Nearing the End... Let's Hope There Are No Surprises

Today was the beginning of the end: this is my last week student teaching. I can say with no doubts that I will only be happy to be rid of this painful experience. I certainly won't miss the kids any, nor will I miss the incompetence of the administration of the school I'm currently at.
I can't help but be suspicious, though, because I still have class-related events until just before Christmas. I still have a final and 2 comprehensive exams, about which I have given little to no thought. I also have a massive paper that will have to be fixed before next Wednesday. There are a million things that could go wrong (I suspect a blizzard on the day of my final/comp exams, which are being taken on the very last day of the semester when all grades need to be in), and I'm terrified of what fate has in the works for me.
Sometimes I think I ruminate on the negatives in the near future so that I don't panic about the future that lies beyond - having to find a real job for at least the next 6 months so I can pay for my wedding and move out. I'm currently clueless about how I should go about applying for subbing work - Deity knows that there are no teaching jobs to be had in January. The best I could hope for is a leave replacement, particularly with my current cooperating teacher, but she won't be leaving for the birth of her twins until April. I have a feeling I'll have to call a lot of school districts to see if they're hiring for subs, and even if I get on one or two sub lists, who knows if I'll ever be called? I'm tempted to just find work in a daycare somewhere for the next 6 months, but I feel like it would be damning to not search for work in what I'm certified for.
Alas, I've upset myself just thinking about life beyond this week. I'm going to go back to living in the "now;" may be I'll pick out my outfit for tomorrow.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

You guessed it kids - CW Post has fucked me over again, one last (Deity willing) time before graduation. Extremely abbreviated story: no where and at no time was I informed by either the Education or History departments that I needed to take comprehensive exams for two my history courses in order to graduate, in addition to my student teaching experiences and my professional portfolio. My professor, who is the graduate advisor in the history department, has fortunately agreed with me that the circumstances are unfair, and is allowing me to take the comps later than everyone else so that I can graduate on time.
This, in the scheme of things, is not a big deal. It's only two hour-long essays, I'm sure I'll pass without much trouble. Inconvenient? Hell yeah. But not damning. The absurdity of the situation is: this is the second extremely important requirement that the administration at Post has failed to inform me about in the past year. My frustration level is enough that I really do want to find out where my advisor, the former graduate advisor in the History Department, and every Dean in the School of Education live so that I may set their cars on fire and inconvenience and psychologically hurt them as much as they have inconvenienced and psychologically hurt me.
And despite my inner turmoil at this disturbing news, I can admit that when I got that dreadful email from my professor (thank Deity for her diligence), I really wasn't surprised. It seems that Murphy's Law has enacted it's cruel reality on me yet again. This just further provokes my suspicion that there is no such thing as fate or a unifying Force in the universe. So thanks CW Post, for destroying whatever residual faith I may have had left after these 2.5 terrible years at your school. Hope your institution collapses in upon it's own incompetence and I never have to pay back my student loans. Fuck you very much.

What If It Doesn't, In Fact, Get Better?

Since the recent suicides of bullied gay teens, I've been pleasantly surprised by the positive messages sent out there by celebrities and charities. One of the campaigns, however, unsettles me: I refer, of course, to the "It Gets Better" campaign. Although I feel the premise is basically true (that life after high school is amazingly better because you have freedom of movement/expression and you don't have to put up with as much homophobic harassment), I'm not sure that anyone can actually deliver on that promise. Will life get better? Obviously it didn't for that poor boy who was victimized by his roommate at Rutgers. Or for the hundreds of adult gays who die in hate crimes each year.
But I digress. The point of this post is: when we tell ourselves that a certain period of our lives is going to be brutal, but then things will "get better," isn't it just a lie we tell to convince ourselves not to give up and die? Because my life is fairly terrible at the moment (excluding the fact that all my basic human needs are being met), and everyone keeps saying "a few more months/years, and it will 'get better,'" and I feel like that couldn't possibly be true. Yes, I'm at a low "bad" point in my life, and in accordance with life-cycles, things will become less stressful and depressing and I'll have a short run of happiness. But the mountain range past that clearing is going to be even more terrifying and miserable than the one I just climbed through, is it not? After student teaching, I'll be married and out on my own, which means I have to start paying back the exorbitant amount of money I owe in student loans. Fate willing, I will have babies and will have to finance everything they do until they themselves are moved out and married. Having a career and a spouse and children are things I thought would signify my life "being better," but upon further examination it appears they will only complicate and add stress to an already unhappy situation.
Does it actually "get better?" Or does life just morph from one shitty situation to a different shitty situation, and the lesser of the evils becomes labeled as the "better" time?

