I think I mentioned that before I moved back to Indiana, I had to sort out some things. Annoying things, like Who Am I ? What Am I Doing Here? Where Did I Go Wrong? Spit or Swallow?
Things that require, like, thinking about myself. Not my normal every day thinking about myself which is mostly limited to
1. What kind of chocolate can I eat today?
and
2. My friends/family/dogs aren't paying enough attention to me today
and quite often
3. Is it a yarn buying day?
4. Sweatpants or nightgown?
not to mention
5. How many episodes of Criminal Minds can I watch in only 12 hours?*
No, I had to put these vital issues on hold, sometimes for up to an hour or two at a time, and try to figure out what to do next. I mean, you cannot watch Criminal Minds if you live on the street.**
So I did something I don't enjoy....I took a complete, thoughtful inventory of My Life to Date. I divided it up as such:
Things I Can Do.
-Make dolls.
-Bead.
-Knit.
-Hoard the supplies for all three.
-Force golden retrievers to love me better than anyone else
-Read books and talk about them
-Make fun of people, especially myself, Republicans, and the Olds***
-Be a really good librarian except for the part where you have to deal with the administration and all that officey nonsense
-Tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue.
Things I Can't Do.
-Keep my mouth shut when it is best for my career, relationships with others, or personal safety
-Geometry, or any other form of math beyond basic arithmetic
-Science
-Understand what goes on in the minds of mean, selfish people****
-Eat beets, or watch other people do so
-Kill spiders*****
-Go back to school, ever, because I loathed every single second of it from kindergarten on. Well, not every single second. Just the bits in the classroom. Recess, lunch, and residential life at college...those were fun.
Things I Would Like to Do Before Joining My Savior Jesus Christ In His Holy Kingdom.
-Not be struck down by lightning for laughing so hard at myself when I write things like that
-Live in Bloomington again
-Possibly get some self confidence back. Oh, and sanity. Might as well shoot for the goddamn moon.
-Figure out a way to support myself that does not involve walking on eggshells 99% of the time, meaning, not in an office environment, or, frankly, any environment that contains other humans on a daily basis with whom I must get along, respect, and try not to piss off just by existing
-Live a creative lifestyle....and by creative I do NOT mean multiple sexual partners of varying genders, recreational drug use, tattooing the living shit out of myself, or being so green that I must use my own thumb to wipe. Not that there's anything wrong with any of those things, even though none of them appeal to me except the first one. I just mean that I want my life to center around creating art, instead of having art be the thing I do when I've done all the other stuff I "have" to do.
-Marry rich
Things I Would Rather Join the Republican Party and Attend Church Regularly Than Do
-Join the Republican party
-Attend church at all
-Stop making fun of Republicans
-Spend one second in a library building as an employee ever again. Unless it is my own private library completely owned and operated by me, and we call those "independent bookstores" and they're about as rare as a tea party Democrat these days
--Own a home ever again
and last, but strangely, not least,
How The Fuck Am I Going To Ever Support Myself With No Skills, Training, or Ability to Deal With People Outside My Immediate Family.
??????
Naturally, after looking at My Life, I had a little nervous breakdown and had to stay in bed re-reading the entire Little House series****** for a week.
But then, armed with the knowledge that almost anything in life can be fixed by making a pie and listening to Pa play the fiddle, I actually had some realizations. I know. It was like giving birth, as a matter of fact. Only worse because I didn't get any drugs to help with the pain.
----I never wanted to leave Bloomington in the first place. I didn't want to go away to college, and I didn't want to move away again after I spent many useless years in grad school here. I have known this since I was a teenager, but I never listened to it. I thought it was so much more important to Have a Career that I just told myself that living here again was Impossible. And I liked lots of things about living in Ohio. But most of the things I liked about it [besides the bead and yarn shopping] were things I liked because they reminded me of Bloomington in some way. Hippie neighborhoods. Trees. Universities. A variety of foreign food, although, unlike here, all those restaurants were NOT conveniently located on one street.
And you can certainly see what good use I've put that Vassar degree to, sitting here in the middle of the day whinging and whining on my blog.
My Realizations:
-----The main things I am good at are making dolls and being a smart ass. Really, really good at them.
-----These are not huge profit-making skills
-----I'm also a very good teacher. I love beading, and I'm good at it. Not as good as I am at dolls, but still, not too shabby. But I am a great beading teacher. For some reason, with students, I have the patience that I lack in pretty much every other area of life. Every time my family hears that my students think I am the "most patient teacher ever", they fall about in hysterics and need to be revived with well placed smacks.
----If I am going to ever try and make a living with art, I am going to have to totally freeload off other people for a while to get started. I mean, even more than I already was freeloading, which was completely. And since I had [have] not yet married a wealthy person, that left my parents. Who had actually been encouraging me to move in with them for quite a while.
Oh my god I am so long winded and annoying even to myself. I must go soothe my savage beast of a brain with some reality TV and perhaps a Judy Blume book.
* More than 12, if you have it on DVD with no commercials, I must add.
** Whoa. I wonder if it is on iTunes? Then I could put it on my iPhone!!!
*** My parents. They don't like me to use their names, talk/write about them at all, and especially not on the Internet. One out of three isn't bad.
****Sometimes, I just get tired of writing out the word "Republican"
***** No. I'm not afraid of them. I just read Charlotte's Web one too many damn times.
******This is what I do when I can't do anything else. I don't know why, and please don't ask me to analyze it, for Christ's sake.
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