Sunday, July 18, 2010

armed!

I am now taking the following vitamins/supplements:

--Women's One-a-Day multivitamin;
--Vitamin C;
--Stress Vitamin B Complex;
--"Heart and Stress Defense" Fish Oil;
--L-Lysine

QED:

I am so ready for combat. I have a general multivitamin, two extra-strength, anti-stress vitamins, lysine to destroy my cold sore & prevent future ones from forming (maybe?), and Vit-C for a further boost to the immune system. I should have an enhanced mood, glowing skin, a healthy heart, and maximized energy.

Maybe it's a placebo effect, but I do feel lighter.

Though yesterday (before purchasing half of these wonderdrugs!) I was feeling pretty crappy. F. and I drove to Niles to look at a car he's thinking of buying (a tiny, barely used convertible) and as he was looking at it my mother called to unload her usual load: health problems, marital problems, job woes, financial issues, and do I have a job yet? It was depressing, as usual. And it had the usual effect of making me feel clueless and irresponsible. F. picked it up on the drive back (he sniffs out my bad moods immediately and then pounces relentlessly, like a bloodhound). When he asked what was wrong I explained, and he made me feel better by pointing out two things:

1) "Honestly, most of those things are your mother's problems--not yours."

and

2) "You're doing what you need to be doing. You're doing it right. And you're only 22--this is too much stress for 22."

And then he helped me formulate an afternoon plan (write 2 cover letters) and I calmed down. And realized that it's true--I need to both become more combative and motivated, and less wracked with despair and stress, as per my age. I am going to stop thinking of time as my enemy and try to get more creative (informational interviews, more investigation, looking for contacts in the alum network, etc.) -- and look for ways of staying involved and interested in my free time. And I'm going to stop being so alarmed and paralyzed.

And I'm going to take my vitamins.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

this is not eustress.

I decided to do nothing involving job applications today.

I made this decision because the stress of all this stuff has been utterly palpable lately. I have been grinding my teeth, and clenching my jaw tightly enough and for long enough that it feels consistently sore. I have been generally unpleasant and whiny to an obnoxious degree. And Monday morning, a cold sore appeared on my upper lip.

I am not a particularly vain person, but getting a cold sore, about the one time a year it happens (curiously, I have come to realize, once every July for the past three years), makes me utterly miserable. It is an aesthetic wake-up call. I can think about almost nothing else. When I speak to others, I envision myself reflected as not a human with a cold sore, but as a leper, a bleeding, oozing, warty, oily, physical manifestation of disease and horror. Yes; it is actually almost this dramatic. I stay inside as much as possible and avoid human contact. I apply miracle goop hourly. Right now that's Abreva, which promises to speed healing time and claims a median healing time of 4.1 days (key word median and not average). It seems to actually be working. Tomorrow is Day 3.

I am the sort of person, I have realized, who is less stressed by actual, stressful, targeted events than by much grander, more complicated things. For example, I can handle having two midterms within a week. It will create manageable stress. I can handle the first day of an internship, the first date, the awkward family reunion. I might be a little sweaty and uncomfortable, but I know the parameters.

But the state of my life right now? Few stressful scenarios, but plenty of omnipresent, existentially torturous stress.

Let's take an inventory:

-Just graduated from an excellent university, with honors, but jobless.
-Although not completely jobless. I have the extension of my unimpressive, tedious library job throughout the summer. I do one of the same, like, seven repetitive tasks every day. I look at the clock frequently and end the day exhausted. This job expires at the end of the summer.
-With my remaining time, despite being exhausted, have tried to work on resume and cover letters and have been edited and edited and edited. Feel paralyzed in my approach to any job. Motivation feels beyond my capability right now.
-Lease ends September 1. No concrete plan for a living situation after this.
-Unstable, casual relationship with adorable Frenchman. (Usually, a drain on stress. Unless we have a fight because he tells me I "move a lot" at night which disrupts his precious sleep, which prompts me to ask "Do you even want me in your bed? Why are you even dating me?" and crawl out of his bed and prepare to leave while he says, looking perplexed, "I think this is a misunderstanding...")

I have no idea what I'm doing. It's like I'm navigating my way through a dark hallway and doing everything wrong. I want to apply for jobs but it's unbelievably time-consuming, and I can barely pull together a decent phrasing to prevent my poor, beleaguered application materials from being thrown in the trash.

Mostly, though, I see discrepancies between who I am and who I want to be. I am uninspired, terrified, apparently talentless, somewhat spineless, and without a plan. Clearly without confidence. I am unrecognizable to myself. I am envisioning a future unfolding, a future of jobs I don't care about, jobs I would take anyway because they would have me. Jobs like the one I have now, where I would spend all my time looking at the clock, contributing in pointless and tedious ways to something I ultimately don't really care about. Being a cog in a machine: always replaceable.