Do Mirrors Lie?

Questions of perception have always plagued me. It always disturbed me that someone as evil as the current pope, for instance, could actually believe that he is a benevolent force in the world, even though we he was a "reluctant" member of Hitler Youth and he regularly preaches hatred towards homosexuals. Or that people with extensive cosmetic surgery could think that their plastic lips and frozen foreheads could possibly be attractive and youthful looking.
The perception of one's physical self has been a particularly problematic concept in my life. Recently, I've been increasingly more at ease with what I've been seeing in the mirror, because I'm slowly losing a bit of weight and have been fitting into clothes better. So the typical female disgust with my appearance hasn't been at the forefront of my mind, thankfully.
Until this morning, however. Unfortunately, the pictures taken at a family party yesterday reveal otherwise. Needless to say, I was mortified by how fleshy and over-weight I looked. Which brings me to the point of this post: how could what I see in the mirror differ so vastly from what I look like in reality? Granted there are the postmodern arguments that a photograph is not actually reflective of the truth, but I am of the school of thought that believes if a picture isn't photoshopped, it is an accurate visual representation of that millisecond of time. As a rational, pragmatic person, if terrifies me that what I think is physically acceptable (my outfit, or hair) when I see it in the mirror may not actually look nice to any other observer. And I'm not talking about fashion, I mean appearance, in general. And short of developing some sort of giant instant-Polaroid picture system, I don't know what to do to remedy this discrepancy between my mirror self and my physical self. This isn't even a unique existential conundrum; I cried about this many a time when I was fifty pounds lighter than I am now. Is there a way to align the two perceptions?
I know this discussion makes me seem terribly superficial, but it would be a lie to say that our physical selves do not play a huge part in shaping our identities. I can only hope that the rest of society isn't as critical of my appearance as I am.

This Is Either Proof That There Is No God, Or That There Is, And It HATES Me

Aside from a few really dark moments in my short life, this is the lowest I've felt both physically and emotionally in at least a decade. To be brief, I had a rather routine bladder infection for which I went to the doctor, got antibiotics, and proceeded as usual. In the past, after 3 days of meds and that stuff that makes you pee neon orange, I felt immensely better. This time it was the opposite: day 4, and I'm in an intense amount of pain near my kidneys and lower abdomen. To make matters worse, it is now Saturday, my doctor's office is closed, the urgent medical place in the next town is closed, and the other emergency care place doesn't open til 9am. Making matters mentally distressing, I was supposed to leave for Vermont with my friends this morning to visit a dear friend, whom I've missed very much; my parents are still in the fucking Caribbean, by grandparents have work/commitments, my only other local friend is also away, and my fiance was at work. The word "distraught" is not a severe enough description of how I felt.
I get in at this place, and thankfully I'm in and out fast, but only to find out that my antibiotics are working as they should be and "you really shouldn't be in as much pain as you are" was the response I got out of the doctor. Her only suggestion was that my intestinal area may also be inflamed due to my agitated bladder coupled with regular PMS symptoms. Oh, and a rather appreciated script for Vicodin.
So here I am, thoroughly spaced out from a mere half of a Vicodin, depressed, alone, and unable to operate heavy machinery. It's times like these when my atheistic inclinations seem justified. Would a benevolent god punish a decent person in such a fashion? Probably not. An Old Testament god would, undoubtedly: just look at what happened to poor Job. Buddha would say my suffering is normal as it is a symptom of human existence, which seems most believable. So: either I have a huge amount of negative karma, the god(s) have it out for me, or I'm currently just being clusterfucked by coincidence and bad health.
Either way, I'm trapped away from my friends, and I can only hope that something good will happen to me soon.

