Life's Distractions

When the mail goes out tomorrow I will have sent out eight applications this week. Most have been to Cowcity, another was sent to Hell-A.

Every day I want to quit my job. My mother keeps telling me I should and go back to school. Get my MA and teach at a JC. I feel like I can't though.

And I don't understand... It's that word "can't." Of course I can. It'd be easy. I just write a letter to my boss saying my last day will be payday then fill out the paperwork and leave.

...And then go back to school?

I want to go to school. I'd like to get my Master's, but I don't want to not be working while I'm in school. The degree needs to be for me first, not the possibility of a job. Besides, if I quit I lose over four hundred hours of sick leave. (If they fire me, pardon, lay me off it'll keep for five or seven years, depending on the person I speak with, and will be waiting for me when I start back up with the state.) Mostly, though, I want to make sure I have a job before I go and spend thousands of dollars as an excuse to write about fanfiction.

As usual, thinking about all of this deepens the valley my brain sits in. And so I go for distractions.

A while ago I wrote (at least I'm pretty sure I wrote, but I couldn't find the post) that I think most people find something important to them to keep them too distracted to become too... thoughtful, as if full of thought. People distract themselves with other people, be it a lover, friends, children. People distract themselves with work. People distract themselves with hobbies. People distract themselves with TV or video games. People distract themselves with drugs, sometimes hardcore and sometime perfectly legal. People distract themselves with sex. Distraction helps keep us and the economy going.

I've been trying to find something to distract myself with to get rid of the thoughts. When I was still living in North Bay I was coming close to being distracted by writing. I got to the point where I was writing a little every day. Just notes, mostly. All of it silly fanfictions. Nothing great, but I was writing. I was on my way to being an amateur writer. (Sure, someday I was hoping to go pro, but that would be sometime after I competed in the Olympics.) Then I got a new job and moved.

I thought I'd be cool with new job. Just move in, move on, and keep going. And then it turned out my job was built around misery and dreams about finding babies to care for. And I couldn't write fiction of any sort. Sure, I could still blog, although not much, as seen by the paltry number of posts in 2011 and thus far in 2012. The hole got deeper and the deeper it goes the harder it was for me to write. But I got out of that craptastic job last fall, everything didn't get better. Oh, the stress and the baby dreams disappeared, which was great, but they were replaced with an all encompassing feeling that my position will never change. My work life will never get better. I'll always be on, or near, the bottom, ignored because I am the way I am and physically feel ill when I try to be different. These past seven months and dozens of applications and at least five interviews only reinforce the horrible things I believe about my professional life. And I'm tired of thinking about it. Hence, distractions.

The thing is, though, that I don't care for people, don't plan on having a lover, don't often feel like I have any friends, and don't want kids. I hate my work and that won't change unless I can move up a little. Video games work for a day, maybe, but not longer than that and only two or three times a month. I argue with the TV and dissect what I watch to myself all the time. Drugs cost money that I don't want to spend. And I'm not having sex with anyone anytime soon.

That leave a hobby. But I have no hobby. Writing was a hobby, but from deep in the hole I can't write what I'd like to write; I can only write narcissistic, nihilistic nothings like this. What can be my hobby?

Well, last week, I bought a ukelele (you may pronounce it either way, I'm cool with that). So far it is only mildly distracting because I can't play songs on it. I can read the music and I've sort of learned how to read tabs, but I can't move from one chord to another within the space of a beat, yet. Practice is what it'll take. Patients is what I hope I have. I really need... I really hope that it'll be distracting enough.