Jeans and Sneakers

I had an idea to make a post to spew out everything that’s been buzzing around my head lately, because there is a lot of it, and I don’t really let it all out anywhere.  So here goes nothing.

First and foremost, there’s my job situation.  Last Friday I put in my two weeks notice, and I stayed home today.  When I decided that I was going to quit, I told myself that I’d work every day of the last two weeks with the company, because I’ve been slacking so hardcore and missing at least one day a week since I told them I’d be looking for a new job.  That was in November I think.  :/  The thing is, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  This job has worn me down so far, has pushed me to the very end of my limits, it’s all I can do to not just never go back.  It’s been nothing but bull ever since I got hired there, and that’s a whole other story altogether.  I’m glad it’s almost over, but I wish it WAS over already.  Which brings me to my next topic:

I have no other job lined up.  This has me so worried that I’ve put it right out of my head.  I know that I’m going to have to find a job, and quick, to be able to pay for my bills and monthly expenses.   And I am looking at all the help wanted ads, Craig’s List (where I got *this* gem of a job. . .ugh), Career Builder, and Monster. . .but more and more I’m not seeing anything that I know I can excel at.  I’m at a point, where I’ve landed and then quit so many jobs since I’ve moved back to Long Island, that I know, before I even go on an interview, what kind of place the company will be just by the ad they put out, and I’m not seeing one job that I’m not just going to turn around and quit in a year or less.  I know it sounds like I’m making excuses, but for all the jobs I’ve already quit, I ignored my gut feeling about them to begin with, and it always ended up being right.  I know where I belong, and where I don’t, and I know what people expect of me and I know what I can and can’t deliver.  I’m freaking out because I know I need to find something that I can stick with, work hard at, grow with, but I seriously do not see anything that fits the bill.  Which again leads me to my next thought:

I have an idea.  A great idea for a website that I’m actually going to make.  I have written about this briefly before, and even now I’m wary of writing about it because even though I’m pretty sure almost no one reads this, I don’t want my idea to be taken before I can manifest it in all it’s glory.  My point is though, that it could be a business.  And I want to make it one.  And while I know that it’s going to take time and serious effort to come to fruition, I’m hoping, deep down inside I’m hoping, that I can make this happen and not need to work for anyone else.  Because I don’t think I’m going to find a place with people who don’t want me to be someone I’m not,  who are willing to teach me what I don’t know, and still pay me enough to survive.  For months now I’ve been reaching out for something that I could grab hold of, make my own, and be myself and still make money.  I think I might have found it, but it’s going to take a lot of work, and I need advice, because there are things I just don’t understand about starting a business.  And I’ve been to the NYS small business websites, and all of that, I’ve requested packets of information, but there are some things that just aren’t covered, and I want to make sure I know what the hell I’m doing before I go and throw myself into it head on.

Part of me is looking forward to the week after my last day there, kind of like a kid looking forward to summer vacation.  C’mon, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Long days of sleeping late, eating food, playing video games, spending time with the bf, and staying up late.  But man, I can’t do that.  I need to make money.  I need to pay rent, car insurance, my debt, my phone bill (though no one except my family ever calls me.).  But I can’t help looking forward to it anyway.  The other part of me is screaming at me to find a job, ANY JOB, before that week even gets here so that I’ll have some money coming in.  When I really think about it, it makes me want to cry.  So I’ve been making my brain shut up every time I think about how after next Friday, I don’t have to go back there ever, and in the back of my mind somewhere, I whisper to myself that I have to find something to replace it.

Toying with the idea of going back to school again, but not seriously, I don’t think.  I would likely go for graphic arts but school is expensive and I really don’t want any more debt, thank you very much.  Not to mention that I don’t really think that I compare to a lot of the graphic artists out there.

Things have been good at the house.  The kitchen is still dirty most of the time, but I’ve stopped looking at it really.  The roomate’s gf hasn’t been around much, much to my liking.

I’ve been reading again, the Narnia books, and they’re really quite good.  I think I even had a dream with something like Aslan in it, and I haven’t felt that way about an omnipotent being since. . .well, in a long while.  So I guess I’m definitely looking for at least SOME of the religious significance in it.  And though I don’t agree with everything that Aslan does in the books, the description of the children’s feelings when in his presence definitely bring back some kind of good memories.

I have pretty much stopped knitting the golden tunic I’m supposed to be knitting.  I’ll get back to it, eventually.  Hopefully it’ll actually get completed.

