The other day I made a comment to a friend about my ineptitude with fairly basic things like walking, cleaning, and packing. My first thought was, “I’m blogging that.” My next thought was, “Well that’s pathetic. I need life.”
But I have been a bit lazy with this blogging thing lately. My drafts queue has become something of a behemoth filled with half completed thoughts about everything from me being melodramatic about my never-ending illness to me being equally melodramatic about the big Coachella announcement that is now a month old and no longer “news”
Part of this is that I have been super dedicated to reading crap kids books and spewing out rivers of snark for Childhood Trauma because I love that blog like it’s my child. (And you should like us on Facebook because this is my child and it would depress me if you didn’t like my child.)
Mostly I have just been busy. There has been a break in the monotony in spite of my impulse to comment on my supposed lack of a “life.” (Although my never-ending illness did confine me to my bed for an uncomfortable length of time. I got stir crazy and my emails reflected this. I used a disconcerting number of exclamation points in emails directed to people associated with my graduate program. Awkward. Or should I say Awkward! So! Excited! For! Grad! School! Ahem.)
I had a family reunion this past weekend and in spite of the fact that my whole family is insane, I actually have very little to discuss on that front, short of the fact that I ate my weight in brownies, tried to work extra hard at the gym, then ate most of a bag of chocolate covered peanuts. Clearly I’m just going to celebrate the weight I’ve already lost and accept that I’m just not losing any more because NOM NOM NOM CHOCOLATE. /#fatbuthappy sidebar
Additionally, I have a new job, of sorts. Monster.com hired the excellent Ryan Paugh who then put together a team of bloggers for a Community Manager bootcamp. We will be simultaneously be learning the ropes of the job and actually performing it. The group itself makes me unspeakably happy in the pants. A few of the names I already knew and loved and after going all cyberstalker on the rest, I’m crazy excited to work with these people.
I would be remiss if I told you all of this without mentioning what it is that we will be working on. If you’re following me on Twitter you’ve probably already heard, but I’ll spell it out here too. Monster.com just launched an amazing new Facebook application on Saturday called BeKnown. Given the level of geeking out I freely do for all things social media, this is basically the best job ever.
The application allows you to leverage the largest social network ever in order to grow your professional network. Suddenly the crap-ton of time you spend on Facebook is actually a valid career-developing thing. Go figure. While you can invite your existing Facebook friends into your BeKnown network, that network is separate — so you can add co-workers and bosses and the like without sharing the whole of your Facebook business. You can upload a distinct picture (not that your Margarita Thursday picture isn’t lovely, but…) and instead of a profile that professes your love for The Real World: Las Vegas (don’t judge. OK fine, judge), your profile is all about your professional accomplishments.
Plus, there are several “game” components like badges. I am an absolute sucker for that sort of thing so I had to pester a former colleague into updating her work history so that I could “endorse” her and get points for being awesome. Again, my silly competitive crap applied to something useful? MIND. BLOWN.
Basically, it’s awesome and you should go join BeKnown and feel free to add me to your network! More importantly: talk to me about your experiences with the app. Questions/problems/flail-worthy-factors, let me know.
I sent a spazzed out email (not dissimilar to the quality communication distributed by Diseased Nicole to Future Classmates and Faculty) to some of my blogger buddies in which I gushed about what a great opportunity this is and how pumped I am and blah blah blah.
Writing that email reminded me of my on-going frustration in the last five years. I keep getting these extensive life lessons in Things I Don’t Actually Want To Do.
I went to school in DC, fully intending to be a political science major. That turned out to be a bust. I was one class shy of a minor, but that one class was the PSC equivalent of my least favorite sociology course. Granted, the SOC version was actually two classes and it is my understanding that the PSC class was more like the dull-but-tolerable course than the life-ruining course. Regardless, I just wasn’t interested and saw no reason to subject myself to another class just to put something I didn’t care about on my resume.
Oh, but a GTA for the soul-sucking-life-ruining course did introduce me to xkcd so there’s that:
I spent plenty of time doing the whole DC intern thing, which is pretty standard for anyone who goes to school there and very little of it actually made me happy. And trying to reflect and mine those experiences for the components I did enjoy has just been exhausting. It’s easy to be so overwhelmed by the feeling of defeat — YET ANOTHER MISS — that you just lose sight of the aspects that worked.
I should point out that I do see a good deal of merit in those Lessons In Things I Don’t Want To Do. The one thing I always made it point to do at the end of each, “Well, cross that one off the list…” experience was ascertain WHY it was being crossed off the list so I could avoid making the same mistakes.
My year in education-related jobs has been particularly useful in that capacity. It’s different enough from the kinds of things I did in DC that I feel like I was assessing all of these things in more meaningful ways.
I finally feel like I have a handle on how to actually sort those components — that is, how to evaluate each experience in a way that clarifies what suited me and what didn’t.
That said, I am elated about all of my upcoming adventures, from this bootcamp to Paris in the fall. It feels like I’m moving in the right direction instead of just running around in circles.
Speaking of Paris, I’ll be back at the consulate in Chicago on Tuesday so hopefully I can report back with an equally ZOMGVICTORYATLAST post following that experience. YOU HEAR THAT, VISA FOLKS? I’M COMING FOR YOU. WITH DOCUMENTS AND STUFF! AND EXCLAMATION POINTS TOO! I wonder if that will make my paper work more compelling? “This girl…she doesn’t really speak French and she’s a bit of a disaster, but she is so excited. Like a puppy. Not granting her this visa would be like kicking a puppy. Really, who kicks puppies?”
On that note, I’m back to Facebooking like a fiend. Yesterday I did that in the comfort and splendor of endless coffee at Panera Bread. I felt like I should have made an announcement to the staff indiscreetly cleaning around me: “I SWEAR SITTING ON FACEBOOK FOR FIVE HOURS IS WORK. SWEARSIES. FORREALFORREAL.”
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