The Gap
I had a sublime moment earlier today. Something good and important happened, and in the ensuing reassesment of my situation, it dawned on me that I really, really, ought to make a post to my blog.
So here I am.
I make so many mistakes. I am making them almost continuously, and this is funny, because I still get so worked up about each and every one of them. I have little or no capacity to prevent them, but I get worked up about them anyway and get upset and distracted because of it and as consequence make even more mistakes. Sometimes, when I am in a good mood, I start laughing uncontrollably about this. Sometimes the laughing precipitates another mistake.
I have lost track of which information I have and have not diseminated into my thought sink. Some of it I have held back because it requires explanation; some of it I have held back because I am a dork and I want to say it when it will have more impact, like after I have explained why it is important, even if the facts themselves are simple and straightforward and easy to understand.
I do not think that I have yet said that I am living with my father. I am. I have been living with my father since the middle of January. One of the reasons I am doing this is because in my room at my father's house I have great big desk. This is helpful with schoolwork.
I am in a really good mood right now, which is why I cannot sequence my thoughts. It is also why I am writing this so quickly! (I love it when I can write quickly! It is the best feeling I know. Literally. Which is kind of depressing. Which makes me laugh. Which makes me realize I have lost sequence again.)
It is important that things be important, even though they cannot always be so. I have not in the past fully realized the importance of this.
When I was in high school my mother bought me a copy of the book
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. I read some of it. Then a fluke of continuity resulted in me taking the new 'leadership' class my high school's principal was starting, and the book was the class text. So I read it all. Some of the book is good, some is mediocre. A lot of it was completely inapplicable to me. A lot of it was applicable to everyone.
The author of the book was the son of the author of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which you may have of heard of. The son's book was basically the same book, except with youth metaphors.
One of the habits of highly effective people, the second one if I remember correctly, has to do with the management of time. Phrased as a scientific law, it would state that all activities have two traits which determine their priority: Their urgency, and their importance. All activies have a varying amount of both. Urgency is the extent to which an activity is attached to a certain point in time, generally an impending one. Importance is how unable you are to do without perfoming it. Based on whether they have relatively high or low amounts of either, all activities can be separated into four categories. Urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important.
For example, specific television shows are generally urgent, but not important. Because you must watch them while they are on, but you can usually do with out them. Answering the telephone is generally urgent, but not always important. Lots of things are urgent and important; we call them emergencies: Fixing a flat tire; Preparing your IRS Tax Form 1040 on April fourteenth.
The second habit of highly effective people is that 'highly effective' people spend as much of their time as possible doing things which are not urgent, but important. Excercise is not urgent, but important. Your taxes were, until April, not urgent, but important. People who spend more time doing things which are not urgent, but important, manage to head off lots of things which are urgent and important. They also spend less time doing things which are urgent, but not important.
I think this idea has philosophical applications, as well as its practical ones.
Because, there is also the category of not urgent, and not important: Just sitting in front of the television, regardless of what is on, is in this category. That that is neither urgent, nor important, is obvious to most of us even though we do it anyway.
But once you relieve yourself of the illusion that urgency equals importance, you will find that what really is important is not always clear.
Somethings are obviously important. Taxes are obviously important.
Some things are not obviously important. Is my thought sink important?
It is definitely not urgent.
For a while, I felt like I had really quit. Not because I was not writing, but because it did not seem important that I was not writing. Then something good and important happened, and in the ensuing reassesment of my situation, it dawned on me that I really, really, ought to make a post to my blog. I found that moment to be sublime.
The reason that I found that moment to be sublime was that it was about looking forward to beginning a task. It also helped that I had just been put into a good mood. You are less apt to find anything sublime right after your dog has been run over.
My apologies for the painful reminder to anyone whose dog was recently run over.
I said that writing quickly is the best feeling I know. Maybe I got that wrong. Or maybe I was not specific enough.
Writing quickly feels good to me because it means I want to do something and I am able to do it, and I am doing it. Looking forward to beginning a task is about wanting to do something and being able to do it, and doing it.
It is the same thing. It is the best feeling I know.
There was that post I posted, last fall, where I stayed up all night to finish it and did not get any sleep and nearly did not make it through work, but I felt great all the same because I had wanted to do something and been able to do it and had done it. That is the feeling. And the sublime part is looking forward to that feeling.
When you do not look forward to a task- that sucks. That drains you. This does not. I hate my life so much, and I always make mistakes, and I hate my mistakes so much, and there is nothing I can do about them, and I am scared of people and I have shitty, shitty, social skills, and I have failed at almost everything over and over and over again; and so I very rarely look forward to doing anything. I cringe and shy away from challenge. I look forward to not doing. That is how I became a quitter. But I have not yet quit this blog, and I will not. I have to keep saying that, or I am afraid I might.
