Welcome to the Jungle.
Well, once again I don't really know how to start this thing. I don't wanna come across whiny or needy here. But I also don't want to try and put an overly positive spin on things, as I am wont to do. I'd like to just give a fair and truthful assessment of where my life is at the moment. Here goes...
So I decided to leave my program here at Purdue, as most of you know, even though at the time I had very little in the way of back-up plans. The reasons I decided to leave are complicated, and I'm still not entirely sure of them myself (future post, I am sure). I have an immense amount of doubt and regret and shame about my quitting from time to time, yet whenever I hear my cohort talking about their classes and such this semester, or whenever we have one of our seemingly endless discussions about the crappy academic job market or the winnowing-out process that is graduate school, I am more and more certain that I made the right choice in leaving when I did, regardless of the reasons. If I were still in school right now, I would be Absolutely Miserable.
Having said that, being a graduate school dropout with no job, no career path, few other prospects, and being flat broke and alone here in East Jesus, Indiana, doesn't exactly fill me with hopefulness and glee, either. But just to reinforce the point (mostly for my own benefit), I DID make the right choice at the time I made it.
Sort of like I still think I made the right choice in initially coming here, and look how well that's turned out for me...
But I digress. Over the holidays, I learned that when you leave a program in the middle of the school year, your fellowship gets turned off immediately. As in, the final payout I expected at the end of December, which I was counting on to cover my bills for one more month while I found full-time work, never came. I ended up having to borrow money that my folks cannot afford to cover my basic living expenses for January, but even that was not enough to cover all of my bills, so I am currently in arrears all over the place and have no fucking clue what to do about it.
Oh, and why did I come back to Indiana after the holidays in the first place? Well, I also learned (and believe me, this is NOWHERE on the lease, I checked) that my apartment complex does not break leases. Period. So my options were to find someone to take over the lease completely (next to impossible in the middle of the school year) or pay the full amount still due, to the tune of $3200, not to mention new packing and moving costs. So back I came.
As soon as I got back, I learned that I had been replaced over the holidays at one of the two part-time jobs I had found last semester, the one at the coffeehouse, which I had, needless to say, once again been counting on. My other job, working as a tutor and a notetaker at the local community college, wanted me back, but could only offer me 20 hours a week at the most, and so far I have yet to even make 15 hours per week. At $13 an hour, this is obviously not meeting my needs. And so I have fallen even further into debt.
My cousin has forced me to accept a loan from her that I have no clue as to when I'll be able to pay back, which makes me feel both enormously grateful and incredibly shitty at the same time, so I can pay my rent for one more month here in Podunk. But at this point, every day means another dozen or more decisions about which bills I can pay and which I cannot, which items are an absolute necessity and which I can live without (i.e., my birth control pill, an item that maintains my sanity, was on the chopping block for awhile there but I finally ponied up the last few bucks available on my credit card to get it. But the heat's been cranked way down in my flat, often set at 60 when I know that I'll be gone all day). I am slowly drowning in the debt.
By the way, appropos of nothing, but Purdue has STILL not reimbursed me the money from my recruitment weekend last FEBRUARY. Just sayin'.
The job hunt is more painful than I had imagined it would be. I will need to make at LEAST $12 an hour just to make ends meet, but allow me to tell you what the job market in a teeny little town in the middle of an economic backslide is like: nonexistent. You know how in the Times and the Tribune, the Sunday paper contains an entire newpaper section of job listings? Here the space advertising farm equipment is equal to that for the employment section -- which is to say, about a page and a half. And unless I am an RN or am interested in delivering the local paper in ice and snow, the available jobs shrink to even half of that. Which leaves me, basically, with minimum wage joe jobs and factory work. Yet, just for added fun, I don't even really qualify to push buttons at the Subaru plant or the Caterpillar factory down the street. I know, I checked. That's how desperate I've become.
But there is some hope. I have finally finished updating my resume (this was harder than it might seem as it has been about four years since I have done so and quite frankly I am out of practice -- oh for the glory of a CV which has no standard formatting or length restrictions!), and Purdue has just listed a few clerical type jobs that I think I might qualify for although god knows what they pay and I may end up having to moonlight at the 7-11 or something if it's not the amount I need...