Living in a Material World, and I am a Material Girl.... To My Dismay

So today, my karma righted itself so swiftly that I hydroplaned into a phone pole and dented the front right panel of my perfect, beautiful new car. First: both myself and the rest of my car are fine: it runs great and the tires are sturdy (my passenger seat is still a bit discolored because the coffee and tea I was transporting spilled all over anywhere and despite the Oxyclean treatments it's still kinda stained). 
I think the thing I found most disturbing about the experience was my thought process while my car decided to not turn when the wheel did. Not: "Oh my god I'm gonna die!" or even "AAAAAAAHHHH!"
It was "FUCK MY LIFE MY CAR IS GONNA GET FUCKED UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" After I righted the car and got into the school parking lot, and I checked the damage and saw that the light was ok and there was only superficial stuff amiss, I still wanted to lay on the floor and burst into tears, not because I had a really close scare, but because my pristine, lovely new car was scarred.
Now, it's not like I'm the only person who would be upset about something messing up their new car. But it really fucking irks me that I'm still so bent out of shape about it (yeah, I made a terrible pun: deal with it)! Why can't I just be happy that the damage wasn't worse, or that I didn't hit a pedestrian? I'll admit, mostly I was stressed out that my father was going to go apeshit when he found out. Thankfully, no one has told him about it yet because he's leaving for vacation tomorrow, and only a fool would spoil Vacation Bob's good mood. But when he gets back and goes to clean the cars as per his weekend ritual, he's going to freak out. 
But it's more than just my father's obsession with car appearances, I feel like it's a societal standard to go nuts if something happens to one of our gadgets. Yeah, an ipod or a Blackberry or a laptop are expensive  pieces of equipment, and it sucks major if they start to dysfunction. But.... it's just a thing! Will it shorten my life because my phone is on the fritz? Does the giant scratch on the back of the ipod make it any less effective? NO! Why does it bother us so much? Is it that we're all obsessed with perfection? It can't be that, because if this happened to me in my old car, I wouldn't have given a shit because it was old and beat up to begin with. This preoccupation with "newness" translates across all sorts of barriers. Take for instance our apathy and general neglect of the elderly in this country, and our obsession with babies and young children. When old people die in a fire, we think "oh, that's a shame, but they lived a full life and were probably going to kick it soon anyway." When babies die in a fire, the media goes into a frenzy and there are candlelit vigils and memorial services. Really, both instances are tragic and unfair, but we care far less about the old folks than we do about the babies.
What is it about "newness" that drives our society so crazy? Have we all become so capitalist-minded that we can't be reasonable about the quality of our private possessions? Because I'd like to continue believing that Marx and Engles were wrong about human history being completely driven by economic motivations. If all we care about is getting the most bang for our buck, do we really have time left over to appreciate the fact that 95% of everything surrounding us is a luxury? I don't think so. The carpet under our feet, the stylish roofing tiles over our heads, the hamburgers on our plates, the cell phones in our pockets - none of them are necessary to sustain human life. Do they make societal living easier? They sure as shit do. But we put entirely too much emphasis on these things, and there really is no turning back from indoor toilets and the internet and text messaging. 
I guess what I'm saying is: Madonna was right: we are living in a material world. And we're all material boys and girls, even though it pains me philosophically to admit it. I wish there was a way to set myself outside of the cycle, but unless I want to become a nomadic hunter gatherer in a nature preserve somewhere, I don't really have a choice. 