I’m having such a hard time coming up with a site design for my new page, and I’m so frigging stubborn that I won’t even think about having someone else do it.  :[

My relationship gets better and better all the time.  I am so happy with Rob, and it kind of bugs me out a little because I’m not really used to the idea of me and someone else ACTUALLY being together for YEARS.  Not bugs me out in a bad way, I’m just fascinated that we feel for eachother as we do, after almost 2.5 years.  I know, it’s not REALLY that long of a period of time, but my longest relationship ever before him was 7 months I think, around there, where it ended wasn’t really clear, but my point is that this is more than triple the amount of time I’ve ever been with someone.  It’s good, but I’m kind of worried it’s all going to end at any moment.  Not because of any unpleasantness in the relationship, just because no one’s stayed with me this long before.

Now that I know that  my income is limited, I of course want to buy everything in sight.  Well not really.  But I want odd things.  Like acreage in Wyoming.  A land lot.  Dilapidated houses in Buffalo to fix up and rent out.  Those last go for between $5-7k.

I take back anything bad I’ve ever said about Adobe Illustrator.  It’s a cool program, I just didn’t know how to use it.  I’m still learning, but it’s nifty.

I’m really kind of lonely.  I miss having friends call me wanting to hang out.  At the same time, I’m kind of anxious about social gatherings now.  Sort-of.  Depends on who’s there.

I hate information pages that give out confusing info, while making no attempt to try to make the info more understandable.

I think I’m going to be in need of dental work soon and I have no idea when I might be able to get that done.  I’m going through this whole big process of getting on Rob’s insurance, and now that we’ve finally got this one form notarized, I find out we’re going to need originals of our birth certificates.  I have the birth certificate my mom gave me, but it’s a photo copy, and it was falling apart, so I laminated it.  Apparrently that’s not good enough so I’m going to have to go to the city website and get a reissued certified birth cirtificate.  Grand.  That’ll cost me about $20 which really isn’t much (more if I want it mailed express), but you’ve got to remember, my last day of work is next Friday and I don’t know where the money will come from after that.  It’s like should I spend it because it’s to get myself health insurance, or should I save it and pay rent, or car insurance?  Hmm.

Video games are a great mental distraction (as are books) when you don’t want to think about things, but they’re also a wonderful waste of time.  I wanted to try to force myself to come up with something for the site, but instead I tooled around with illustrator for a wee bit and then played warcraft all day.   Oof.

Wow.  This has gotten retardedly long, so I’ll end here.  I’m sure there are other things on my mind, but I can’t think of anything else, and I’m supposed to be sleeping.

So a while back I heard all the rage about the Katamari Damacy game.  And since I heard it was silly and addictive, I had to go get it.  But I didn’t have a PS2.  My roomate told me at the time that I could get the game and use his PS2, since he kept it in the living room anyway.  He even went with me to the game store to trade in some old GameCube games and buy it.  We came home, and I started playing, and played for 3 hrs straight without noticing it.  Rob came out to the living room and asked me if I was going to bed soon.  I asked him what he meant, cause it was early still.  Then he told me it was 2am.  :[

The next day my roomate took his PS2 into his room, never to be seen again.  That was about seven months ago or so.  I knew I wasn’t going to buy a PS2, especially since the PS3 is supposedly on it’s way, so I gave Katamari Damacy to a friend of mine who I thought would enjoy it.  That was last weekend.  This weekend another friend of mine who I haven’t seen since before Christmas came over.  He gave Rob and I one of his old PS2’s, since I had told him that I owned Katamari Damacy and had no system to play it on.  Ha.  Too bad I didn’t have any games for it.   So we went out to the game store, and I had to pick if I wanted to buy Katamari Damacy again, or if I wanted to buy it’s sequel, We ♥ Katamari!  I went with the sequel.  This is probably the only time you’ll ever hear of me skipping to the second of something without finishing the first.  Anyway, this was worth it, it’s got 2 player mode, so Rob and I can both play together.  Technically, I beat it already, having rolled up the sun and getting all the parts to the story line movie clips, but Rob pointed out, there’s crazy replay value here, I haven’t even gotten the best I could have on all the boards, and haven’t even played some of them at all yet.  Not to mention I haven’t gotten all of the characters or gifts yet.  I think that We ♥ Katamari! was a good choice.  If you get a chance to play it, please do so, you’ll like it!

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This morning (afternoon really, but it was right after I woke up), I was cranky.  I didn’t know it, until I tried to play WoW and nearly bit Rob’s head off.  Apparrently, I have some issues that begin with how most of the friends I’ve made in life have altogether stopped  calling me or even wanting to hang out with me or contact me in any way, leaving me feeling very worthless and expendable, and ending with me not wanting to group in WoW because I’ve conditioned myself to not work together with or rely on people, and to do things on my own wherever possible.  It may sound absolutely asinine to you, but it makes perfectly logical sense in my head.

The fact that it makes sense to me doesn’t make me any less sad about the fact that I can’t make (or haven’t made) friends.  It makes me wonder if I’m completely not worth knowing for an extended period of time, or if people around here are just really flaky.