Okay, so this actually does sound a little bit whiny. Sorry about that. It's just that I've been fighting the urge to complain for so long that I'm finding it incredibly cathartic to get this all off my chest at long last (even though at heart I'm still aware that there are plenty of people out there who've got it a whole lot worse than me).
So my plan for now is to stick it out, hopefully find a decent job really soon, and juggle bills until my lease ends in May. Then I will pack up my crap and store it while I go out to work in L.A. again, then drive it all back to Florida in August, whereupon I will either enter the master's in journalism program at USF that I was originally supposed to start last year (more about that situation later), or perhaps find some other way to bide my time until I figure out just what the fuck a bachelor's degree in social sciences means in terms of an actual career. Not much, I'm imagining (sheesh, pessimistic much?).
In the meantime, I'm really just trying to keep things together here. I'm pretty lonely, although I do still socialize with my former classmates a bit (am hosting a Super Bowl party here this weekend), and I'm battling with hopelessness and depression on pretty much a daily basis right now, so that even completing simple tasks like laundry and such can be pretty overwhelming at times. Plus, I've got the single most wicked case of insomnia I have ever had, which is not exactly helping matters.
Oh, and I turn 30 next Wednesday.
But I have to say that I am surprising myself with my ability to still find happiness and fun and peace from time to time in the middle of all this existential crisis. Comes from maintaining low expectations, I guess, but whatever it is I am still pushing forward, fairly confident that things will improve over time. I mean, frankly, they can't really get much worse (ooh! Shouldn't say that! Of course they can get worse!). But we'll see...
So that's the gist of it for now. I'll hopefully be able to explain some of the stuff I've talked about here in more detail in some future posts, but I just wanted to give youse guys an overall impression of what I've been up to lately, in case you were curious. :) I feel pretty drained right now, which I guess is a sign that I was pretty thorough here (well, that and the sheer length of the post should be a clue). So I guess it is time for me to stop writing about my crappy life and go back to living it for a time, no?
Peace out, Girl Scouts.
So I decided to leave my program here at Purdue, as most of you know, even though at the time I had very little in the way of back-up plans. The reasons I decided to leave are complicated, and I'm still not entirely sure of them myself (future post, I am sure). I have an immense amount of doubt and regret and shame about my quitting from time to time, yet whenever I hear my cohort talking about their classes and such this semester, or whenever we have one of our seemingly endless discussions about the crappy academic job market or the winnowing-out process that is graduate school, I am more and more certain that I made the right choice in leaving when I did, regardless of the reasons. If I were still in school right now, I would be Absolutely Miserable.
Having said that, being a graduate school dropout with no job, no career path, few other prospects, and being flat broke and alone here in East Jesus, Indiana, doesn't exactly fill me with hopefulness and glee, either. But just to reinforce the point (mostly for my own benefit), I DID make the right choice at the time I made it.
Sort of like I still think I made the right choice in initially coming here, and look how well that's turned out for me...
But I digress. Over the holidays, I learned that when you leave a program in the middle of the school year, your fellowship gets turned off immediately. As in, the final payout I expected at the end of December, which I was counting on to cover my bills for one more month while I found full-time work, never came. I ended up having to borrow money that my folks cannot afford to cover my basic living expenses for January, but even that was not enough to cover all of my bills, so I am currently in arrears all over the place and have no fucking clue what to do about it.
Oh, and why did I come back to Indiana after the holidays in the first place? Well, I also learned (and believe me, this is NOWHERE on the lease, I checked) that my apartment complex does not break leases. Period. So my options were to find someone to take over the lease completely (next to impossible in the middle of the school year) or pay the full amount still due, to the tune of $3200, not to mention new packing and moving costs. So back I came.
