Rambling out

Headed out of home for no big reason in particular.  The place was a mess: two unruly (one more unruly than another) teenagers romping around the house, one hijacking the piano with his somewhat-self-learned prowess that cannot comprehend the keyboard and taking down the whole house with the noise and the broken repertoires that are almost unbearable, to the extent that I would never listen to the certain classical music that it happens to be a victim of.  There is more than one; I just do not know the name of the scores, or the mere mentioning of the names will keep me awake at night.

The coffeeshop in which I am in right now is not very much better, either.  The raucous, poorly played scores on the piano is substituted with the soul music turned up a little too high.  It is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but I was never a big fan of loud places.  I came here to do… what, exactly?  I dropped off something I have sold on eBay (you would not believe the things people would buy if you offered) and as I did not want to simply go back home and listen to the kids yelling and piano thumping, here I am, with a vague plan but not specific ones.  Despite the music and lack of Internet, the place is actually quite bearable, with air conditioning set almost just right (the place is actually a little chilly, which I think is just enough to keep me from falling asleep) and power plug conveniently located near the free seat.

What did I come here to do?  I roamed around the bookshelves after getting a cheap cup of iced coffee, the bitterness of too much beans in the filter basket dampened—in all too subtle a manner—by the half-and-half, which I am sure was more than how much I should have put and tastes like it has been out for one too many hours.  Manga I have been waiting for is here, for a few months in fact; the HTML book I looked for last time is still missing in action; and the book Eat This, Not That! continues to tempt me with its unique mix of concise information and voice that refuses to keep me bored.  Well, the layout and color pictures probably have something to do with it as well, but content is ultimately what matters, I think.  Then I realized that I vowed earlier this month that I would not buy anything unnecessary until I got a job (never mind the iced coffee, I need the caffeine if I were to have a day remotely productive), and as for JavaScript and HTML, well, I remembered that the library, in in its infinite wisdom of being funded by my tuition and by the state government subsidies, I have access to the relatively good source for learning the computer codes for no cost.  Well, it is probably not free; I have partially paid for it, is all.

But that does not answer the question; why am I here?  I have no real intention to buy a book, but I have the 40% off coupons.  I also have a couple of almost-filled Moleskine notebooks, some printouts for jobs, and binder from the old career service program I have taken a few months back.  I also have a journal, probably to serve as a first draft material for this—but it has not been used like that.  Perhaps, then, it would be good idea to ponder about the future while I do not have anything better to do.  But then, I have to fill out an application for Delta (I appear to be on the short list for summer job, or… well, I can dream, right?) when I get home (remember, no Internet, and I need to do this online) and other jobs, I probably have little hope for.

It appears that I do not have much to do here.  Perhaps I should just go home…?

Next steps

Had another meeting with career advisor a few hours ago.  It was not bad, what with talking about making connections with people in the fields of my interest and thinking of whether computer science or CIS is better for me (shocking: they are about evenly matched, in a way).  I have a plan—a list of things to do—written out here.  Hopefully I will get on with it and do more things than what I usually do.

Right now, I am not sure about how to make phone calls.  My advisor—oh, for crying out loud, let’s call her Stacy for the sake of convenience (I will henceforth call her Stacy throughout the blog, as I know no other Stacys)—wants to keep calling people over the phone as a practice to real-life situations; she tells me that it would be better for me to do so right now to get used to it, than for me to get out into the real world just to fail because I have not had any experiences with phone calls.  She is right—I should begin giving phone calls.  How about making myself more comfortable with talking first?  I know that I have made some mistakes over the past, and much would have been remedied if I had better conversational skills.  And I had better build up those skills and practice pronunciations quickly, too; Stacy went ahead and contacted a bunch of alumni with computer science and CIS majors.

I have so much things to do, and that is not counting the job hunt.  Amazing.

Training, but which one?

It has been a few weeks since I began taking a break from the job as a “sales associate” at that “sandwich place.”  While I am bored pretty much all the time from staying at home all the time, I am easily able to find something to do.  I could be playing a game or two, or I could be surfing a web, shopping for a certain something that I really should not be shopping for. 

Losing the only source of income is pretty terrible, really, even when one lives in his parents’ house and do not have a traditional “bill” to pay; what I lack in home mortgage or car payment or utility bills, I make up for the credit card debt that I have accumulated over the past few years, owing to the fact that I have been living beyond my means—and that does not take much when the biweekly paycheck during the time in which I have taken up most of my debt was something along the lines of $130.  Can you blame me?  I worked with rather small hourly pay (but at least above the minimum wage) for the measly 8 hours a week.  It was a cushy job, sure, but it just did not have enough hours.

