(no subject)
After quite a while with nothing going on in my life worth writing about, things started happening this week, and it rapidly turned into one of those situations of
First the good news: after weeks of frustration and futility, including the tantalizing near-miss with Westcliffe Publishers, I now have a job working for the Community College of Denver writing center. Their set-up is a bit more involved than the UE writing center (for example, all of the tutors have at least a Bachelor's degree), but the nuts and bolts of the job is something that I've done before and that I know I can do without pulling my hair out. Right now it's only for 10 hours a week, so even though it pays much better, I won't be leaving Starbucks. There is a decent possibility of more hours being available next semester though, so things may change in January.
In a similar, but unrelated development, I'm on the path towards doing some volunteer creative writing instruction with the Odyssey School, a charter school here in Denver. They're still setting up the program, but based on what we've talked about so far, it looks like I will be working with 7th and 8th graders. It's not a paid position, but I'm still very excited about it as a way to fill a void in my life now that I'm not taking any creative writing courses, plus it will look nice on my grad school applications.
Speaking of grad schools, I'd been putting off making any decision while I was in my blue funk of the last few weeks, but now things are looking up, and I'm coming at it with fresh enthusiasm. As it stands right now, these are the schools I'm looking at seriously: U of Texas- Austin, Ohio State, U of Wisconsin- Madison, NYU, U of California- Santa Cruz, George Mason, Washington University (St. Louis), Columbia, U of Denver, Notre Dame, U of Missouri, and U of Oregon. Over the next week or so I will be narrowing that down to about half a dozen, and then it will be time to start crafting my apps.
Just as I was finally coming out of the doldrums of my Starbucks-centric recent weeks, I received an invitation to the 21st birthday party on Wednesday of a dear friend who transferred to El Paso this year. I had actually already been thinking about figuring out a time to visit her, as El Paso is a relatively doable drive from Denver. It just so happened that her birthday coincided with a couple of days off for me, so I made some rapid last-minute plans amidst the craziness of things coming to fruition with both CCD and Odyssey all in the span of 24 hours. I tried to arrange for someone to cover my shift on Friday morning so that I would be able to stay for more than just one evening. That proved impossible, so on Wednesday morning I was on my way to El Paso for a super-quick 21st birthday bash.
I had the drive all planned out, but of course it's always when you need things to be uneventful that Murphy's Law tends to hit the hardest. I'd made it into southern Colorado easily, and after the eternal construction of Colorado Springs, I was pleased to have some flat, straight-as-an-arrow interstate in front of me. What little traffic there was was moving briskly, so I let myself drift up to seven miles above the speed limit, and you can probably guess what happened next. The officer's demeanor when he told me that he'd pulled me over for exceeding the speed limit seemed to indicate that he was going to let me off with a warning, but that was before I made the unfortunate discovery that my proof of insurance card was out of date. I did have up-to-date insurance, which was thankfully verified when he ran my plates, but I now have a date at a county courthouse all the way down on the New Mexico border to respond to charges of speeding and failure to produce proof of insurance. So much for an uneventful trip...
That incident cast a pall on the next few hours of the drive, but I cheered myself up by elaborating on some thoughts that I'd had earlier in the week. While thinking on the subject of happiness and progress, in light of the fact that studies regularly show that we're generally less happy even as our prosperity continues to skyrocket, I came to the conclusion that a big part of the problem is that we overvalue productivity and undervalue our time. The main thing that has kept the United States' economy chugging along in the 20th century is the unmatched productivity growth of american workers, but that's not actually a good thing. Some amount of money is necessary to survive and have the sort of stability that makes happiness viable, but time is far more important. If you spend all of your money, you can always make more, but the amount of time you have in your life if a finite quantity that cannot be replenished. Unless your are in a situation of deprivation, working more is not automatically a good thing, and money is only useful as a tool to use in the pursuit of happiness. I cheered myself back up by realizing that the reason I work to make money is so that I can do things like be there for my friends' 21st birthdays, so even if the ticket makes it a much more expensive trip than I'd anticipated, it's only money (of course, I may have trouble maintaining that same level of calm if the fine eats up an entire paycheck).
