We break it down so it can build us up.

What you see is three kinds of cheese, some lunchmeat that is almost certainly bad, a random bottle of water, eggs, butter, and Kahlua that I've been slowly sipping from for what, three months? It's not so much that we live from paycheck to paycheck, which we of course do. I've been doing this for enough years I'm getting a better understanding of how we're living from windfall to windfall, even though the windfalls come in the form of once-yearly tax returns and twice-yearly excess aid from Stafford loans, i.e. payback's gonna be a mofo. I've been hearing more lately from people at work and school about putting applications in and getting my resume out, and here I am still angsting about not having anything to put on a resume. Reading this does two things - makes me happy because I've got numbers 1 through 6 in the bag, and makes me sad because I've completely screwed up on number seven.

When I came to Jonesboro, I had to have a job right away and school was not a priority. Getting the gas station job was quick and easy and provided the kind of guaranteed employment that was important at the time. And those two words, "guaranteed employment", have provided a sort of false security blanket for me ever since. No matter how poorly I did in the classes I took, no matter when I dropepd out of AState for a semester, no matter how much debt I was taking on, I had guaranteed employment and felt little need to get an internship or look for perhaps less guaranteed work in a more relevent area. Tech support at our local Circuit City, for example, would have been more relevent than what I'm doing now. A classmate with a paid internship at a local software company mentioned to me last semester that they were taking applications and he could put in a word for me, and I did nothing with it! Nothing! Half of it is fear of the unknown, of putting myself into a position where everything might implode and I'll lose this "security", and half of it is self-doubt. My worst grades in school have been in the math classes I thought I was taking for fun and the CS classes I was taking to learn the craft. Doesn't that mean something? I know I'm smart enough, but I've lost my stoicism; the emotions drive my actions more than reason does.

Reason states that if I have nothing to put on a resume, then build something and get it out to the public; make more friends and express interest in their employers; stop with the useless stuff and do the real stuff. Emotionally, it's like looking at a wall. I don't feel like I'm up to the task, even if intellectually I am.

Wow, okay, I didn't actually mean to jump from empty fridge to "My life is dooooom!" I suppose it is time for that annual rant. Well, no matter what, this is my last semester of school, so things will change. There's some degree of predictability and yearly repitition when one is a student, and I won't have that after May ends. *Insert Japanese trope about "doing my best!!" here.* :D