Wednesday, November 30, 2011

What am I fit for... what's to become of me

Musical buffs will recognize the former as Eliza Doolittle's plea to Mr. Higgins the night after the Imperial Ball. "I sold flowers, I didn't sell myself. Now that you've made a lady out of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else."

I guess it's fair to say that this speech is something that I can very much relate to.
:sigh: as much as I hate to say it, I don't think my college education really taught me much of anything. Sure, I know how much I hate Physics, Calculus or pretty much any close where there isn't careful supervision so the students can actually absorb what they were learning. I was lucky to know what the heck was on the tests of Physics I... I mean the problems were nothing like the ones we were taught in class and a take-home exam more less became openbook... I mean, who the hell is going to know but you that you looked in the book for answers

Even then, the book wasn't very helpful. The principles were the same, but the application of them made me feel like my brain was being twisted into shapes it was not meant to.

I almost can't believe that I managed to make a good connection to how I'm currently feeling. But that's definitely a good example about how I feel sometimes.

I've got the following problem of life in front of me:
I have a B.S. degree in Marine Science. When it comes to tests and schoolwork, I excel. I feel like that was where I really was in the zone... that was where I was meant to be. Because the learning is always a turn-on when you understand what's what... and not to be vain, that was one of the few times/places where I felt superior to a lot of other people because I got higher grades than most people I know.
The unfortunate thing is that even though a good friend of mine, who is going to graduate in a few weeks as a marine bio student on the 5-year plan (actually, I think he's been going to my school for 6 years. Fall 2006, nope, 5 years, I was right). I might have gotten better grades than him in all our classes in school, but he is going to be a greater success playing the game of life than I ever will.

For every flaw that he has, procrastination and tardyness, he has an attribute that I'd kill to have. The most crucial being the ability to meet a person and know their life's story within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. He has that effect on people that makes them feel at ease, with me in particular, but that started to dissolve as soon as my overcomplicating mind screwed things up... I dreamt about kissing him so I automatically assume that it means that we would end up together some odd year.
One too many dreams later, and except for that one, I never wrote any of the others down, I screwed things up where he called me out on it... told me to back off a bit and stop sharing so much, lol

He's a good spirited person so he didn't take it too personally. I only hope that he and his current girlfriend (who's part of the reason he put his nose to the grindstone and graduated at last) stay together a while and are very happy. If anyone deserves to be treated right in that regard, he does.

Next piece to the puzzle:
I'd been out of work for over a year. My degree got me a position in a microbiology lab. Roughly a year and three months into it, my character flaws caught up with me. Perfection was such a huge thing at that facility that there was no place for someone like me.

My degree was more or less to get me into the front door in the sciences industry. It has done very little to do that. A master's degree, however, would do so, but I'm nowhere near being able to try grad school. Sure, I'm great in the classroom and everything, but it's a lot more complicated than that.
Sure, there's the large thesis I have to write and defend... but what the hell am I going to study? I don't know what my interests are in that field and even if I did, they probably wouldn't be within my grasp. You try being a Marine Biology student who lives in Pennsylvania. Sure, we have a shorehouse, but even then, nobody on the east coast within distance wants anything to do with me because I'm lacking in experience.

My god, my insecurities are mounting right now. I have so many that I can barely count them. The economy has sucked for a while, but all that is available, aside from the science jobs I'm not qualified for, it's narrowed down a few categories, none of which I have a foot to stand on.
Construction, where I'm not physically fit, strong or good with my hands (other than typing and keyboards of course).
Secretary, which I've considered, but then there's the aspect of having GOOD communication skills.
Wait staff, where I'd have to have an A-type personality, be able to interact with people 24/7 (or however long my shift is)

My greatest faults lay in communciation. I am nowhere near close to being excellent in that area. The best way I can communicate what I want to say is by typing, which really does help compensate for my inability to think on my feet.
I'm also not good with projects with multiple steps that carry on for a couple of days... that's what got me into trouble at the lab a couple of times. But things got really complicated and I was asked to excel in way too many areas. Those people must be goddam robots to get through the workload without breaking a sweat.

I'm not a great people person. I don't bend that way at all. Every single position that's out there seems to require that I keep a good attitude, keep upbeat and more or less have a smile plastered on my face. My god, that's so phony. Holden Caulfield is probably the only person that agrees with me on that. My default personality is very cool, chill, not stirring anything up or calling attention to myself. I really do hate the idea of putting on an act for people just so they feel easier around me. I'm not about to change what my personality is just to suit everybody else's needs.
I'd seen this question a couple of times on your run-of-the-mill employment application questionaire: how do you rate yourself on talking to people you don't know... I even put down a 5 and they never called me back.

My god... why do people have to be such social creatures all the time? I get along by myself just fine and if I had to endure my entire life that way, I wouldn't mind it at at all. But seriously, I feel like I need to act for people all the time just so they don't think I'm not normal. I know I'm not normal and in most cases, I take pride in my differences.
People mistake my reserved nature for shyness so much that it "kills me" (another Caulfield-ism)... the way I am with people, I listen first and add my own 2 cents to the conversation later on. I don't like to interrupt a conversation in progress, a) because I'd gotten slighted in my family for speaking out of turn, and b) I'd hate to stop a person who was on a roll.
When I speak something that needs to be communicated, I keep talking until I run out of air so nobody else can get a word on... then I let them speak, and so on. When I'm really flustered about something, I shut down, blocking off all communication until I sort things out in my head. I was given criticism in what would be a last-chance meeting... all the main people at the lab telling me where I need to work on things, I said that I was starting to get things sorted out and the HR guy didn't quite believe me. They probably thought I didn't have any fight in me. I'd gone through this a million times in my head and other places. If I really got passionate about this or that, I wouldn't be able to control my emotions. Would they prefer I made a scene, crying my eyes out being unable to communciate anything, or that I be passive about it and swear to do better

Honest to god, I tried... but they asked me to take on way more than I could handle one fateful/fatal Saturday...

