The Finish Line

“Follow your bliss.  If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.  When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.  I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.  If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.” 

- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (Interview with Bill Moyers)

One F*$%ing Upbeat Piece of Blogging

It's awesome to finally be blogging about happy stuff again.

I looked back at my old blogs are realized something recently: I write a lot when I'm upset, and when I'm happy I just go about life being happy and only writing snippets of things in my mind.  

(Someday these snippets will erupt into a children's book of epic awesomeness. Someday.)

A couple of things have happened recently that have made life extra awesome.  

1- The clouds finally lost the battle and let the sun come out for about a week straight.  It was glorious.  I wore short sleeves.  I took Sadie for a small hike and only hit like 3 muddy patches. Which is awesome for up here.
2- During that sunny week, I got a job!  As you probably know by now since, let's face it, the people who read this are pretty much my friends who regularly see my posts on Facebook.

But yeah, I've landed an internship working 20 hours a week as a teen librarian for the summer at a rural public library, and I couldn't be happier about it.  

My approximate reaction in the car after landing the job.
And then I called my mom, of course.

It's a bit like combining the two major career paths that I've had in my life, since I'm doing a similar kind of reader's advisory work that I did when I worked at Barnes & Noble but I'm also combining library database and procedure knowledge that I've gleaned in my studies and my work at the UCSB Library.  

I'm also more intensely aware of the gaps in my knowledge base that I want to fill in, though.  I really want to be able to incorporate a lot of of Web 2.0 tools in my summer reading program, but I lack the programming skills to actually do the website work to make it happen the way my brain has it envisioned and it's a bit frustrating to not be able to make my own dreams come true.  I fully intend to continue this aspect of my education after I'm done with my MLIS, but if I'm going to finish this degree by the end of the year I really need to not let myself get distracted with dreams of CCS and HTML programming classes in the near future.  Apparently my 14-year-old cousin knows Javascript programming, though, so maybe I'll just ask him for help...
(Knowledge tidbits like that only serve to make me feel a competitive sense of "Oh yeah, youngin'?!?!" reactions in me lately.  Who knew I had a competitive bone in my body? Not me, that's for sure!)

The timing on the job is really perfect since I need to jam out four more classes by the end of December if I want to graduate, and this way I can do one class during the Summer and then three in the Fall and be done.  And since the job contract only goes through the end of August. I can realistically think of finishing those three classes all at once.  Maybe.  Hopefully.  One of them could be a thesis class, which is actually something I might welcome since I've had a lot of library-and-literacy-related stuff bubbling around in my brain for the last three years and I'd love a chance to just spew it all out somewhere.  

(Although the whole "organize and cite references" portion of it is admittedly less fun. But somehow it's not un-fun either... usually when I'm reading about the stuff I'm interested in it just inspires me further!  

It's really just the actually formatting of the citations that isn't fun for me. 

Because I'm a nerd like that.
A nerd that is in deep student loan debt because I did as Joseph Campbell suggested and followed my bliss. And the fact that I know I followed my book-bliss in the best way I could means that I will make payments on those student loans until I die and I won't regret a thing.)

(Longest parenthetical TO DATE!)

The kiddo also got to start going back to preschool three days a week now thanks to my job, which is really good for her.  I've loved ever minute of getting to just hang out and bond with her these last 6 months, but it's clear from her interactions with other kids at playgrounds and such that she really needs time to be with her peers right now too.  And now she gets to do just that.

Now, this post has been sitting idle in my "drafts" folder since April and it's July, so I'm just going to hit publish on it and start a new one now.  :)

Welp, Here we Are.

So I've been an awful blogger.
First I whine repeatedly for months on end about wanting to move.  Then I post that we're finally moving.  Then I abandon blogging for months on end.
There is a reason I will never consider blogging as a career.  (Well, that and it would mean trying to pimp my blog to people for money and I'm just not that kinda gal.)

But I guess it's about time for an update.  So here goes the most nut-shell version of one I can give you.

So the week before we were just going to move without a safety net, Andrew got offered a job at the Costco in Marysville, WA.  The same city as the house that my friends were so generous in letting us rent from them.  When they found out, my parents praised God for answering their prayers.  Andrew's mom said she was happy for us and had been doing Buddhist chants for us as well.  So I figure we really just had our bases covered there and the Universe went, "OK,OK, I guess I can stop stringing you along now..."  Between that job and the income we are getting from some things Andrew's wonderful Grandma left him we have been doing ok monetarily.  Not GREAT, but we can make it.  Stuff is a lot less expensive up here!  

So we rented my friends' house from them between Sept. and Dec. of last year, and although the place was really nice and it was tempting to try and stay there longer, we decided that we really needed to move to a place that was going to be "ours" for quite a while (since their house was for their vacation needs and we had to be out for sure by May).  So in mid-December we packed up again and moved to a townhouse community that is within a 5-minute drive of Andrew's work.  The timing wasn't optimal in terms of the holidays and whatnot, but we couldn't afford to fly home anyway so it was almost nice to have a distraction from the whole not-seeing-family-for-Christmas thing. Plus we got our Christmas tree so late that it only cost us $5. So now we're at least done moving for the next 11 months and have managed to unpack the majority of our boxes which is a REALLY nice feeling.  

So that is the nutshell about us.
As for me, here is what has gone on:
Mid-November I'd fallen off the "woo-hoo, we moved!" high and, having failed to land two other library jobs that I had interviewed for, I was feeling pretty low. And then I started having these weird heart-palpitations at night: I would lay down for sleep, about to pass out and suddenly this would happen:

Only I was in my PJs instead of a zoot-suit.

After 5 days in a row of crazy heart flutterings that I thought might have been related to the sickness I was fighting off, I finally dragged my uninsured self into a local clinic where they convinced me that I wasn't, in fact, dying of a heart tumor or something, but was in fact having panic attacks.  Which apparently hit people often at bedtime because your emotional defenses go down as you get sleepy and, when you're all emotionally repressed and don't realize how stressed out and sad you are, you can't actually calm your heart down by deep breathing.  Go figure, you can't actually just boss your emotions around by ignoring them and pretending that only the happy ones exist.  Which is generally how I handle things.  I hate dwelling on negatives, so I do my best to focus on the positive things around me and just talk my brain into feeling better that way.  But oh MAN did I feel like an idiot breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing in that clinic when they gave me a "standard" quiz to take regarding depression/anxiety.  Apparently seeing myself circle things on paper that indicated I was anxious was what it took for me to realize exactly how emotionally ragged I was feeling.

Moving to the new place actually helped the anxiety go down a lot since I wasn't in a constant state of panic about not messing up my friends' house anymore and didn't have another move hanging over me anymore.  And then at the beginning of December I actually got a job as a "nanny" where I helped two elementary-school kids get up and ready for school in the morning since their parents both had to leave the house by 6am.  Although the hours sucked and required me to be up by 4:45am during the week, this job gave me a bit of an emotional boost since I finally HAD a job, even if it wasn't in a library, and the mom was really nice and told me regularly what a great job I was doing.  Which was nice.

It's also really nice that I have a cousin and her family (so, some cousins?)  up here in Seattle and that we got to spend Thanksgiving with them.  Even though we weren't really close before the move, it's been great to get to reconnect with them and have some actual family up here.  

I also got insanely lucky in that I have one amazing friend up here - I'll call her the Masseusess because she is a massage goddess and might be weirded out if I started calling her by name on my blog - and her wisdom about transitioning from sunny California to drippy Washington has been awesomely helpful.  She has given me a free massage when my neck seized-up, she's forced me to start taking herbal supplements that really helped relieve my anxiety issues without making my stomach feel like it's digesting rocks anymore (like the stuff the people at the clinic prescribed did), and she's regularly made time for me and the kiddo to just get out and do things with.  If it weren't for her, there's a good chance I'd be curled up in an anxious little ball right now.

With the start of the New Year I finally got myself going to the YMCA to work out again regularly, then we had like a week and a half of sunshine where I got to take Sadie out exploring a lot and I was finally starting to feel GOOD again... like I was living again instead of just clinging to a piece of driftwood and hoping not to get smashed up.

Last week, though, the gal I worked for had her hours at work cut and now I'm back on the unemployment wagon.  Oh, and I found out that I was the 2nd choice for a library paige job that I applied for that same week (which, for those of you unfamiliar with library jobs, is literally the bottom of the job ladder).  Apparently I can't even get a job doing work that I used to hire other people to do.  (I was beat out by someone who already worked as a part-time paige in another library and already knew the system... but STILL.) (I should probably abuse some parentheses here again to mention that I might not be having so hard a time in the job search if we lived in Seattle proper, because the area I'm in pretty much just has the public library system to job-watch on and commuting to the city regularly just isn't an option for the part-time work I'm trying to find while I try to power through my last year of grad school.  Especially because the traffic in Seattle is truly horrendous and people in the city don't understand the concept of checking their blind spots before they merge...)  So between that and the constant illness we've had in the last two months I'm feeling pretty low again to be totally honest.

