A New Season of Hopelessness

I'm restless to a certain extent; the vast majority of my waking hours yesterday was spent doing chores and taking care of other important household stuff -- I cleaned the cat room, I washed/replaced the bedsheets, I did all of the dishes, cooked dinner, unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, and vacuumed the entire house...yet, I'm restless. I feel like there's something missing, something I should be doing. Or, conversely, I sort of have this sense of dread and/or anticipation that something -- good or bad -- is going to happen.

I can't chalk this up to fatigue; I've been sleeping remarkably well as of late, really. Well, remarkably well for me, anyway. Any night I can sleep for eight or nine hours straight without my back hurting, sweating so much I soak the sheets, my allergies going nuts, or having to get up to pee due to excessive fluid intake (due to the heat) is a good night. I suppose, anyway.

I'm in a bit of a funk, to be honest with you. As you know if you read my last post, I'm past that point of no return now when it comes to teaching jobs -- there's no point in looking for anything for the fall anymore. Today is July 1, and with July comes a new season of hopelessness: looking for work that isn't academically-based, and more than likely a job in the private sector someplace.

While in the bathroom tonight, I went down the pros-and-cons list, in my head, of filling out an application at Arby's. I'm not kidding. When I was mentally finished, it boiled down to something like well, it wouldn't be good, but it wouldn't be *that* bad. And when I came across this realization, I wanted to cry. It's because I've already, on some level, resigned myself to being forced into some sort of unskilled labor, fast food, service-industry job just to be able to pay the bills. And I did it unknowingly, as well. It's as if somehow, subconsciously, I've already accepted my fate as a loser, and the downward spiral began without me noticing -- it just took me working out the pros and cons of being a fast food roast beef clerk that made me realize it.

Throughout graduate school -- actually, throughout undergrad as well, but mostly through grad school -- I always told myself that I'd be the guy who succeeded where others failed, the one who actually would have enough luck to land that good teaching job or that good writing job after graduation, pulling myself up with my two degrees and experience to make something of myself despite all the odds against me. I didn't want to be the perpetual student, continually putting off trying to figure out life in order to dive back into academia for yet another degree, buying/wasting more time in doing so. When I graduated six weeks ago, I was full of hope and optimism that I was finally done with schooling, that I would be able to break out of that daily grind and press forward, moving up, starting a new life. After all, I'm engaged to a wonderful woman, I've got my health, and I've been on this planet for but a short thirty years. My entire life is ahead of me.

And yet, even though I only graduated six weeks ago, six weeks has been enough for events to come full-circle, and for cold hard reality to come crashing back down upon me. I've got maybe enough money in my bank account, barring any new employment or windfalls, to last me until Thanksgiving. And that's with me being somewhat frugal. After that, it's all over. Ironically, around Thanksgiving is when my first student loan payments would be coming due. Daisy is trying to plan our wedding, and is trying to budget for everything involving that, and here I am trying to budget for simple survival and nothing else. There's something not right about that. There's something wrong, something lopsided about that scenario, and yet...there's little else I can do. In the span of six weeks, in my mind I went from being a success to rapidly becoming a failure. Six weeks.

To make matters worse, this afternoon I received a call from a teaching position I applied for in Omaha -- one of the very few teaching positions I applied for in Omaha, since it's not like any others are open -- and one that wasn't for a college-based position, at that. The lady on the phone told me that she loved my credentials and CV, and wanted to offer me four hours a day at eight dollars an hour.

You're fucking kidding me, right?

Why even advertise a position if it's only four hours per day (two in the morning, two in the afternoon -- not even all together -- for eight dollars an hour? Yeah, sorry, I can't live on $32 a day. Even working five days a week for four weeks a month, that's $640. A month. Before taxes. Daisy gets paid much more than that every two weeks at her current job.

That's, frankly, an insult. A big insult. That's a position you give to a retired senior citizen looking to fill a few hours of time, or someone looking to work a second job when they already have something that actually pays the bills. I deleted the voicemail in disgust. If that's all these people think I'm worth, then they're clearly not worth my time or energy. Working that job for a year would pay me almost $1000 less per year than I made as a GTA. For me to even consider a job like that, they'd have to at least triple or quadruple the hourly pay...or the hours themselves.

This is what I have to deal with, folks. This is where I currently am. I've got nothing. I've redesigned yet another copy of my CV/resume for office/administrative work, something that I clearly don't want to do, but am forced to pursue, and in doing job searches in almost all areas find nothing but sales jobs. I am not a salesman. I do not want to deal with sales. I could have done a sales job with no degree whatsoever. I am not an entitled little shit or an ingrate when I say that I know I deserve, and can do, better than that. I've worked too fucking hard over the years to work a sales job or anything related to that.