As soon as I got back, I learned that I had been replaced over the holidays at one of the two part-time jobs I had found last semester, the one at the coffeehouse, which I had, needless to say, once again been counting on. My other job, working as a tutor and a notetaker at the local community college, wanted me back, but could only offer me 20 hours a week at the most, and so far I have yet to even make 15 hours per week. At $13 an hour, this is obviously not meeting my needs. And so I have fallen even further into debt.
My cousin has forced me to accept a loan from her that I have no clue as to when I'll be able to pay back, which makes me feel both enormously grateful and incredibly shitty at the same time, so I can pay my rent for one more month here in Podunk. But at this point, every day means another dozen or more decisions about which bills I can pay and which I cannot, which items are an absolute necessity and which I can live without (i.e., my birth control pill, an item that maintains my sanity, was on the chopping block for awhile there but I finally ponied up the last few bucks available on my credit card to get it. But the heat's been cranked way down in my flat, often set at 60 when I know that I'll be gone all day). I am slowly drowning in the debt.
By the way, appropos of nothing, but Purdue has STILL not reimbursed me the money from my recruitment weekend last FEBRUARY. Just sayin'.
The job hunt is more painful than I had imagined it would be. I will need to make at LEAST $12 an hour just to make ends meet, but allow me to tell you what the job market in a teeny little town in the middle of an economic backslide is like: nonexistent. You know how in the Times and the Tribune, the Sunday paper contains an entire newpaper section of job listings? Here the space advertising farm equipment is equal to that for the employment section -- which is to say, about a page and a half. And unless I am an RN or am interested in delivering the local paper in ice and snow, the available jobs shrink to even half of that. Which leaves me, basically, with minimum wage joe jobs and factory work. Yet, just for added fun, I don't even really qualify to push buttons at the Subaru plant or the Caterpillar factory down the street. I know, I checked. That's how desperate I've become.
But there is some hope. I have finally finished updating my resume (this was harder than it might seem as it has been about four years since I have done so and quite frankly I am out of practice -- oh for the glory of a CV which has no standard formatting or length restrictions!), and Purdue has just listed a few clerical type jobs that I think I might qualify for although god knows what they pay and I may end up having to moonlight at the 7-11 or something if it's not the amount I need...
Okay, so this actually does sound a little bit whiny. Sorry about that. It's just that I've been fighting the urge to complain for so long that I'm finding it incredibly cathartic to get this all off my chest at long last (even though at heart I'm still aware that there are plenty of people out there who've got it a whole lot worse than me).
So my plan for now is to stick it out, hopefully find a decent job really soon, and juggle bills until my lease ends in May. Then I will pack up my crap and store it while I go out to work in L.A. again, then drive it all back to Florida in August, whereupon I will either enter the master's in journalism program at USF that I was originally supposed to start last year (more about that situation later), or perhaps find some other way to bide my time until I figure out just what the fuck a bachelor's degree in social sciences means in terms of an actual career. Not much, I'm imagining (sheesh, pessimistic much?).
In the meantime, I'm really just trying to keep things together here. I'm pretty lonely, although I do still socialize with my former classmates a bit (am hosting a Super Bowl party here this weekend), and I'm battling with hopelessness and depression on pretty much a daily basis right now, so that even completing simple tasks like laundry and such can be pretty overwhelming at times. Plus, I've got the single most wicked case of insomnia I have ever had, which is not exactly helping matters.
Oh, and I turn 30 next Wednesday.
But I have to say that I am surprising myself with my ability to still find happiness and fun and peace from time to time in the middle of all this existential crisis. Comes from maintaining low expectations, I guess, but whatever it is I am still pushing forward, fairly confident that things will improve over time. I mean, frankly, they can't really get much worse (ooh! Shouldn't say that! Of course they can get worse!). But we'll see...
So that's the gist of it for now. I'll hopefully be able to explain some of the stuff I've talked about here in more detail in some future posts, but I just wanted to give youse guys an overall impression of what I've been up to lately, in case you were curious. :) I feel pretty drained right now, which I guess is a sign that I was pretty thorough here (well, that and the sheer length of the post should be a clue). So I guess it is time for me to stop writing about my crappy life and go back to living it for a time, no?
Peace out, Girl Scouts.