Desire for Direction

I write this post from one of my favorite Fort Worth spots, Avoca. In a city full of Starbucks stores, it is our one and only locally owned coffee shop. My favorite season, fall, is nearly upon us and I have become a very intermittent (read: lazy, preoccupied, and restless) blogger lately.

 

mmm...local caffeine fix

The past few months have been a struggle for me. Without getting into the nitty- gritty of balancing love, career, finances, and all the crap that life throws at you in the meantime, let me just say that lots of things have been weighing on both my heart and checkbook.  For the first time in my life, I decided to finally try to find a full-time job to earn some decent money and have discovered that such a task is quite a tall order in this down-turned economy.  We are indeed in a recession, the competition for entry level jobs is frighteningly fierce, and it turns out that a college degree is very little help unless it happens to be in computer science or engineering. I suppose I knew all these things when I graduated a year ago, but there is nothing like job hunting and fruitless interviewing, to serve as a helpful reminder.

My process seems to goes a little like this: I apply for very modest paying entry level job I feel relatively qualified for. I am given an interview which I feel goes very well. I am then told that 147 other people also applied for the same job and that while I made it into the top 4 applicants, there was someone with ten years of previous experience who they offered the job to instead. Combined with the oppressive Texas heat and the Careerbuilder recruiters that enthusiastically inform me regularly by email that my resume would qualify me to become a life insurance salesman, I'm left with the strong desire to drink copious amounts of whiskey and jump on the next plane back to Europe.

So in short, I haven't blogged lately because things feel bleak and discouraging. I'm brainstorming ideas for my immediate future and mostly just feeling terrified about overwhelmed at everything I come up with. The pressure of learning a foreign language for graduate school, the fear of not getting accepted into a graduate program, and the economic burden of that graduate school are concerns that loom in the distance.

For now, I am keeping myself busy working at the wine bar, making frequent trips to Austin to visit a special person in my life, and attending the Tuesday night lectures series put on by The Fort Worth Modern Art Museum.  The lectures are an encouraging reminder that there are other people who are interested in the same things I am interested in and that, while it may be small, there is an audience for such endeavors.

The recent loss of entrepreneur and innovator, Steve Jobs, has provoked many people to post quotes from the 2005 commencement speech he gave at Stanford University. Given the economic woes our country, and myself, currently face, his wisdom is appreciated. Jobs advises that you can't connect the dots looking forward, only looking back. He reminds us to follow our intuition and our heart.

“Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

That is all for now. I just wanted to tell my readers, all six of them, that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth.