An Update & Stuff

It’s been three weeks since I quit my job as a dog walker.  Unemployment is kind of…weird.  I’ve had a hard time finding the motivation to work on things because I feel like I’m in some sort of purgatory.  I’ve quit one job, and now I’m waiting for another to begin.  Work provides my day with some degree of structure, and I find it difficult to make a schedule for myself without some sort of outside force providing at least a modicum of influence.  It doesn’t help that it has been hot, hazy, and humid here in Virginia, which is the weather of apathy, if there is such a thing.  Especially now that I have no transportation, I feel like a half-filled balloon, floating aimlessly around our apartment.

For now though, I have a position waiting for me at Harris Teeter, an east coast grocery store chain, and I’m waiting to hear back about a start date.  The thought of working at a grocery store again gives me flashbacks to when I used to work for Whole Foods, but at least the pay is decent for customer service-type work (glassdoor.com cites around $10/hr for this area), and it will lower our grocery bill.  In the meantime, I have been continuing to apply to other jobs, albeit at a slightly less frantic pace.  I’ve been applying to marketing positions, secretary and administrative assistant positions, social media manager positions, pretty much anything that is 9-5 but that won’t make my brain melt from boredom.  I have a good lead on a legal secretary position at a friend’s law firm, but the position won’t be available for a couple months.  Hopefully I will be able to work for them and get out of the grocery store.

Part of the problem is that it’s difficult for me to find jobs to apply for, because I’m not looking for something that is career-track.  I have full faith in my ability to pull this Mongolian Experiment thing off (website forthcoming, I promise!), and I don’t want to take any job that would be difficult to quit when I head over there in the spring of 2011 or 2012.  If I pull it off and I think that I can parlay it into a journalism/photography/writing/whatever job, then that’s great.  If I can’t parlay it into a job in my chosen field, well, then at least I can say I tried.  I don’t want to go into a different career until I know I’ve tried to hack it in journalism, because otherwise I will spend my entire life asking myself “what if?”, and let me tell you, that is a miserable way to live.

I really can’t wait to get my site up for the Mongolian Experiment.  I feel like my life is sort of on hold right now until the site is up.  It has been such a big part of my conciousness for so long, but it hasn’t had any real representation in my online life.  It’s been like getting married to someone without being able to introduce your friends to your fiance or even show them a photo.  I can talk it up all I want, but until I have the site up, it just won’t feel real to me, or to anyone else.  I have several friends helping me now with logistics, and I think it should be up soon.  I have had a lot of difficulty with it because while I have given my elevator pitch for the project a million times, it’s a lot harder to write about something than to speak about it (for me, at least).  Three minutes of speaking is about five pages of text, and yet my description needs to be more on the order of five paragraphs.  Conciseness has never been a strength of mine, and it has been a major hindrance in trying to get this site up.  Thankfully, my friend Abby is proving very helpful.  I also keep coming up with new ideas of things I want to add, which just increases the time it takes to get everything up.  It will be up soon though, I promise.

So anyway, that’s what I’m up to these days.  Right now my focus is on trying to get my site up for TME, so I may be a little quiet here until that’s done.  But when it’s done…things will hopefully be very different around here.

[Photos from Me, Tallybates, chrisdebruyn]