...And The Shoe Hath Dropeth

Those dark clouds promptly rolled in this afternoon, after being subjected to the most pessimistic and despicable school-mandated information session I've ever attended in my life. My intense hatred for gender-based double standards and the superficiality of American culture has increased a billion fold, and the fact that, apparently, my very career rests on whether or not my nail polish is chipped has squashed any fanciful notion I may have entertained about getting a teaching job in New York State within the next five years or so.
Picture a panel of persons in your chosen field who have the dubious job of hiring new employees. Now, imagine the responses they might rattle off when posed the question "What are some basic do's and don'ts to be aware of in the interviewing process?" Perhaps "be positive and provide well-thought out responses" came to mind, or "don't bad mouth former employers" or "dress appropriately." That's what I expected too. What we got was a 45-minute lecture on all of the horrible crimes of fashion one could commit at their interview. No chunky jewelry, no outlandish shoes, if your hair is long it must be up and neat, suits must be crisp and well tailored, no colored suits unless it's the summer, even if it's 1738 degrees out you must wear pantyhose....45 FUCKING MINUTES ABOUT HOW "LOOKING PROFESSIONAL" WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF YOUR INTERVIEW!
Sure, we finally got around to the quality of the responses, resume etiquette, and the application process. And that stuff is important, but only if you pass the initial appearance test first. For christ's sake, one Assistant Superintendent told us when she was an intern, she was on a hiring panel, and the reason why they didn't hire a well dressed, articulate, extremely knowledgeable woman was......wait for it....... because she was wearing green nail polish during the interview. Not because her tits were popping out of her top, or because she had "love/hate" tattooed across her knuckles, or because GOD FORBID she was wearing open toed shoes.... because she had the audacity to wear green nail polish!
Have I gone crazy? Am I living in 1937? I thought it was the cultural norm to look past individual differences and evaluate people based on their merits when hiring them for an academic position? Apparently the teaching profession might as well be high fashion modeling because if I can be eliminated from a hiring pool simply because I don't meet a certain standard of "professionalism," I might as well be a fucking piece of meat. Yes, I agree you should be dressed very sharply and seriously for a job interview, and you should look as clean and presentable as possible. But to disregard my accomplishments and qualifications because my skirt was slightly wrinkled is absolutely ridiculous, and in direct contrast to the "meritocracy" of America. I'm not fooling myself either; I realize that first impressions are important and everyone is unfairly judged by their appearance on a daily basis, but as a culture we generally recognize that this is problematic, and yet we have done nothing to change it.
It also pisses me off that 90% of the advice was directed towards women. Really all a guy has to do is press his conservatively colored suit and comb his hair and he's set; a woman has to scrutinize every square inch of her body for imperfections and possible fashion faux pas.
An errant hair could fuck up my employment opportunities in this absurd, cut throat recession. One panelist even condescended to be optimistic enough to say "Things are bad now, but eventually they just have to pick up. Don't get discouraged!" Fuck you, bitch. You just said I have to worry that my shoes may be the determining factor in whether or not you hire me. But I shouldn't get discouraged.
Why isn't there a nation where people can enter and work based entirely upon their qualifications and willingness to perform? Because that sure as shit isn't the case here.

Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop

So, thus far, my "semester from Hell" has been rather.... pleasant. My cooperating teacher is a good guy, the lessons I've taught haven't failed miserably, I'm on par where I should be in my history class, I have some free time to myself, and I haven't gotten anything scary in the mail lately.
I can't help but wonder when my life will start spiraling into a dark clusterfuck of misery because it's just been too easy, don't you think? In my experience, for everything good that happens to me, something of equal value of shitiness will occur, typically in rapid succession. Like Newton's 3rd Law of Motion....sort of.
I want to be able to just enjoy this time while it lasts, but my paranoia is so acute that I can't even relax for more than ten minutes before I half expect my car to implode, or my university to decide that some aspect of my degree wasn't completed and I won't be able to graduate this winter. 
Partly my brain says that a healthy amount of paranoia is good because if I expect lame things to happen to me, then they won't happen. Of course that's completely irrational, but my acknowledgement of this fact doesn't change my superstition. The problem with being hyper rational all the time is that reason and pragmatism don't explain everything. Actually, they do, with the whole "existence is all just a random series of events" business, but the idea that I have no control over what happens to me isn't entirely true either. 
Bother, now I'm just off topic. The point is, I'm afraid to let go of my fear because every time I do, it seems that kharma promptly shows up to kick me in the ass. I want to just live life without the dark cloud looming over me! Why does reality have to be a dark cloud so often? Why couldn't it be a sunny sky?

I Hate Repeating Myself.... But I Feel Bad About It

This is a personality flaw that is hugely disadvantageous, but I'm the kind of person who, when something interesting happens to them, despises telling their story over and over and over again.
I bring this up because I became hyper aware of my annoyance at everyone asking me how my first few days of student teaching went. Here's an example:
Person: "How was your first day of student teaching!?!?!?!"
Me: "It went well, I enjoyed it."
Person: "What did you teach?"
Me: *sigh* "Nothing much, it was the first day, we won't teach anything serious until Monday."
Person: "Then what did you do?"
Me: (exasperated) "Mostly sat around and helped with attendance."
Person: "Well that sounds boring."
Me: =/ "Um, kind of?"