I knew the move away from family and friends was going to be hard, and I don't regret doing the move - we actually ended up in a fairly rural area that is still close to the city, which is really nice, and it's freaking GORGEOUS here when it's not raining and I'm actually used to the rain at this point - but I'm so ready to start feeling happy and proud of myself again. I never really realized how much pride I took in my jobs until I didn't have one.  I started working full-time when I was 17 and since then I've literally always had a job (not counting the leave I took after the baby came and the neck injury sidelined me), so this business of letting Andrew support us alone makes me really anxious.  Not because he can't do it, but because I'm not good at having to depend on someone else completely. 

But through all these emotional waves I've become a pretty bad friend to a lot of people back home: I've emailed them to say hi, then never responded to them when they wrote back.  Not because I'm trying to be a jerk, but just because I feel like I have very little to say that isn't like bringing my own little raincloud into their inboxes. (Ha!  Get it?  I live in Washington now... I can make rain jokes.) I've also committed to help a friend write a blog to help fund-raise for her brother, who is in a much worse place than I am, and I've barely even looked at it in the last month. Heck, I forgot about my niece's first birthday last month and just now realized I missed it. I've tried to make plans with a couple of my friends that were already up here when we moved, but after failing to actually meet a few times I've given up and just let myself start pouting that they never think to call me or text or anything like that.  Not that I have tried to contact them again or anything... 

In short: I'm a moping fool right now, people.  I'm stuck in a rut of feeling sorry for myself and I'm doing a really poor job of snapping out of it. I try to keep myself busy with the kiddo during the day and then I distract myself at night with tv or books so I can just get through each day without feeling overwhelmed by everything I'm failing at. It's completely paradoxical and stupid, but it's my rut and you can't have it.  

So all I ask is that if I've fallen out of contact with you or been a bad friend lately, please just understand that I am aware of how badly I suck.  And maybe try not to hold it against me.
Or the fact that this last part about me has been so damned long and nowhere near a "nutshell."  Because dammit, I write more when I'm drinking wine sad.

And mark my words, I will climb myself out of this rut.

 At this point I have to have caught every flu the PNW has to offer me this season *KNOCK ON WOOD,* so I will workout to get my endorphins up and keep applying to stupid part time jobs and I will kick butt at my classes this semester and I will get better soon.  I don't want this post to come off as me digging for sympathy because that's not the point: the point is that this process has been hard, we've had a lot of change in a short amount of time and even though I'm kind of a mess from it, it's still a work in progress. And it'll keep progressing until things are much better.  Or at least until I can get my act together and be a normal person again.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand the Power of the Internet Suddenly Astonishes Me (Or, WE ARE FINALLY MOVING!)

So, two weeks ago I was having one of my worst days to date and, after three people asked me that dreaded "So when are you actually moving?" question within a few hours of one another, I felt like just running away and hiding from the world.  So I took to my blog and just let it all out in one big "I give up, everyone stop asking me questions about this, please" post. 
And then I sat at my desk at work crying silently and thinking that I was totally going to do something like this when someone else asked me about it:

But then something completely unexpected and amazing happened: 
A friend I made from the pregnancy message boards I joined back in January 2009 sent me a message that changed everything.  She and her partner had purchased a vacation house in a town called Marysville, WA this year, and she offered to let us use the house for an insanely reasonable amount of rent while we continued our search for gainful employment!! 

For those of you not obsessively studying Washington's map like I have been, the marker is where Marysville is.

So far our main stumbling blocks in making the move was the fact that 1- We were still putting California addresses on our resumes and apparently Washingtonians hate Californians, and 2 - No one was going to rent to us when we didn't have jobs. 

So for this friend of mine - who I have yet to meet in real life! - to make this insanely generous offer this to us knowing all of this information already... it just made everything fall into place.  It took the pressure off of us to find housing immediately and gives us a few months to get our job situation in order before we have to find a permanent place to live. (And also made me basically eat my words in that day's blog, since it was the fact that I *did* tell everyone online how frustrated I was and how hopeless I was feeling that prompted her and her partner to make this offer to us!)  And I'd be lying if I said I didn't immediately start happy-sobbing the moment I read her message and had to run outside so I didn't freak out my co-workers. This woman and her partner are seriously changing our lives for the better SO MUCH and I don't think I'll ever be able to thank them enough! 


