Entry tags:

photography

nearly my birthday.
It is nearly my twenty-sixth birthday. Traditionally (or as traditionally as anything can be if it's just me and I've only done it for a few years), I look back on what I've accomplished, things that have happened, changes I've made, and generally take stock of where I am in life as compared to a year previously. As it's not quite my birthday yet, I'm not going to do that right now. I am, on the other hand, going to recap the time since my last posting. Though my journal has been sorely lacking in frequency, I hope to maintain a reasonable level of completeness in coverage.

I am, as people at my age do, not enjoying my job. No, it's now reached the point where I hate my job. I'm sticking with it for the time being because it pays reasonably well, it's closely located, and I'm going to be switching careers in roughly six months in any case. Above all, I believe it is because I'm terrible at looking for work; my inertia is truly something to behold. I do like my coworkers, and I wouldn't mind working with them more... but I can't stand the customers. And I'm still sore about getting my pay chopped, as it has remained chopped. (When I took this job, there were murmurs of profit-sharing! What a joke.)

Carin talks about how the promise of a new job never pans out, how the job the managers sell you on ends up bearing little resemblance to the job you actually do. I want to think that she's wrong about that, but experience is slowly beating it into my head that she's depressingly right.

Over the last week, I've started to have a problem where I lose track of my sentence halfway through, I can't pay attention to anything except what I'm doing right now at this very moment, and I draw a blank on the simplest of things. Maybe it's finals-stress; it's subsided considerably since classes ended for this quarter. It worries me greatly when this happens; I don't know if it's happened before, or how long it will last, or what it really means. It's been centering around the work day lately, to the point where I have to tell Jay to stop explaining something to me because if he explains something new to me, what I was working on will fall right out of my head.

(I ended up looking for puzzles to prove to myself that I could do something that involves problem-solving. Not for the results--I didn't even complete it--but to do something to convince myself I wasn't going all Flowers for Algernon.)

The last few months have involved two trips, and a few outings. Looking back, I'm surprised that Carin and I got out that much, as her work schedule was opposite mine, so we were both out of the apartment most of the time, and we got to see very little of each other. She didn't get much of a summer this year, unfortunately. But we look forward, and hope that things will be arranged better. She's no longer working evening shifts at the jewelry store, but rather day shifts at a framing shop, where she can dress casually and is learning a useful trade. The change comes just in time for her to be going back to school.

I'm impressed that she's worked up the guts to ask me math questions. Not that I don't respond well to being asked math questions--I rather like it--but she's been very self-conscious about taking math classes, as she's rather rusty at it. She's perfectly good at math, but she's not happy about relearning it. Despite that, her desire to learn this stuff has trumped her pride, and that makes me very happy. (Remember, it's never a bad thing to ask; whatever the other person knows, they must have learned it somewhere in turn.)

As for trips, we took a whirlwind weekend drive to Chicago in an enormous rental van to pick up her father's old furniture. The drive out there became interesting, in the cursed sense, when the rain picked up to the point where visibility was under fifty feet, and hail started falling. I'd never actually been in a hailstorm; it was as if a hundred angry toddlers with rock hammers were banging on the roof. Carin performed admirably well, finding us a bridge to park under until the storm died down. (The under-bridge area was occupied by cars which had gotten the same clever idea first, which is why we got to listen to the hail on our roof.) A more peaceful part of the drive is seen at left.

The other trip was to Des Moines for the State Fair, where I got to meet another member of Caitlin's entourage that Carin had told me about, Chris, who was from rural Kentucky and apparently does not take after his family at all. I got to see all of Carin's family, and even though we had to head back shortly after I got there, I still had a great time. Highlights included cooking lentil burgers for the vegan guests (I don't like how they come out, which is why there's no recipe in this post, but other people seem to appreciate them) and seeing Carin's mom fly around her place of work on one of those little two-wheeled skateboard-with-handlebars scooters. The Fair has become the high point of my summer; I don't know how I got along before Carin started bringing me to it.

On a more negative note, I don't get paid for vacation. There was a change in management, the upshot of which is that my pay was cut, I get health insurance (but it's expensive as hell), I get dental insurance (which took effect just after I paid out-of-pocket for the last set of work), and all of my accrued vacation has gone up in smoke. Curse you, job situation.

My last full-time quarter at school has just drawn to a close. I previously had planned to take a full-time (three-course) schedule this fall, and then do a single course of independent study in the spring to complete the degree, but due to the vagaries of course registration, I barely managed to get registered for two. (If they hadn't added another section after registration had been under way, I'd have been down to one.)

This quarter did not include a repeat of the last one's failure to properly collaborate with my group, and I'm not embarrassed like I was before. On the other hand, my grades aren't better. (They weren't bad last quarter, so there's nothing to really complain about in any case.) I learned a few things, but I completed a course in "Information Architecture" and still couldn't say exactly what Information Architecture is. The name is like "content management"; it doesn't really mean anything. I took a networking course which encouraged me to learn more about public-key cryptosystems (short version: SSH host verification is a joke; note to self, expand on that), and also a course in human-computer interaction, which did teach me a few interesting tidbits about how "user error" is frequently indicative of bad design. Still, I'd rather be taking courses about library science. Next quarter should be better in that regard.

Earlier, I drank some ceremonial end-of-the-semester (literally quarter, but the idea dates back to when I took semesters) cheap beer this evening, which has made me quite sleepy. Hopefully I'll be able to update again before long, and I will write about a more local fair where I didn't see cows being born and took what I consider to be an awesome picture of horses, about some recent discoveries about integrated library systems, about my recently-arranged carpool into work with Doug (professional cook for twelve years, want to learn everything he knows, but don't think I like him), and about how Carin got me an early and extraordinarily awesome birthday present on Saturday. But for now, sleep, then work.

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