It's bad enough I didn't have much to contribute because I was only there two days and we didn't do much but get used to the classroom and the schedule. But then came the stupid questions and statements that only served to irk me. And I felt like an asshole getting angry at these people, because they were genuinely excited and happy for me and were only trying to be pleasant. I really wish I had more patience.....

A Calm Between Storms?

So I'm currently enjoying a moment during which I'm not freaking out about anything in particular. I almost forgot what it was like to not have a knot in my stomach! It's pretty nice!
My first 2 days of student teaching went well. But to be fair, all I did was sit around and hand out the bathroom pass. My cooperating teacher is a pretty nice guy. He reminds me of an ex, but not in a bad way. He actually seems to have his shit together. Let's hope it's not downhill from here.
The only downside to this whole interim is that my nose has been running like a faucet since yesterday and it won't stop no matter how much Dayquil I ingest. 
It's funny how you have so much less to say when you're content compared to when you're depressed or pissed off or in crisis....

This Is (NOT) The Perfect Time To Panic!

So I start student teaching the day after tomorrow, and I'm trying desperately to stave off a massive panic attack. In the rational part of my brain, I know that I really don't have much to be stressed out about: it's only the first day, so I won't be expected to do much. I'll just be meeting everyone for the first time, staff and students. In the manic part of my brain, which tends to cannibalize the rational part, I'm hearing "OMFG, you have to go to bed early tomorrow night, and get up at 6:30am, and make sure your hair and outfit and make up is super professional, and leave so that you can get to school in plenty of time (which reminds me, I need to Google the exact location to determine the best route), and what/when are you gonna eat?, and then you have to leave in time to make your advisor meeting at Post at 4:15....."
I wish my rational sector could effectively subdue the manic sector. No matter what I tell myself, or what other people tell me, I can't fully relax. I think it's the silly things that worry me the most. Like, I'm going to be in heels all day (not tall ones, but they're elevated) and I'm afraid my feet will fall apart. And I'm afraid that because I won't get to eat until 3 or so, my tummy is going to twist in knots and I'm going to be in pain all morning.
I'm also worried that I'll be watching the clock and time will be moving in slow motion like when I was in middle school. It should move pretty fast, but again, any and every irrational fear is coming at me like darts at a board.
Le sigh. I wish I could just wake up in the morning and do things without having a meltdown like everyone else does.

Romantic Movie Rant

I just finished watching 500 Days of Summer, which, for what it was, is a pretty decent movie starring the cutie Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. What really pisses me off is the complete and utter role reversal of this movie and all romantic-type movies where the guy is the poor hapless victim and the girl is the villainess bitch.
In the movie, the main character, Tom, falls madly in love with this girl (Summer) from work who flat out tells him she doesn't believe in love, she doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend, yada yada yada non-commitment bullshit. They have a pretty good run for a few months and then she breaks up with him. He's destroyed. They keep bumping into each other, he thinks there's hope, and then he finds out she's getting married. Long story short, he gets over her and moves on.
In my life experience, as limited as it is, women are rarely the commitmentphobes in any relationship. Do female commitmentphobes exist? Undoubtedly they do. But according to Hollywood, it's the guy who is the hopeless romantic, and the girl who is an evil succubus, 99% of the time. From personal experience, and from all sob stories I've listened to over the years about girls getting mistreated by dirtbags who refuse to put a label on their relationship, this is NOT the case.
The only possible explanation I can come up with is the fact that many screenwriters are men, and dorky, insecure ones at that. It's plausible that they've had their hearts broken before, and their stuff is semi-autobiographical. Fine. But it creates a completely unbalanced portrait of real life when there are 100 movies out in a year with this same exact plot, and 90 of them have male protagonists. Not only does it make it seem like guys in their late teens and 20's are extremely interested in serious, marriage oriented relationships, but also that they're very thoughtful, considerate, and in touch with their feelings. Again, in my experience, this is not the case. It's so super rare to find a young guy who isn't terrified of commitment and marriage. I'm still amazed I actually found and am marrying one myself; I worry that I'll suddenly wake up one morning and Ethan will have been a friggin' figment of my imagination.
I realize in my frustration I'm being completely unfair and biased and all things lame. One can't generalize about the frequency at which men are dumped by cold women or vice versa. I just wish that pop culture didn't perpetuate this gendered imbalance at such an alarming rate. It seems like the only movies that reflect the female point of view are solely produced by Drew Barrymore. And while Drew is great, she's one woman in a male dominated industry. I just want to be able to identify with a female protagonist dammit! One who isn't a total dork who wants to go out with the football star (SO OVERDONE), one who isn't a girl who has everything and then finds out her man is cheating on her only to travel abroad in her despair and find an even hotter European man, one who isn't a bitch who sees the error of her ways and falls for the nerdy guy. I want just a small smudge of reality in a story line: girl likes boy, boy likes girl but is a fucking asshole and mistreats girl, girl is heartbroken, girl moves on, boy falls into a ditch and dies. Well, that's an extreme, you you catch my drift.
Rant over.