Now, I am looking for another job to pick up the slack and such.  Career advisor has been helpful to meet with, albeit a little… how can I say this, becoming less and less effective?  She seems to have reached her limit of effectiveness.  Nonetheless, thanks to her, my major has (once again) narrowed down to computer science and computer information systems (CIS).  That was predictable, seeing as I did not want to transfer (“who would want a student that is a fifth-year undergraduate?” is what I told my advisor) and I really did not want to give in and take my leave and go for a vocational school instead (it simply looked like a colossal waste of time and money).  With that in mind, and with the thoughts on the skills I currently have, I began searching for jobs, part-time and otherwise.

Let me say that it did not go quite as planned.  The initial search was actually better than expected:  from the school’s in-house career search engine, I actually was somewhat fruitful in finding the jobs.  The problem from it, though, was this:  the jobs that I thought I was qualified for… well, they are not, really.  English tutoring jobs require me to graduate and hold some kind of degree first.  IT jobs generally expect me to know SQL or PHP (usually both).  And other jobs… they look pretty good on the surface, but I am sure they are competitive positions with many others applying for the same thing.

This prompted me to go ahead and look for some books.  What I am talking about are, of course, training books—the dime-a-dozen books (except a hell of a lot more expensive) about computer languages and such.  Here is where I am split.  So far, I figured that I need to learn HTML (which I know already, kind of, but am really rusty), CSS (also rusty), PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript, and there is also the issue of going through a kind of crash-course of MS Office.  I have a lot to do.

So where to start?  I have a hell of a lot of things to do aside from this, too—I need to turn in my resume to a lot of prospective companies.  I have to set up a server, look for jobs or internships—it is almost overwhelming.

I am tempted to lie down and think about things later, but that can only work for so long…

It’s a strange day when….

… you find a post office out of nowhere,

eat in a complete stranger’s house,

and trigger an alarm that once belonged to an old lady that owned the car before me.

 

The thing’s still ringing in my ear. Enough excitement for one day?

Out of job and looking for another

I am sitting around the library again, after meeting with the career advisor.  I suppose the whole fiasco with choosing major is drawing to a close:  it is back to CS or CIS.  A bit of discussion ensued: does it really matter which course I should consider?  The advisor tells me that, ultimately, it is the skills they expect from a job candidate, not the degree or prestige; “how able are you,” if I may.  Seeing as how I am rather pressured to get to the graduation and out of the house, I am tempted to simply stick to biology and graduate; with about a year of keeping away from the field, however, would do nothing good about it, nor would it work when the last class I took was a disaster with failing grades.  So, biology is out.

This is based on the little table that I filled out earlier.  Sure, it was quite simple and did not have some things that I valued (environmentalism?), it gave me a general things of interest and general fields of interest, and had them mix and match.  Of those, three were out—but only based on whether or not the school offered it, which is not quite a good idea to do, but I had to have some kind of constraint or I would not be making any decisions whatsoever.

There, we also talked about the summer jobs.  Of part-time jobs or internships, she said that internship was better thing to do, but it is also something that is harder to get, due to the fact that I am in a transition period and also I have acted a little too late.  So, I have a few summer and part-time jobs on hand that I could do, and it is basically for me to decide.  She did help me with the resume (and what to do with it), and suggested that I talk to some people in the fields of interest.

So, why a job?  At first, I wanted to find a second job to supplement the first part-time job at the sandwich shop with ever-dwindling hours.  Now, though, the job is all but gone for the summer, prompting me to get a new one that can replace it.  Seeing as I still have not taken care of the debt that I have, it is a good choice for me to keep working.  It would have been better if I did not go to school and instead took some time off, but here it is.  Job market is supposedly very though, though; I was surprised to see any job openings at all.  Does this mean that I am going to meet hellish amount of competition?  Oh boy.  I did not want that at all.

Whatever.  I need to keep working, and that is what I will do.  What to do at home… fix the resume, personalize them for companies, and send them off.  Call the IT department at school, ask them about internship or part-time job.  Inquire about the job at College of Law.  Contact the professors I had this year.  This will be a busy week, or what is left of it.

Paths of resistance

The way I have lived so far can be best described as “the path of least resistance.”  I had an enlightenment of this—an epiphany, if you will—while browsing through the college library’s selection of periodicals.  The aisles of shelves showcased many; some were magazines, many of them of popular variety (although, as I think of it, I cannot find any gossipy stuff like People), while others were scholarly journals that looked more at home in its surrounding environment, as this is, after all, a college library, although of community kind.  Some of them tried to blur the boundaries of the two, or at least perceived so, such as Journal of Popular Culture.  Perhaps I should look into it.