It is sublime to see a task before me and look forward to tackling it. It is the best feeling I know. It makes me write quickly.
* * *
This post is titled 'The Gap' because it is about the gap between winter and spring quarter at my college. In The Gap, you are between obligations. Nothing is urgent. You have a week and a half between winter finals and the first day of spring quarter. As
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People tells us, most of us lose it in The Gap. My goal, at the start of the gap, was not to lose it. Not urgent, but important.
I intended to write this post at the start of the gap, and explain about that sublime feeling of looking forward to adversity. I did not do that, and it did not seem terribly important at the time, because I was trying to do things which were not urgent but important. I made a lot of other mistakes, too. I did a lot of things that were not urgent, and not important, too. But I got some very important things done, and I found out that they had, in fact, been somewhat urgent. But I could not have found that out unless I had done them.
I did my taxes. I have never done my taxes before, and I did not know where to begin. It took some figuring, since I could not ask my mother or father for help. They insisted they did not know anything about the subject. I figured it, though, and I expect a return of the lordly sum of twenty-five dollars; that is from my wages at Atlanta Bonded Warehouse. Working for my dad is under the table.
I was doing my taxes because my Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) said that completing my tax form would greatly help me fill out my FAFSA. I filled out and sent my FAFSA during the gap, too. That took some doing as well, because it meant that I had to ask my mother how much money she made in the past year. She did not want to think about that.
Then I applied for transfer to a four-year college. That one was the easiest, and it was the one that upset me the most, because it asked me what I had done since I graduated from high school.
I have not done anything worth mentioning since graduating from high school.
I twisted my mother's arm until she sat down and figured out how much money she had made in the past year, and then I twisted her arm some more until she would give me some advice about the college application. She told me I should just put 'I worked'. I did.
The college I applied to is
Georgia Southern University. It has minimal entrance requirements, low tuition, and it is in the middle of nowhere. All in its favor.
I found out, in doing these things, that the GSU deadline for most financial aid was 'postmarked by March 31st'. I had my stuff in the mail a week before then; but it could not have waited, and I would not have known unless I tried to do it. So I am happy about this.
And so my blog did not seem so important. And I started wondering if it was. It can be hard to tell. And it is not like I am doing a good job with it. Is a good book important? Is having a good time with your best friends?
I did not get to looking for a new job during the gap. I spent too much time on my taxes, my FAFSA, and my GSU application. I hedged a lot. I had to collect a lot of information. I was terrified of making a mistake.
Spring quarter classes began on Monday, March 29th. My instructors are an incomprehensibly thick-accented Moscovian refugee for precalculus, an eccentric, frumpy, yet impressively organized woman with... claws... for introduction to psychology, and a young, gregarious, pirate-humored internet entreprenuer for what unexpectedly became a 'hybrid' half on-line, half in-class Compositon and Rhetoric II course.
Last quarter, when I had only one class, and I never got around to posting about it, I had a middle-aged, skinny, shaggy, pimply, heavy smoking, sweater-wearing instructor, with a doctorate, who was very nice to us, but told us that the words 'the', 'a', and 'an' have no real meaning and are interchangeable.
For the entire ten weeks of the class there was a wall clock hanging on the wall above and behind his head, upside-down and tilting slightly, displaying randomly selected times. The instructor had nothing to do with the wall clock. He was only in that classroom for eight hours a week. But I thought it was funny.
My goal for this quarter is study skills. I will need study skills to get through MAT 194 and and ENG 193. I have a lot of goals for this quarter. I might not achieve a lot of them. But that study skills one is a priority.
It is important.
There are a lot of good and bad things about community colleges. One of the good and bad things about community college is that your peers are much older. During the last class, a middle-aged black woman who I had gathered was- and I am not exaggerating- a preacher- handed out business cards to everyone. According to her card, her name is Tincie, and she is, in addition to being a preacher, an 'Employment Marketing Representative' at the
Georgia Department of Labor's Cobb/Cherokee County Career Center. She told us to call her if we needed a job. Tincie is a big woman, with a big voice, and I know this is insufferably cheesy, but she has a big heart too.
Tincie had sat in the front of the class and participated vocally in the discussions. So had I. But we were not even aquaintainces; I did not know her name and she probably had not picked up mine. Neverless I recieved a card from her.
I did not get to looking for a new job during the gap. I was not doing anything last friday, at the end of the first week of spring quarter, so I gave it a go.
I have been to the Career Center before. It has decent job listings for professionals, but for someone unskilled like me it can be pretty frustrating; plus it is a long drive. My resume is pathetic.