Hyper Analytical + Emotionally Sensitive = The Dumbest Crying Jags EVER

I'm currently at a point in my life where being on antidepressants is both a financial burden and an unwanted emotional barrier. I've been on and off medications for my anxiety and moodiness for a full decade now, and when I was a teen, it was necessary. As an adult, I've found that every permutation of medication I take only serves to stunt my ability to feel, among other side effects (it was just awesome having night terrors while on Cymbalta, or not being able to eat despite being hungry while on Welbutrin).
However, it's days like these when I wished there was something out there that would take the edge off of my drop-of-a-pin sobbing trigger. Sometimes it's the slightest, most dispassionate thing that sets me off. Like the fact the my uncle came over tonight and fixed the electrical connection behind our washing machine. Pretty standard, right? Nooooooo, it got me thinking: Uncle Nick works long hours and has his own family to care for, and he came out at 8 at night to help us. Not only that, but he is constantly fixing our cars (and refusing full payment), he was one of the first responders when my brother was in the hospital, he paid for my prom dress - you see where this is snowballing, right? If not: I turned a simple familial act of kindness into an opus of emotional gratitude. I had to run to my room to compose myself because I literally almost burst into tears. And this kind of crap happens to me at least twice a day!
As lame as these random outbursts are, I really can't justify finding another psychiatrist and paying an exorbitant amount of money on meds each month to curb them. I managed to get through the worst year of my life (thus far) without antidepressants, and I'm still here. And, as dumb as the random crying during commercials and wedding shows is, I value my ability to feel things as strongly as I do. It's a part of who I am, and until it becomes a true impediment to my everyday life, I'm going to continue to not medicate myself. And my fiance will just have to deal with my "that scene in [insert TV/Film title here] was so touching!" tears. <3

My Very First Blog Post

About a year ago (or perhaps more?) my therapist suggested that I set up a blog to vent all of my existential crises, because I had been feeling isolated in that (once again) my thoughts had advanced past the point of normal human understanding. At first glance, that sentence makes me seem like a pompous intellectual snob, and to be truthful, I was once one. Thankfully, I discovered that intelligence (or in this particular case, hyper-awaredness) I have found, is both a gift and a curse. Great for composing a 15-page research paper, not so great for coping with everyday banality. When you tend to operate on a conceptual level that is constanty assesing reality and the fabric of society and culture, it makes it super hard to come back down and just enjoy the simple things in life - which is what I actually want out of my existence.
It's exciting and rewarding to ponder the meaning of life and the implications of an ever expanding universe - but what I really want is to turn my brain off and be able to get through a day at my temp job without wanting to throttle the people who can't follow a simple direction like "please form a single line."
Anyway, what I'm really trying to convey with this first post is that, while it may sound like I'm just whining that the rest of the world isn't as smart as I percieve myself to be, it's actually more like I wish I was as functional as the rest of humanity seems to be in this contradictory and complicated world we live in. Expect updates on my ongoing battle with existentialism (why won't you let me sleep at night!?!?), summaries of my better days if I have them, and just general wit and dry humor.