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…