Congratulate Me.

     

     Lol. Just kidding - not about that.

     About me becoming a co-manager at Ventures (we'll continue to call it, I think), where I work.

     It's not exactly my dream job, I must say, and I did have to put my education on a more-extended hold to accept the promotion, but I did it for the following reasons:

• Although retail is extremely stressful and is not, as I mentioned, my dream job, I am good at it. Really good, if I do say so, myself, and since no one else is knocking down my door with better opportunity, I figure I have to accept my chances as they're offered to me. Ventures has been good to me, and I think this job is worth giving a shot.
• Secondly, I am having a hard time making ends meet, only receiving a part-timer's paycheck, and even though Dan and I are thankful the apartment-type space we have at my parents', we are not exactly out of our minds with joy about having to stay there. Also, my family might be moving, themselves, so we (Dan and I) have been thinking for some time that it would be best for us to start planning for another place of our own. That means at least one us has to get a full-time job - if it has to be me, it has to be me.
• Thirdly, I recently changed my major for the third (or is it the fourth...?) time, and I am really starting to think that I am flat-out unsure about all future-related things but two: that I want to be married with a family, and that I want to write. Both of those things I can do with career at Ventures, and until I can make longer-lasting, more satisfying goals for myself...I think am cool with this.

     As always, I will not pretend to know what the future holds for me. I just do the best I can with what I've got, pray for guidance, and try to stay positive...but here's hoping, right?

And from here on out...

----=I'm gonna make hay while the sun shines=----

I swear it.

I feel a little embarrassed admitting this, but I had never heard this...oh, 500 year-old proverb until last week when I heard it slip casually from the lips of a news anchor...

but what a beautiful thought to keep posted on the cork board in the back of your head.

It's true, I was in a vulnerable condition when I was watching this particular news cast - still springing back from an unprecedented and bone-shaking grand mal seizure - but I think these words would have reverberated through me regardless of if I had just spent the last days being tested and stuck...barely getting off of my back, and thanking my lucky stars for the breath in my lungs and the beat in my heart. I'm sure of it, actually.

Make hay while the sun shines.

Strike while the iron's hot. Get while the getting's good. Act while opportunity still exists.

Live while you're alive...

I can't get it out of my head, and - I know this may sounds cheesy, but - I really feel like this is exactly the kind of thing that could change the course of the rest of my life.

Okay...

I'm back.

Spring Break/a short stay in the hospital (it's a long, strange story I may or may not care to put into words again...) had me on hiatus for a minute there, but   I   have   returned   ( =] ) and I am ready to get rolling!


I am hoping for a smooth tranisition back into my day-to-day life, including my blogging, so I'll have a little something to post right after this. I really just wanted to say,


Hello again.
I've missed you.
I sure have missed writing...


...and, I do hope you can forgive my absence...

Total Bull Spit

Today was this semester's first official meeting of the Erie Square Gazette at SC4. It was my first-ever meeting - as a writer, or anything else - so I was very nervous...and excited...and also pretty nervous.

The newspaper advisor, and my teacher, Professor Lusk, was expecting me, and greeted me warmly, but I didn't know anyone else at today's meeting.

Even though it was obvious by all the people who sat alone, looking around like sheep that I wasn't the only new face in the bunch, something in the air made me feel like I was not in the same boat as the everyone else.

When the editor in chief, Brian Johnston, began calling names and searching the room, I waited quietly.

I knew quite well that I hadn't put my name on any list from which to be called, but still I sat, rapt with my most thoughtful attention, just in the crazy case that...well, someone else had...

Of course, my name wasn't called. It didn't go unnoticed.

I had to exchange only a few clumsy words with Johnston before it came out that the newspaper, sure enough, is a one-credit class (with grades and everything, who knew?), one for which I hadn't registered.

This is real crap news for me to get now, halfway through my payments on this semester. Especially due to the fact that I am already enrolled in only six credit hours because it's all I can afford to budget. (My days with student loans are over - well, my days of taking them out are over...) Trying to squeeze out another almost-$200 for the two remaining payments this semester is going to be very tough.

Worse than that is the fact that everyone else is already enrolled. I seem to be the only one vacant enough to have not looked a little deeper into this. I obviously should have taken this more seriously, and I can already see that I'll pay dearly for my negligence.
Today, after skating through 47 pages of syllabus as a group (I know, right? It's a full-on class!), the editors started passing out story ideas to everyone in the room...everyone except me.

He said there's room at the paper for a guest writer, but that their priority, I have to understand, has to be with the registered student writers. The first edition is going to be basically fluff anyway, so I shouldn't worry about it. We'll figure something out, he said.

Unacceptable. All I am is a fantastic version of everyone else. A little more talented than the average Joe, perhaps, but no different. Therefore, I refuse to be treated any differently. I can't have some special relationship with the editor in chief which sometimes affords me a chance to contribute to the paper as a guest writer. It's flattering that Johnston would allow be the opportunity, I suppose, but I expect a staff position nonetheless.

It's lucky for me that campus clubs each have their own advisors, and that the Gazette's is none other than my doting news-writing teacher, John Lusk.