But after my last job search I decided that driving to the other side of the county for three or four mediocre leads was less of a waste of time than spending an afternoon filling out applications to places that were not even hiring. I called the number on the card to make sure they were open, and got Tincie herself. She told me to bring a copy of my resume and come on in.
My resume is pathetic. I spent three hours grappling with it, and it was still pathetic, so I gave up and printed out some copies and came on in. When I got there I found out Tincie was not even supposed to be at work that day; I got lucky.
There is an awkward system at the Career Center which I do not want to take the time to fully explain. You look up the listings on the computer, but it does not give you any contact information. To get that you have to select up to three jobs on the computer, and then get in line to see a representative, who takes you to a cubicle and checks to see that you are actually qualified for the jobs, and then gives you the contact information. Getting job listings this way can take a while.
What do you know? I took the time to fully explain it.
Anyway, Tincie came out and found me before I had relearned to use the computer system and picked my three jobs, and sent me in to see a representative without having to wait. She had some particular employer in mind, who was hiring a lot. She said it was a shame that I had not come in the day before when they were at the Career Center, taking applications.
Me going on in kind of messed things up because I had not actually picked listings yet for her to show me, and so I had to go right back out again and relearn the computer system and pick some jobs. But then I got to go right back in again.
To make a long story short, I got three or four mediocre job listings. The best one is for Home Depot; their new landscaping stores are hiring a lot of seasonal workers. I went down there that day and applied.
Funny thing, while I was going through the job listings on the computer, I came across one that I recognized as being from my current employer, Royal Staffing Services. They have not called me with an assignment since February, and I did not even get that one. I made a note to call them and ask them if the listing was bogus, and if it was not, why they were not calling me.
The weekend was a bust. There is a pendulum motion in my level of responsibility; any productive period must be followed by an equally unproductive one.
Have I mentioned that I find looking for a job sickeningly frustrating?
And so my post arrives at today. The beginning of Daylight Savings Time is killing me. I hate Daylight Savings Time. Six months of setting the clock an hour ahead just to trick people into getting up earlier and going to bed earlier.
Ahem. I was saying about today. Let us just say that I am still working on those study skills. I walked two miles, though. Broke a sweat. That was good.
About two o'clock in the afternoon, the white cordless telephone standing upright in the middle of my desk rang. I leaned over to look at it. The built-in caller-id read '
ROYAL STAFFING'.
The nice lady on the other end was calling, unlooked for, to offer me an assignment. Back to Co-Pack, tomorrow morning, bright and early. I took it.
There is a part of me which feels cheapened when I do not choose my own course. I wonder how much of the rest of the world is bothered by this. I am not back in school because I forged resolutely ahead; I am back in school because my mother nagged me incessantly to distraction. Even if I am the one doing all the work. Even if she does not know the first thing about college. She made the decision, I did not. That makes me feel icky inside.
So I am not going back to work tomorrow because I persistently sought out employment. I am going back to work tomorrow because the nice lady noticed my name on the list and remembered it and called me to ask if I was still interested. She made the decision, I did not. That makes me feel icky inside.
And the work is not high-paying. And it can end at any time. And they might tell me that they do not need me after all when I show up tomorrow morning at six-forty five ante meridiem, and send me home.
All the same, I felt really, really good when I got that call. Partly, it could be a lot of things. Partly, it could be that it meant I did not have to keep looking for a job for a while. Partly, it could be that basic human need for acceptance. It feels good to be employed.
But mostly, it was the thought that here was a task which I knew I could handle; A surmountable obstacle. Everything in my life is so goddamned complex. Co-Pack is simple. It is not easy, but it is straightforward. I will pack boxes, for eight hours. And I am looking forward to it. I want to do it and I am able to do it and I will do it. Getting called in was good, and important.
I am still going to follow up on the Home Depot job. That is something not urgent, but important. I am not going to rest on my laurels. (what are laurels?) I am not going to lose it in the gap.
I made myself a turkey and cheese sandwich, on a hoagie bun. It is in the refridgerator, in a brown paper bag, with a Michigan Apple. I have to get up early tomorrow morning, and it is now after midnight. I started writing this post at seven o'clock, in the library at school, and I am finishing it more than five hours later in my room in my father's house. For some reason blogging from this room makes me uncomfortable. I prefer the library, but it closes at nine.
Dad just walked in the door. He was at shule, or the synagogue, because to-night is passover night. He is going to bed. So am I. Sleep is now urgent and important.
May Azrael leave you and all those you hold dear untouched this night, and may you all have good days tomorrow.
Every day I am more and more convinced that everything is connected.