And it’s funny, since that happened this morning, one of my friends from high school who has been pretty much ignoring me and denying my attempts to hang out with her, called me tonight wanting to know if I could hang out because she was bored.  But on the phone she actually told me that she called me only after she had called every other one of her friends that she could think of, and she also called her dad to hang out before she called me.  Let me tell you how great THAT felt.  :[

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Tomorrow is day 1 of the last 10 days of employment for this stupid company.  It’s only a half day, and I’m pretty sure I won’t lose my mind.  Speaking of which, I should be getting to bed!!

I put in my two weeks today at work. Yesterday they decided that the management wasn’t sure if I was getting any actual work done and they wanted to spy on my computer. It’s funny, really, because when I wasn’t being given any work, I told them so, and complained about it because I *wanted* work to do, to make the day go by faster. And now I’ve been given work, and I’m doing it, and they think I’m not doing anything. Too funny. So yeah, January 27th and I’m done with this job.

So I’ll be looking for another job, and working on my project. That’s really all that’s going on today.

I’m pretty sure I’m too hard on myself.  Creativity isn’t something you can force to happen.  Some people fuel their creativity with their anger, or frustration.  When I’m angry or frustrated, trying to be creative usually ends in me feeling even angrier or more frustrated, because I’m not pleased with what I’ve come up with or I can’t come up with anything at all.  I don’t think I ever really learned to focus my creativity, it kind of happens on it’s own.  Which all just means that basically if I’m in a slump, I’m in trouble.

I used to doodle all the time.  I’d draw all sorts of things, on school notes, tests, scrap pieces of paper, on my arm with a sharpie, all over.  I actually tried to force myself to doodle recently and came up with a couple of lines on a piece of paper.  I’m trying to come up with a design for my new site, not to mention a design for this blog, and I just can’t think of anything.  I must have been in the zone when I made Twice on Tuesday.  And that wasn’t my first attempt.  The first site was clean but boring.  You wouldn’t believe the first design and the second were made by the same people.

Sometimes I think maybe you can make yourself be creative.  All through my life I’ve tried to write poetry, or lyrics, to make good use of my feelings and make them pretty, or at least so descriptive as to be moving when they come out.  But I was always stuck in that elementary school-ish way of rhyming.  The set meter, the childish rhyming.  Then one day I thought about it, looked at it totally different, and used rhyming instead of trying to fight it, and I came up with some pretty good stuff.  I wonder if I can do the same with my designing.  I know I CAN design things, and make them look good, I just can’t do it all the time.  And that gets me down.  Especially when I’m pressuring myself to make something out of nothing in an attempt to rid myself of an unpleasant portion of my life right now.

I feel like I wasted today, and I should be sleeping, but I don’t think I’m ready for bed just yet.

I installed an open source message board on my new domain and have been playing with it. I don’t even have a site up for the page yet, just the incomplete forum, so I’m not posting a link yet. But man. There’s so much I don’t know!! I’m getting frustrated too because I want to build my own template, I’m going to have to, to match my site and then ultimately a blog to match both, but I have no idea how, and most of the quick google search results just tell you to take the standart template and change the color. >_< THAT'S NOT MAKING YOUR OWN TEMPLATE!!

I found some awesome marketing and small business/entrepeneur blogs today by browsing American Express' Small Business Resources page. One of them had a "manifesto" of Guerilla Marketing that actually got me excited about doing things to push my new project. Gave me lots of good ideas, and I didn't even read through half of it.

I'm supposed to be sleeping. Ha. Word.

Good things happened though, for real.  Yesterday I took a really late xmas present to a friend, and we went to the mall so I could return some things.  It sucks when you realize just how cool a person is and then find out they’re leaving your immediate area.  He’s moving to Queens.  Oh well.  I’ll definitely try to stay in contact with him more.

A friend of mine from high school found me on MySpace last week, and wrote me an awesome long email about what she’s been up to.  I’m so excited to have heard from her, she’s a great person, and someone I’m glad to have back in my life.

The consumer bug has totally bit me in the ass, because for some reason, I want EVERYTHING.  Well, not everything, just an SK II, a new cell phone, a new digital camera, a laptop, and probably some other random electronics items.  It’s a good thing I’m relatively poor.

I bought some domains today to start working on a new project that SHOULD be reason enough for me to learn all the web goodness I’ve been saying I’m going to try to learn for the longest.  Tomorrow I begin the design of the site, which I already know how to do, so that’s a start, and I’ll also begin looking into what elements of the page I might want to use.  I *am* really excited about it though.

Also this week I discovered a bunch of pages with WordPress plugins, and will be browsing these to see what I might want to add to my blog here, and don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about designing a template for this blog, I just haven’t figured out how I want it to look yet.