Lusk and I have a special relationship of the positive variety. The kind where I work hard to impress him, looking up to him as a true expert and role model, and I think he does his best not to let me down. He respects my talent as a young writer, while highlighting opportunities for growth. His eyes betray the aging hippie beneath his clean, professional appearance, so I imagine cultivating emerging talents comes naturally to him.

At the end of the first newspaper meeting today, Lusk pulled me aside to ask me if I had gotten set with a story ok. I said I hadn't, and choked for a second on the explanation that followed. It was embarrassing, but I began to make plain how I never thought to ask if the newspaper was something I might have to sign up to join. Before I got to the beginning of the meeting today when I first spoke with Brian, though, Lusk stopped me and said it didn't matter.

He said, even if I went to the registration office and, for some crazy reason I couldn't get in, he would let me work for the ESG. The paper could still use me, he said.

I registered as soon as I could get home and to the computer. I will have to find a way to pay for it...some other day. I haven't exactly figured it out yet. I will have to come up with an extra $50 in February and March, but that's in February and March, I guess.

All I can really think about is now. And right now I'm thinking of how awesome John Lusk is, and how I can't wait to be an m-effing writer! (Classy, I know.)

Wish me luck(, my readership of zero)!!!

Am I really here?

Am I seeing this right? Because, to me, that looks like the proverbial fork-in-road. It's bigger than I would have guessed, but...oh, yes. Look there. My work life is on one side, sneering at my school life on the other. I'm sure that's my district manager who's giving the finger to what looks like my Advanced Newswriting final...

I can hardly believe this is happening to me now. Though my disbelief will neither make it un-happen, or help me deal with it, so I have no choice but to turn and face it.

It, incidentally, is not something with which I ever thought I would be dealing. Least of all in the way that I am, which is the way of dealing with trouble.

You see, for the second time in the year that I've been at my job, I am currently up for a promotion. And, also for the second time, I'm currently struggling with the decision.

That's not to say that I haven't decided, or that I labored over which to choose - because I have, and I didn't -but rather, that I'm having a hard time living with myself, knowing I'm turning down a brilliant chance to improve my station.

And there are many reasons lined up for the chance to spit their doubt in my face. So many reasons...

For starters, a day at work, for me, is almost always more good than bad - more fun than not. I'm grateful to be where I am, working for a fashion-forward shoe store, and I'm good at what I do.

The store where I work - Ventures, I'll call it - is really something too. Funky music videos, neon lights, rainbowed walls of t-shirts and bags, and of course, a savory selection of shoes, from Beat-It red high-tops to sex kitten stilettos. It's the kind of place where browsing is genuinely fun, and where some people work just for the employee discount.

Like I mentioned, I've been at Ventures for just over a year now, and, I must say, I am a rather excellent employee. Scarcely a day goes by when my manager, Tim, doesn't exclaim to me or someone else that I will be a manager someday. That I'm the best part-timer he's ever had - always do what I'm supposed to, great customer rapport, outstanding sock-seller. That sort of thing.

The point is I do a good job at a job, and it's appreciated.

So what's the problem, right? It's a promotion which would more than double my meager paycheck, and all my head can say is, "You could really...really use that money." Also, as my boss is always eager to remind me, it would put me one step closer to taking over his job, and running my own store.

The problem, as I find usually happens with me, lies within - within me, and my inablility to imagine myself as a manager of...anything.

Ventures is a shoe store. It may be an overwhelmingly-popular, multi-national conglomerate which offers singular opportunities for advancement, but it is essentially just a shoe store - a retail chain. However high up I move, that's where I'm working: with sales and figures and consumer relations at a major shoe store.

To be honest, just thinking of that is making me sick. I am no business woman. And my heart truly is not one of a salesperson. In point of fact, I've always found working with the public to be frustrating because I'm often disgusted by human nature...frankly.

I am a writer, and even though I didn't finish high school in the spring and start college in the fall, knowing to what I was going to commit the rest of my life, I do now, and I say it sure and proud: I'm going to write.

I'm imaginative and observant and full of ideas. These are not the traits of someone with their future in retail! I refuse to imagine and observe and create exclusively as a hobby forever. And while writing certainly isn't burdening me with riches, it is what I love to do, and what I'm determined to do. Even if I have to turn down big, fat, smiling promotions to do it.

I want to write, that's all. I realize there are uncounted reasons why writing will probably never be my sole, or even my main source of income, and that I will likely always have to hold down another job. I know that right now my minimum wage job is barely paying the bills, and not taking the promotion on the table feels like slapping away the hand of opportunity as it reaches to help me up...

But I also know that to take the job would mean placing my education on hold. There is absolutely no way to work my Journalism classes, which are smack in the middle of the day, around a co-manager's 50-70-hour work week.

It's a great offer for a girl like me - a girl who desperately needs the cash, and who stands to gain a lot from advancing - but I refuse to put my writing dreams on the backburner while I whittle out a career for myself at Ventures, regardless of how great a career it promises to be. I can't afford to.

I guess what it really boils down to is this: do I want to Venture off now, and work for money? Or do I just keep trucking down the road I'm on, inching closer to my heart's desire?

Looking at it from this angle, I can't even see an opportunity for discussion...