As a result of the traffic stop, I ended up getting caught in the rush-hour traffic in Albuquerque, but the delay proved moot when I got a call from her at 8:30 pm because she'd just woken up from the midnight celebrations the night before and was still too hung over to have a party. I arrived to find a smashed coffee table, a gouged arm, and a bruised head, all of unknown origin due to tequila (one more bit of evidence for my theory that tequila is the blood of chaos).
I was disappointed that I wasn't going to get to enjoy the party, but we went out just the two of us to a club that was having dollar beer night, and then we went on a 3am tour of El Paso and the university, including a glorious stop at Whataburger (which is one of the things Texans rave about that actually lives up to the hype). The next morning wasn't feeling too well, which I took advantage of to buy myself a few more hours before I had to leave to go back to work. It gave me the opportunity to have one more lunch with her and see her engagement ring, which manages the rare feat of being slightly unusual while still looking attractive, but the fact that it's a gorgeous ring does not reduce my difficulty in coping with the reality of any friend being engaged, much less one who is younger than I am. My moments engagement squeamishness aside, it was a very nice trip, and now that I know how easy the drive is, I expect that there will be another trip in the works as soon as I'm able to finagle enough time off to make it worthwhile.
The trip back was thankfully less eventful than the first leg, though I don't know how I would've managed it if I hadn't been able to stop for the night at my Aunt's house in Albuquerque. I got up early this morning and powered through the rest of the drive, managing to arrive at work with a whole 5 minutes to spare. I finished my short shift easily (and I got a compliment on my new hairstyle), then I fought rush-hour traffic to get to CCD and fill out the paperwork to officially join the staff.
Side note on CCD: After four years of purple and orange at Evansville, anyone care to guess what CCD's school colors are? For some reason it seems that my destiny is tied to that bizarre color combination.
Now I'm back home getting my bearings after a breathless 72 hours, but hopefully things will remain sufficiently eventful that I'll have more good stuff to write about in the coming weeks.
First the good news: after weeks of frustration and futility, including the tantalizing near-miss with Westcliffe Publishers, I now have a job working for the Community College of Denver writing center. Their set-up is a bit more involved than the UE writing center (for example, all of the tutors have at least a Bachelor's degree), but the nuts and bolts of the job is something that I've done before and that I know I can do without pulling my hair out. Right now it's only for 10 hours a week, so even though it pays much better, I won't be leaving Starbucks. There is a decent possibility of more hours being available next semester though, so things may change in January.
In a similar, but unrelated development, I'm on the path towards doing some volunteer creative writing instruction with the Odyssey School, a charter school here in Denver. They're still setting up the program, but based on what we've talked about so far, it looks like I will be working with 7th and 8th graders. It's not a paid position, but I'm still very excited about it as a way to fill a void in my life now that I'm not taking any creative writing courses, plus it will look nice on my grad school applications.
Speaking of grad schools, I'd been putting off making any decision while I was in my blue funk of the last few weeks, but now things are looking up, and I'm coming at it with fresh enthusiasm. As it stands right now, these are the schools I'm looking at seriously: U of Texas- Austin, Ohio State, U of Wisconsin- Madison, NYU, U of California- Santa Cruz, George Mason, Washington University (St. Louis), Columbia, U of Denver, Notre Dame, U of Missouri, and U of Oregon. Over the next week or so I will be narrowing that down to about half a dozen, and then it will be time to start crafting my apps.
Just as I was finally coming out of the doldrums of my Starbucks-centric recent weeks, I received an invitation to the 21st birthday party on Wednesday of a dear friend who transferred to El Paso this year. I had actually already been thinking about figuring out a time to visit her, as El Paso is a relatively doable drive from Denver. It just so happened that her birthday coincided with a couple of days off for me, so I made some rapid last-minute plans amidst the craziness of things coming to fruition with both CCD and Odyssey all in the span of 24 hours. I tried to arrange for someone to cover my shift on Friday morning so that I would be able to stay for more than just one evening. That proved impossible, so on Wednesday morning I was on my way to El Paso for a super-quick 21st birthday bash.