Adding the Washington address to our resumes has already helped Andrew get three job interviews up there (one of which is actually in Marysville) in one week and he should be hearing back on them any day now.  Plus he has a supervisor who loves him from his current store about to transfer to that same Marysville Costco so she can help put in a good word for him once he's up there.  :) 

So, here is the Actual Plan:  

Our moving Upack-pod-thingy gets delivered on Sept. 10th, we spend 2-3 days packing it up, and then we GO!  We're not terribly sure yet if we are driving both cars up there or if we're only taking one and then having Sadie and I fly up after a few days spent back at my parents' house, but we should be figuring that out in the next few days.  

The Upack thing got reserved yesterday.  My tw0-week-notice was just handed in at work this morning.  

IT'S OFFICIAL: WE ARE FINALLY MOVING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  YEEEE-HAW!!!

Bobbing in the Waves

Yesterday my little family went to the beach together for the first time in months.  In trying to escape the high temperatures we drove to a beach south of us a bit and Andrew and I were able to take turns bobbing around in the water while the other watched the kidlet.  

While I was bobbing around, I started to remember a game I used to play with my friends when I was a kid: Over or Under.  It was a simple concept: before a wave reached us we all had to shout "Over" or "Under."  And then we had to follow whichever way through the wave that we had called out - diving under it or bobbing over it - or risk being penalized by a seaweed necklace.  Unless, of course, you were smacked in the face by a wave and came up with a red enough face that your friends felt the water had punished you enough and took pity on you...

Of course, me being eternally lost in thought about our moving issues, I started thinking about how life is a lot like that game.  Most of the time you can predict which way through a wave of change is best and you can go that direction feeling sure of yourself and your choices.  But sometimes you make the wrong prediction - like thinking that you think getting a job out of state is going to be fairly easy when it's not- and when you're trying to  bob your way over a wave it suddenly comes crashing down on you.  And you know that the instant you come out of the waves your friends will call you out on your inability to bob over the wave and throw some seaweed around your shoulders as a symbol of your failure to predict the future.  

Thankfully my friends these days are adults.  Adults who may see us sputtering for breaths between waves and might even take pity on us and say, "Dude, do you want to go boogie board instead?" as they hand us a board. 

The point to this random ramble is this:  I'm trying to remember that no matter how bad we have been at planning for our future after reacting to this wave of change, we will eventually come out on the other side of the wave.  And as of a few hours after I posted my last blog post, an amazing person has showed up next to us with a boogie board. 
(Yes, this is cryptic on purpose.  No, I won't explain further until we have a concrete plan...)  


But the important thing is:  We have hope again! 

Oh Goody, Square One Again.

Sometimes life is damned disappointing.  

No, I didn't get the job.

And you know what makes it worse?  Realizing that telling everyone about what was going on in your life was a dumb, dumb idea. 
Because now everyone knows your personal dramas and asks you about them regularly. 

Social media is such a double-edged sword like that.  


When all this drama with our housing situation started I thought it was prudent to tell my friends and family "Hey, we might not be here for much longer, keep us in your thoughts/prayers/meditations because we really need to move ASAP."

But now it feels like I've been publishing our failures for the world to see.  And I'm honestly kicking myself for it.

In some part of my mind I figured Well, the fastest way to tell everyone stuff you want them to know is probably just to post about it on Facebook.  Or them blog about it and post THAT on Facebook.  But then you get people who don't see your posts that often - they may see that you said you were moving at the end of July and then when you see them in August and you are sitting in the same damned spot you were unhappy to be in back in June and they always ask something that feels like nails on your internal chalk board:

"Have you heard back about that job yet?"  or  "So when are you guys actually moving?"  

  And I realize that everyone asking these questions means well and is genuinely curious about what is happening with our move, but when you are returning them the same answers you did two months ago - two months ago when you were convinced that a Costco job transfer to another state would be an easy thing to get done - it's just.... depressing.

The whole situation is beyond frustrating and I feel like I'm sinking into a giant pit of despair.  Not because I didn't get one job, mind you, but because neither Andrew or I can get any traction on what to DO now.  If we move out of state without either of us being employed we will 1- Probably have a hard time finding someone willing to rent to us, and 2- Potentially be setting ourselves up for complete financial devastation.  As miserable as I am, I would feel even worse if we moved up there without jobs and didn't account for the fact that the economy sucks right now and we might totally screw ourselves over if we do make that move.

