Thinking about The Future should come with a warning label for people like me. The way pregnant women shouldn't operate heavy machinery and small children shouldn't play with uzi's, such thoughts and I should really take out matching restraining orders on each other.
I am hoping it is only an adverse effect of several weeks of unabashed sloth that has me frantic and frenzied and manic and panicky and terrified. But perhaps not.
I can't find any summer internships that interest me. I have read every single thing I can find relating to potential jobs for English majors and am just not inspired. So many appear to involve offices. I hate offices. I worked in an office once, for three weeks, and it was a nightmare of uncomfortable clothing and copy machines and dry recirculated air and utter artificiality (in people, in things, in every.damn.thing) and bulging file cabinets of wasted paper and mindnumbing forms, all of it overlaid with the nauseating aroma of burnt, stale coffee.
Maybe some people get off on that sort of environment. I dunno. I wouldn't know ambition if it introduced itself in a spelling bee, so such people are clearly not of the same world I generally inhabit.
And, of course, offices have people. Lots of them. I don't play well with others. Nor do I have anything resembling confidence or the ability to make the sort of small talk that prevents all coworkers from deeming you "that girl who never speaks or smiles."
But of course that begs the question - would it in fact be wise to seek out future employment that allows me the pleasure of working mostly alone, when my ability to make any significant emotional connections with other humans is so severely impaired? On the one hand it's logical; on the other, it's self-damning. I like my solitude, but the future, in my imagination, is seldom seen as anything but a very lonely place. I'm good at alone, but loneliness is another thing entirely. And a potential lifetime of it terrifies me.
Such a lengthy committment to a journal has had the unexpected effect of crystallizing, to me, my most damaging weaknesses. Unfortunately awareness only goes so far, and I'm clueless as to how to change them.
Enough of that; it's no wonder I can never sleep.
I am hoping it is only an adverse effect of several weeks of unabashed sloth that has me frantic and frenzied and manic and panicky and terrified. But perhaps not.
I can't find any summer internships that interest me. I have read every single thing I can find relating to potential jobs for English majors and am just not inspired. So many appear to involve offices. I hate offices. I worked in an office once, for three weeks, and it was a nightmare of uncomfortable clothing and copy machines and dry recirculated air and utter artificiality (in people, in things, in every.damn.thing) and bulging file cabinets of wasted paper and mindnumbing forms, all of it overlaid with the nauseating aroma of burnt, stale coffee.
Maybe some people get off on that sort of environment. I dunno. I wouldn't know ambition if it introduced itself in a spelling bee, so such people are clearly not of the same world I generally inhabit.
And, of course, offices have people. Lots of them. I don't play well with others. Nor do I have anything resembling confidence or the ability to make the sort of small talk that prevents all coworkers from deeming you "that girl who never speaks or smiles."
But of course that begs the question - would it in fact be wise to seek out future employment that allows me the pleasure of working mostly alone, when my ability to make any significant emotional connections with other humans is so severely impaired? On the one hand it's logical; on the other, it's self-damning. I like my solitude, but the future, in my imagination, is seldom seen as anything but a very lonely place. I'm good at alone, but loneliness is another thing entirely. And a potential lifetime of it terrifies me.
Such a lengthy committment to a journal has had the unexpected effect of crystallizing, to me, my most damaging weaknesses. Unfortunately awareness only goes so far, and I'm clueless as to how to change them.
Enough of that; it's no wonder I can never sleep.
Current Music: aimee mann - ghost world
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