I had the drive all planned out, but of course it's always when you need things to be uneventful that Murphy's Law tends to hit the hardest. I'd made it into southern Colorado easily, and after the eternal construction of Colorado Springs, I was pleased to have some flat, straight-as-an-arrow interstate in front of me. What little traffic there was was moving briskly, so I let myself drift up to seven miles above the speed limit, and you can probably guess what happened next. The officer's demeanor when he told me that he'd pulled me over for exceeding the speed limit seemed to indicate that he was going to let me off with a warning, but that was before I made the unfortunate discovery that my proof of insurance card was out of date. I did have up-to-date insurance, which was thankfully verified when he ran my plates, but I now have a date at a county courthouse all the way down on the New Mexico border to respond to charges of speeding and failure to produce proof of insurance. So much for an uneventful trip...
That incident cast a pall on the next few hours of the drive, but I cheered myself up by elaborating on some thoughts that I'd had earlier in the week. While thinking on the subject of happiness and progress, in light of the fact that studies regularly show that we're generally less happy even as our prosperity continues to skyrocket, I came to the conclusion that a big part of the problem is that we overvalue productivity and undervalue our time. The main thing that has kept the United States' economy chugging along in the 20th century is the unmatched productivity growth of american workers, but that's not actually a good thing. Some amount of money is necessary to survive and have the sort of stability that makes happiness viable, but time is far more important. If you spend all of your money, you can always make more, but the amount of time you have in your life if a finite quantity that cannot be replenished. Unless your are in a situation of deprivation, working more is not automatically a good thing, and money is only useful as a tool to use in the pursuit of happiness. I cheered myself back up by realizing that the reason I work to make money is so that I can do things like be there for my friends' 21st birthdays, so even if the ticket makes it a much more expensive trip than I'd anticipated, it's only money (of course, I may have trouble maintaining that same level of calm if the fine eats up an entire paycheck).
As a result of the traffic stop, I ended up getting caught in the rush-hour traffic in Albuquerque, but the delay proved moot when I got a call from her at 8:30 pm because she'd just woken up from the midnight celebrations the night before and was still too hung over to have a party. I arrived to find a smashed coffee table, a gouged arm, and a bruised head, all of unknown origin due to tequila (one more bit of evidence for my theory that tequila is the blood of chaos).
I was disappointed that I wasn't going to get to enjoy the party, but we went out just the two of us to a club that was having dollar beer night, and then we went on a 3am tour of El Paso and the university, including a glorious stop at Whataburger (which is one of the things Texans rave about that actually lives up to the hype). The next morning wasn't feeling too well, which I took advantage of to buy myself a few more hours before I had to leave to go back to work. It gave me the opportunity to have one more lunch with her and see her engagement ring, which manages the rare feat of being slightly unusual while still looking attractive, but the fact that it's a gorgeous ring does not reduce my difficulty in coping with the reality of any friend being engaged, much less one who is younger than I am. My moments engagement squeamishness aside, it was a very nice trip, and now that I know how easy the drive is, I expect that there will be another trip in the works as soon as I'm able to finagle enough time off to make it worthwhile.
The trip back was thankfully less eventful than the first leg, though I don't know how I would've managed it if I hadn't been able to stop for the night at my Aunt's house in Albuquerque. I got up early this morning and powered through the rest of the drive, managing to arrive at work with a whole 5 minutes to spare. I finished my short shift easily (and I got a compliment on my new hairstyle), then I fought rush-hour traffic to get to CCD and fill out the paperwork to officially join the staff.
Side note on CCD: After four years of purple and orange at Evansville, anyone care to guess what CCD's school colors are? For some reason it seems that my destiny is tied to that bizarre color combination.
Now I'm back home getting my bearings after a breathless 72 hours, but hopefully things will remain sufficiently eventful that I'll have more good stuff to write about in the coming weeks.