lady has a very special set up involving her cell phone clipped to her computer and an ear piece on her ear, and because she hasn’t jumped the Bluetooth bandwagon, she has a wire leading from her phone to her ear piece-thingie. Calls come in to both Mr. Guy and Ms. Lady, but neither have their phones ringing (I guess I should be thankful for small favors), so all of a sudden they just start talking. Conducting business. The guy behind me is conducting business almost completely on his phone (I know because I sat across from him the other day, and he did not shut up once). These three individuals are here every day of the week. I don’t know what time they arrive to work, but they’re certainly still here working by noon. GET AN OFFICE!

I’m here basically to do the same thing, except I don’t do it on a regular basis. I also don’t have to talk on the phone, making it less obnoxious that I’m sitting here for hours on end abusing the coffee and WiFi privileges. I’m not sure this is what Panera had in mind when they invited people to abuse their free WiFi, and some Paneras have shut down their free WiFi during peak business hours, a practice I’m not a fan of, but understand and approve. The world is changing, I know, and people are going to sit in places with WiFi for hours on end, doing business via cell phones and the internet. No more three martini lunches. No more face to face interaction. It used to be that this kept some entrepreneurs in their home offices, never to see the light of day or the forced smile of an employee working minimum wage, but thanks to places like Panera, now we can be intimately acquainted with their business.