And yet apparently I've resigned myself to an Arby's position? A roast beef slinger? A purveyor of curly fries?

The one plus is that working at Arby's would pay more than that teaching position I mentioned above. And that makes it even sadder. 

At this point, my only real hope is to wait to hear from some (or any) of the places and positions I've applied for in the past six weeks, and hope that the ones who contact me allow for enough time for relocation if I am hired. Those are some big hopes, some big ifs. There's little else I can do other than searching through the job postings everywhere to see if there's one that's not a sales position, and see if that one is something I could actually do with the degrees I have.

In the meantime, the 4th approaches. Daisy and I, over the few days I'll be in Omaha (I'm not even sure when we're leaving and/or coming back yet) will have a few days together and with the parents where I can temporarily, at least, push a lot of this shit out of my head.

Of course, I've heard nothing else from the department, either; I don't know if I'm going to be hired on as an adjunct or otherwise for the fall. The budget is apparently being cleared sometime this month, and I'll know one way or the other later in the month about what's going on, if anything. Again, I'll have to go pick up my diploma after the 17th anyhow, and will have to drop off my keys on that day if I'm not going to be hired on in any capacity, but apparently at least one of the office administrators there has left the department, so I don't know what's going on. I've had no communication with anyone in the department since the end of May.

Daisy has told me that (obviously) she would greatly prefer me to get a job in Omaha, or somewhere around the Omaha area, so that she can continue working where she is (even though she hates it) and stay close to her parents. I understand this, of course. Her reasoning is that there's no reason to work "some shit job" somewhere on the opposite side of the country if I could get a comparable job here or there. She's right, of course, but that heavily depends on whether I can even get a "shit job" in Omaha. What's worse is that in about two months or so, regardless of whether I have work or not by that time, this entire cycle of looking for teaching jobs is going to restart as I begin heavily looking for places to start teaching starting in the spring semester, in January. No, I don't want to move during the winter, but if I run out of money, I'm going to be forced to anyway. When it gets to a certain point, it'll be sheer necessity that I take anything thrown at me regardless of how degrading or awful it may be. Again, enter the roast beef slinger.

I want to reiterate that all hope is not lost, though it is certainly waning a bit. I do have hope that those positions I've applied for since graduation will at least contact me, or the majority of them will, anyway, and that something may happen with the university. Daisy has told me that if I get hired on at the university, she will make the move down here to Kansas, though we'd still be moving out of my current place and into a different one -- and she'd have to find work here as well. There's no need for her to do that if I'm simply adjuncting for a semester, of course. As much as the thought of adjuncting makes me shudder because of the work involved compared to the pay, it's more pay than I'd get slinging roast beef or pushing curly fries.

I'm also getting to the point where I'm desperate enough to start looking into teaching in high schools. I haven't started looking yet, however. Daisy's mother teaches high school and hates it -- but the money is good and the healthcare benefits are as well. I don't want to come home every night wanting to blow my brains out, but if it comes down between being able to eat and having a position in which I may actually be able to use my degree, as depressing as that position may end up being, I'd much rather not starve and be able to keep the lights on in my home. I was a licensed substitute teacher for a year, as you may or may not know, in 2009-10. The license cost me an outlandish sum of money to obtain, and even though I was "on call" every day, I never got a single call to sub. If nothing else, it may be worth it to renew that license either here or in Omaha, one way or the other.

In other news, there's not much going on. It's been rather nice here weather-wise -- last night it was down into the 60s, and today the warmest it's gotten is 84, which means it's rather pleasant in my house and I'm not sweating profusely for once. This much-cooler weather trend is supposed to extend throughout the next ten days or so both here and in Omaha, so it should be somewhat pleasant while I'm up there (and it also means that the cats won't cook in the house while I'm gone, whenever I'm gone). I have to go to Walmart tonight to get cigarettes and stamps, and tomorrow morning before it gets warm in the sun I plan to mow the grass and clean up the yard as much as possible so that when the tree-removal city crews come through to get all of the branches and the like after the storm we had, they can get them without issue. All the bills I already had for the month have now been paid, and anything else can wait until after the 4th (as it probably won't come in until long after then anyhow).

As for any trip back home to visit my parents, I don't know if that's going to happen this summer either this month or next month, and whether or not Daisy would get to go anyhow. I've not discussed it with my parents for several weeks, and due to tight scheduling when it comes to their vacations and/or the vacations of people in their offices, not to mention if I get hired someplace and/or need to start adjuncting again in August for the university, I don't know when or if it's going to happen. As it's the 1st of July, there's time to plan it, but that doesn't mean anything if I get called for a job tomorrow and have to spend the rest of my summer (and money) frantically uprooting myself for a cross-country move.