...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