What caught my eye in the middle of browsing, though, was a journal from another college—the university that I go to:  Five Points.  Named after a probably historic but overall insignificant area in downtown where modernized business area meets the downtrodden slums, it is one of the two literary publications by the English department.  Needless to say, I pay no heed to it, considering it inferior to other journals that have better name recognitions and, arguably, better content.

Unlike normal times in which I would just pass by without a second thought, I picked it up.  It did not appear to be read much, especially in comparison to more popular magazines like Road and Track.  Nonetheless, it made me think:  could I be good enough writer to have a presence in a journal like this?

By no means am I a good writer, even though I appear to be a decent one compared to my peers; it is probably to compensate for my communication skills from hell.  Or it could be just that I have been hanging around those who simply look terrible on paper, of which their resumé would be ridden with typos and wrong formats.  Perhaps if I went to a better university with people that dazzled me with brilliance (and I mean intellectually, not with terrible glitters and fake tans), things would have been different, and I would have been more eager to catch up with my peers.  And this is when I wonder with the what-if scenarios.

And that thought, in turn, reminded me of the YouTube video of a late professor’s last lecture.  Called “How to achieve your childhood’s dream,” among the things he said was that the “brick wall”—figurative term for obstacles that are in the way for achieving such goals—exists to keep those who do not want something badly enough out of it.  While this, the Five Points, was nothing really, I found myself wondering, is this it, did I not want to be a writer badly enough?  From the look of my actions, I did not.  In fact, I did not want anything badly enough.

Now, summer comes, after the spring semester that was not 100 percent successful but still satisfactory enough.  Do I know yet what I want?  Perhaps I have been simply looking at what I wanted all along, which stifled me… I was only looking at the past to get a glimpse of what I am inclined toward.  Sadly, it does little in helping me decide; I only did things in ways that they were “good enough,” which may explain my slips and falls and wondering where I have gone wrong, when in fact it is not where, but how, I have gone wrong… and that is by inaction, lack of motivation, and generally wanting no more than taking an easy way out, going out in comfort while taking small risks that do not matter and will not help me get ahead yet give me illusion that I am doing something with my life, only to throw those away when things start going wrong, seemingly impossible to overcome.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here, or at least a question to be answered.  And here is the million dollar question (which can actually be literal, given time and thinking of jobs that were not but are out of reach):

What do I want badly enough to jump over the perceived brick wall and get it?

Conflicting emotions

Classes are nearing an end. Have I mentioned that before? I have taken a final exam today—it was an online exam, done with one hand on the book and another on the mouse—and while 54 out of 60 was not as well as I have hoped to do, it was still all right, enough to keep me in the A territory.  This is a far cry from how I did a year ago; out of four courses that I have taken, I had two F’s, a D, and a C+.  It was a shameful experience, and while much of them were challenging courses, with two of them being an upper-level biology courses and one of them organic chemistry, the D was from an introductory neurobiology course that should have been a breeze.  In fact, I am sure everyone but me got an A in the course… the shame still lingers.  It made everything crash down around me, and I have since taken a scenic route out of the college life—scenic, slow, but hardly eventful.

This first A, though, could signal a turnaround, which I hope it does.  While the classes are nowhere near the classes a year ago, getting high grades have to count for something.

The day went rather downhill from there, though.  I have lost my wallet since yesterday afternoon (which was on a computer case… long story), cannot find my key, and all of my parents have been asking me about my summer plan.  It is understandable, asking about the summer I could very well spend loitering around.  Terrible thing, that is.  They also asked me about what I will do as my major… that would have helped me with internship that might come my way, so I said “somewhere in IT field,” which was true but I have honestly not decided yet.  Oh boy.  Then there is an issue of a job… how am I alive in this economy again?

 

I have been doing a few things to keep myself from going insane as of late.  I have done a lot of things… let’s see, I have gone to the Centennial Olympic Park, which I have never been to despite the fact that I have been living in the city for a decade…

…and I have unwittingly stumbled onto a gem of a camera at an estate sale.

I will write more about them later; look forward to it.

Tackling procrastination?

Today was another disappointing day.  Granted, the day is not yet over, but it might as well be; after the class that ends in 9:45, I would have to go to sleep, get up at 6:00, and prepare for the presentation that will pretty much dictate my grade in the class (which would either swing between A and B… but anyhow).  There was an extra credit opportunity for the class that I will be attending in less than one hour, which is something I probably could have done in about an hour or two but is now lost.  Granted, it was only for 15 points (nothing when you consider the grade involved in that class is 500 points), but it would have been nice to get a little cushioning for my grades.  I am probably cutting too close for an A right now; I need to get at least 120 out of 130 for getting an A.  A-, though (damn you and your plus-minus scales, damn you to hell, except you are a university and you have no soul), I can take easily, with 100 out of 130.