Teamwork is where I'm lacking a lot. I don't let people in on my mistakes until it's too late or way after the fact... or I just plain get caught. I guess my friend and I both have issue for procrastination, just in different areas. The worst of it was that I was told I wasn't a team player cuz whenever I finished my workload, I took on other tasks before helping anyone out.
And I did work on that a bit. I lent my assistance, but seriously, in most cases, they'd do a better job without me than with me hindering them with my speed, which had gotten better over the years. But really, c'mon... what was wrong with taking care of the other tasks because ultimately they were one less thing to do at the end of the day, what's the big deal about that

I'm not good with people, I'm not good with telephones. I'm pretty much raised on typing and email. I have trouble communicating my feelings to people or just about anything in general. That's why I took up typing so much. So I wouldn't have to annoy people with whatever it was I was talking about.
And really, I don't have much of anything to say in the first place. I don't need to add anything to a conversation I know nothing about.

Writing has been my saviour for the past year and a half... whenever I'm done and out about something, I write about it. Sometimes in periods of crisis, I write down my feelings on my blogs and working through them in my typing helps me feel better. I think I would have gone insane if not otherwise.

Yet sometimes I think that I'm so abnormal that I do need to change... but I've never been comfortable with change.
A couple of my friends have pushed me in a direction I'm not entirely cool with. Putting myself out there is a terrifying notion because I don't know what I have within me to instill in other people. Whatever I do have is either pop culture-related, which is something my MARS buddy isn't really knowledgeable on... I believe there are tons of people just like him in that respect... or they're my stories... where I can't really communicate a lot of the time what it's about. I'd had to be longwinded about something almost as much as I hate the idea that nobody will get me.
Everything that's left is the really difficult stuff... the political stuff... I'm just getting used to the idea of communicating my thoughts on gay rights. Ever since hearing about that "pray the gay away" program that Michelle Bachmann's husband stands behind and one particular case where the person considered suicide because the problem didn't work... I'd become very passionate in my own way about the LGBT crowd having as much right to the pursuit of happiness as any of us do.

I'm not very argumentative and sometimes I really wish I were... but when it comes to politics, religion or, hell, even football, I could not win an argument to save my life. There's no way in hell I'd be persuasive enough in my argument where the person would at least accept my position as a possibility. I don't ask them to change their mind because its rare I can manage that much... I just ask that they acknowledge I feel differently about them on a certain subject.

Writing is all that I'm really good at, all that really want to do, but it's a difficult business to break into from every possible angle. Sure, it'd be easier if I wasn't writing fiction. Non-fiction people get published all the time, but what would I have to write about aside from maybe more pop culture or about my college years.

I just feel that there aren't enough places in the world for people like me to make a life for themselves. People who aren't comfortable with one-on-one interactions with other people. People that aren't particularly gifted mechanically or with their hands (aside from the typing, again).
I have a brilliant mind, sure, but that's all I can really contribute to society. It has to be through my typing, the only way I know how to communicate much of anything.

Christmas is coming within 26 days and while I'm thinking that maybe this year I'll skip watching "A Christmas Story"... because seriously, it feels like I had just been to watch it a couple months ago... and it's been 365-25 days since the last time... for the past 6-7 years, I'd watched it every Christmas eve so I don't have to worry about missing it during Christmas day while with family...
...I'm also thinking about what I truly want for Christmas this year.  And I'm talking about the abstract here... if there was one thing I wanted from the magical spirit of Christmas, it would be... whoa, this is a tough one

Unconditional confidence in who I am and what I'm capable of.
I would like for people to really know me, that the person who manages to communicate so well through typed word is the same person they see every day... I'd like for people to know me as a writer and to refer to me as such instead of just a college graduate... so far, that degree has done nothing for me but keep me from being considered for a lot of basic positions, which I believe are the only things I think I'm capable of doing. The only door it got me through, that was all that it was for. My inexperience with personal interaction caught up with me.

I just hate the idea of people telling me I have to do this or that in order to achieve much of anything. How many people have written 6-7, maybe 10 stories from start to finish... very few people I know have been able to do anything like that. I'd like those skills to not go to waste and even better that they help me make money.
When it comes to putting myself out there, I'm not like a lot of other people. I have difficulty taking direction when it sounds like an order. I feel like I need a safety net, people not looking at me and thinking that I'm out of my mind because I think differently than most. Instead, I'd like to be told... how can you put a twist on "getting out there, out of your shell" into something that sounds positive...

God, that makes me sound so fragile and skin deep, I believe I am very fragile when it comes to situations I'm new to.

Truth of the matter, I know that deep down I have what they call the strength from within... It worms its way into my stories all the time, but if there were a way to bring that to the table in real life situations... that would be something I'd love to be able to succeed in accomplishing

and for once, I start writing an entry on this blog and manage to carry it all the way through so I can click "publish post"... at least that's something I've accomplished

Right now, I know of one thing that I've become accomplished at doing... when it comes to my favorite music, sometimes favorite albums, I get visual and even cinematic at points. So far I'd begun to piece together a conceptual video for Taylor Swift's "Enchanted," a few storyline ideas to put together somewhat of a musical out of Maroon 5's music over three albums (to be titled "Songs about Jane"), and I'd just about come to the end to a sequel I wrote to my Prince-inspired story... which was initally started from a trip into fantasyland after hearing one song from his Planet Earth album

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