Skip to main content

Jinkies! Zoinks!

Well, I have less than one month left here in the motherland. On August 27-28 I will have the pleasure of meeting my fellow training class volunteers, and on August 29, I will be winging my way down to Nicaragua, which Google Earth tells me is basically due south of Montgomery, Alabama. I'm hoping that's where the similarities end.

If you're curious about what my future life might be like, check out some of the blogs I added to the sidebar. I've been reading them, and I'm not sure if it's making me more or less nervous. It has soothed my concerns about shoes somewhat, and anyone who knows me knows that shoes are still the most challenging part of getting dressed in the morning.

Which brings me to my final topic of the day. I continue to be absolutely horrified at my lack of progress in life. I'm 26, and SHOES continue to challenge me. I have also been looking up people from high school; you know, the Google/Facebook/myspace crawl through the interweb, and it turns out that basically everyone I have ever known is cooler than me. This girl I went to middle school art camp with went to Germany on a Fullbright and apparently worked at a radio station doing goodness only knows what kind of cool stuff. One of my friends just became a lawyer, and the other is going to be an architect.

I am leaving for the Peace Corps in less than a month, and I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life. Up until this point, I have been paralyzed by fear of failure, by fear of trying to find what I really want because if I did, then that would mean that I could be bad at it. I'm finally starting to try to do some things to help me start moving in the right direction, and then I go comparing myself to everyone else. Cripes. As a former budding biologist, it sort of makes sense to me why we would compare ourselves with others. We're always angling for that evolutionary advantage, but isn't there ever a point in time when you just look at yourself and think, I'm here, now, and it's good?


Addendum:
I still have a desk, coffee table, armchair, twin bed, over the toilet shelf thingie for grabs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts from last Thursday: Tonight we set up our Indie Bits game, and I'm consumed by nervous anticipation. I imagine this is not unlike when your firstborn child goes to kindergarten. OK, maybe it's not that serious. But the feelings of, please don't bite anyone , and I hope you make friends translates roughly to please don't break while someone is playing you , and also please no one play this game because What if you don't like it?  What if people hate it? What if it doesn't work? What if it's uninteresting? What if the puzzles are too hard? There are so many ways this can go wrong. These are not feelings I typically experience with the things that I make, as I usually make things just for myself. I've always been more of an engineer then an artist. At middle school art camp, I was competent at various techniques, but I never had any great ideas. We would be set free to our own creative devices with a new method, and I sat there, feeling inad...
Post a Comment
Read more

2011 Reading Challenges

On the first day of this new year, I am pulling together the reading challenges in which I want to participate.  There are so many that sound interesting that I'm not doing, particularly a bunch of them that are regional authors, which I'm trying to cover with my Global Reading Challenge.  I've chosen a bunch of them, but the problem won't be reading quantity, but more like reading strategy.  I read 3 or 4 books a week and most of these challenges allow crossovers, so I see no problems reading enough books, merely reading the right books and then, perhaps more challenging, writing about them, which some challenges require, and some only suggest.  Either way, it's a neat way to prioritize reading for the coming year. The Challenges in Which I Shall Participate Southern Literature Challenge - I've never read enough Southern Lit, and while some of the newer stuff is truly awful, I'd like to explore some older books. It's any book set in the South by a S...
4 comments
Read more

The Land of Lost Things

I met my new therapist last week.  I test drove a few, and she was the one that stuck.  She seems like she's not going to let me get by with any bullshit, and she said a couple of things that zinged me in our very first meeting.  That was unexpected, delightful, and now, with time to think about it, terrifying. I've been doing so much soul searching lately, so much careful consideration of my life and where I am - you'd think I'd be finding myself, but instead I feel so completely lost.  A few reasons: 1. I sabotage relationships in a really predictable way.  I had always thought of this behavior in one way, but with one sentence, this woman last week made me question everything I thought about that.  It's good to question it; it's what I wanted, but to be confronted so quickly by something that I had never considered is frightening.  I've spent so much time trying to figure this stuff out, and it turns out that I've been so completely wrong about ...
6 comments
Read more