Plus Fall semester starts for me on the 22nd and that makes me panic even more because the number of classes I'm registered for could vary between 1-3 depending on what my job situation is like in the next month.   So there's that awesome added stress.

So in regards to keeping everyone updated any time Andrew or I get an interview:  I give up.  
I can't expect people to want to actually want to follow a play-by-play of my whining about the same problem over and over again.  And I know now that I need to play my cards closer to my chest with this because there's nothing like trying to explain to everyone that you failed to make you feel the sting of your ineptitude even more.     

You'll hear once we have an official move date and a job lined up.  Until then, just please keep sending good thoughts/prayers/vibes our way when you remember to.  Because we need them more than ever. 
 

Dun-dun-DUUUUUN

So I made it to my interview.  I flew to Seattle the day after my daughter's 3rd birthday and spent entirely too much money on the journey .  I bought a nice jacket for it, I took friends' up on offers to help drive me places and stay with them, and I got a hotel room that I stayed in for all of 5 hours so that I didn't have to wake up any of my friends to take me to the airport at 5am.  
I got to the library a full 4 hours early so I could look around and get my bearings.  Which only really took about 45 minutes before I started feeling like people might grow suspicious of the chick who was carrying a suitcase around and just staring at the stacks and floor maps, so I used their wifi to re-watch Doctor Who until it was interview time.  

I was taken up to do the Excel portion of the test by a gentleman who gave me a list of about 18 tasks to complete on a pre-made Excel sheet.  I had 30 minutes to complete the tasks and he told me he would knock on the door 5 minutes before my time was up just so I could be sure to pay attention to the time. 

So the first 11 tasks go by easily despite the fact that the mouse they gave me had a button that kept sticking (and I STUPIDLY did not ask them for a different one... or use the built-in one that was on the laptop I was using because THAT would be too obvious a solution), and then I got to step 12.  And I could not remember how to write a formula that linked the values on one sheet to a cell on another sheet.  I remembered how to hyperlink them, which I did, but I didn't feel like that was the same as writing a "formula," which is what the step specifically instructed and I spent a while clicking through the relatively-new-to-me 2011 Excel interface trying to see if I could figure it out. 

Then the interviewer knocked my 5-minute-warning on the door, and this is about what happened to me:

This happened to me during my GREs too.
I am not someone who does well on tests. 
Unless they're essays on a topic I know about.
Which this was not.

 I just could not focus on completing the last few tasks on the sheet because I was convinced I had messed up  the prior step.  And when I finally talked my brain into just letting it go and moving on, suddenly the test was over and I had to go interview with two people while the words "DID NOT FINISH!" flashed in front of my eyes like a talisman of doom. 

Luckily I have an awesome friend who posted the Karate Kid "You're the Best" theme song on my Facebook page earlier that day, so I took a few deep breaths, focused on hearing that song instead of looking at the sign scrolling through my head: 

I bet the Karate Kid didn't have one of these on the insides of his eyelids...

I am pretty sure the actual interview went well - I made a point to state that I had panicked on the Excel test and I knew if I'd ever used the newer interface for the function I got stuck on I wouldn't have had the problems I did, but I'm not sure if it helped or not.  The female interviewer seemed to like me, but the male interviewer, who was the one who administered the Excel test, seemed less enthusiastic and made a comment about how he needed someone with the "right skills to help [him] out"... so who knows.  I'm up against 7 other people (out of 60 that applied) and they knew that I flew up there just for the interview so I'm hoping that they'll see my potential and enthusiasm and not just the fact that I didn't finish my test.

And I'd be lying if I said that the first thing I did once I got out of that building wasn't  crying.  Or that I didn't go seek out a bar right after that to go get a shot of tequilla to help shake off the feeling of being a total failure.

It's been a long, emotionally-charged week for me.
 
But even if I don't get the job, the trip was not a total loss.  I fell in love with Seattle - it's like San Francisco with a lot fewer hipsters!  And I got to have a great night out with two of my best friends that I hadn't seen in forever.  (And I'm secretly hoping that they eventually fall in love and have like 6 babies together because that would be the greatest thing ever.)

I should find out by August 8th or so whether or not I get the job.  So we'll probably stagnate here in Santa Barbara a little longer than planned so that we can find out before we move. 

Now I just have to breathe and try not to drive myself crazy thinking about it.  


PS:  I know, I know.  A song at the end of the blog?  Makes zero sense.  But it doesn't make sense anywhere else in here either.  So shush.