This has been a problem of mine for the longest time.  I always put things off until the last minute… I generally do not care for anything until it is almost too late.  What would be going in my head when I slack off?  …is what my mother would say.  Frankly, I do not know.  Usually the procrastination is fueled by perceived urgency to do other things, or by pure lethargy—I succumb easily to drowsiness—and when I do things like playing games, it is either for letting out the inner frustrations (and as I am not the best guy at playing games, sometimes it works the other way and I quit even more spent than when I started—waste of time AND energy with NO stress relieved? Sucks!).  Of course, these do not account for the random times when I find a neat webcomic and just decide to consume over four hours looking through 300 pages of backlog… I have not read the Dinosaur Comics and Achewood in its entirety for a reason.  To look at those takes commitments.

I would look at ways to defeat procrastinations every now and then (when it is not fueled by sleep).  So far, though, I have not come up with anything except for the fact that this is inherent, I lack discipline, and I am hopelessly lazy when I have no certain goal that must be reached in the next thirty minutes.  I know that there is no magic pill for anything—remember, I was a runner, and I did not get fit (or unfit, for that matter) overnight—but I wish I had some kind of regimen to stick with.

Freeing from shackles

Many strange things are going around in my head.  I find it hard to concentrate; it has been a rough week or two, with harder projects and homework showing up one by one, with the hardest yet to come in a week or two.  It is all right, everything will be fine, that is what I tell myself, I have had harder times, it is much better than waiting like a swine in a pen, waiting to be slaughtered any day now when you know that  everything has been decided and it is simply a matter of when you will see yourself failing like you did a year ago.

I hate to admit it, but I did come a long way from where I was a year ago.  This hellhole, this aftermath of courses that left my GPA in shambles and the turmoil that gained me a girlfriend but betrayed the trust of family… how is it better?  It is hard to explain, but I will try to.

Until the end of the spring semester a year ago, I was basically shackled to my major.  By then, my GPA has already been sagging; there was no need for me to go for dental or pharmacy school, even though I knew that I would not like going to either to begin with.  That is the funny thing with your mind—even though you know things are not going to work out, even though this is not what you want to do… you go ahead and do it anyway, hoping that everything will work out as you would hope—or rather, everything will work out somehow as you progress through the ranks, or at least the course requirements.  Yes, I am still a biology major, if in name only; what does it make me, with physiology concentration (I should at least have change my concentration; I cannot stand looking at pictures of human body), then?  It truly was a pointless thing to have.  Neurobiology or even microbiology could have worked out better.  And working has had its merits, too… if only for being more comfortable with strangers during the job.  I probably will never have another sandwich wraps after I stop working at where I am working now, but the boss is nice (or I probably would have been fired by now) and I am earning some money—at least enough to get me through the days.

But is that all?  I am afraid so.  Some street smarts and social skills will not get you anywhere, especially when you have learned only a bit of them via working behind the counter.  It is obviously beyond my comfort zone, but what can you do?

At least I am out of the major.

Currently I am looking to get some part-time work or internship.  With my faltering GPA and limited knowledge and social links, it will be hard… but this is a grave that I have dug, so I must find a way out.

I also have a post about the childhood coming.  I am assuming that it should help me find out just why or how I turned out like this.

Speaking from the shadows: unsent letter 1

This is a letter that won’t be sent to my girlfriend, due to the content that is… not very suitable and might be detrimental to the relationship.  I shall name her “Maggie.”

Maggie--

How’s it been?  I’m writing as I told you after chatting on the IM earlier.  Nothing quite like a letter written from the motivation.

I’m not sure of what I’m doing right now.  What… are we doing, exactly? Are we serious about this and that, or is this but a fleeting love, just in a phase?  We are getting along nicely right now, but both of us know that the status quo will not last, and we must decide, once and for all, what we will do with our lives.

Of course, we won’t decide that right now; at least I don’t think so, as I believe neither of us is really qualified to do so right now.  Coming stateside for graduate school is fine.  Relationship is fine. My family also seems reasonably happy that I have a legitimate girlfriend (they even told me to bring you over sometime).  But, at the same time, you tried to look for a job in the  country; I am sure that it means you do not want to leave where you have lived the whole life.  Seeing as I do not want to leave America as well (I would rather take my gamble of life here than there), there is obviously a conflict of interest… do you know where I am going with this?

I am tired, so I will end things for now.  Love you.

Tom