This is the great, horrific existential stress weighing on me. It is literally my future. And it is here. I am paralyzed in the headlights of my future.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Haiku for Kinko's

pay-by-the-minute
the glacially slow scanner
drains money from me

copy machine hums
piled-up papers convince me
I am productive

giant on the screen:
my story in PDF
false professional?

Monday, July 12, 2010

sweet frustration.

Writing a resume and then showing it to different people is like decorating a room and then asking all your friends' opinions.

Friend 1: "It's nice, but couldn't you paint it a lighter color? It would open it up more."
Friend 2: "Nice idea, but maybe a few shades darker."
Friend 3: "Too much art on the walls."
Friend 4: "Maybe you should paint it all white and then just paint that one there as an accent wall."
Friend 5: "The whole thing kind of... doesn't go together."
Friend 6: "You need more art on the walls."
Friend 7: "It's too well-balanced, maybe add some new elements."
Friend 8: .....need I go on?

I have been "working on my resume" for hours and hours these past couple weeks, in what feels like a sort of deeply unfun, fruitless abandon. Changed the font, the formatting, the lines in bold, the verbs, the amount of writing, the information. Changed it again. And again. Showed people. Problems brought to my attention. Incorporated changes. Showed people. More problems brought to my attention. Finally the critiques are starting to wind down, and it's admittedly looking a lot better. But my confidence in my ability to put together anything professional? Well... I sort of feel like I should really be applying to Subway and 7/11, at this point.

I'm like an unbroken dog. I keep peeing on the carpet, and then my nose is whacked and I am brought outside and made to look at the grass. But then I come inside and pee on the carpet again.

I don't get it. Nothing about applying for jobs is intuitive to me. Other things are not intuitive to me either: playing the drums, break dancing, interacting with someone whose parent has just died. But applying for jobs? That's something I need to GET. It's my next step. It's muh bread and muh butter.

But everyone has a strongly informed and different idea of What's Good and What's Terrible, as does every person hiring. I have looked at some sample resumes that strike me as atrocious. I have seen graceful phrasing scrapped for greasier, inflated phrasing. All this exercise is really telling me is how dizzyingly subjective the whole process is. It's a big crap shoot, based partially on the emotional flarings that occur in the brain of the boss when she scans my resume, partially on my actual experience, and largely, I think, on whether and how well I know her cousin.

It is a little frustrating. A little chaotic. A little enlightening. A little nauseating.

Very "Real World."

Monday, July 05, 2010

overdose.

It turns out that when F. has extra time, he likes to spend it with me. As in, I have spent the last four nights and most of the past five days with him. The boy is a Boyfriend, with a capital-B. He's in the lab, he's out of the lab, he's in my bed, he's back in the lab, he's kissing me in the kitchen, he's back in the lab, we're in a park, we're at a party, there's another bed, he's in the lab, he's texting me, we're eating dinner, we're eating breakfast, we're brushing our teeth, he's kissing me in his kitchen.

Three months into the relationship, with a generous two-three week break, and this has somehow become a dizzy world of inseparability. He texts for dinner and I welcome him. He emails in the morning and shows up in the night. The lab separates us and we're back together, wherever. It's not passionate enough for this, and so I don't really know what we're doing. What I do know is I have trouble saying no. And so tonight--dinner at his place with his lab friend and her amiable Swedish couchsurfer--I was determined to lay down the law and say, "I'm sleeping at my place tonight, dear." I would have control!

So imagine my frustration when, as we're driving to his place, he gently says, "If it's okay, I think I'd like to sleep alone tonight. I really need the sleep."

That was MY LINE.

This was said as a sort of churning illness was coming upon me, one of those no-food-all-day-but-lots-of-coffee toxic stomach things. And so I was becoming literally sick to my stomach, irritated that I couldn't even take control because he beat me to the chase, and was stumbling into a situation with him and his friends. It became too much. I wanted to be alone. I curled in a ball on his couch as he made crepes in the kitchen. I looked dazed. I got up for water and curled back up. Nausea. Nausea. Effing coffee.

He checked on me every so often. "What's wrong?" he plied, touching the back of my neck gently. "Is this because I said I wanted to sleep alone tonight?" He asked this softly, with concern. Well, sort of, darling, but only because I wanted the upper hand. And the coffee, aaugh, the coffee. Remind me never to drink coffee again.

Eventually the friends came, I ate half a crepe, and because he wouldn't let me drive home in my moaning, nauseous state, I took to his room and lay in his bed, miserable. Every so often the door cracked open and in he came, feeling my forehead, searching for non-stomach-related issues, saying, at one point, "You can sleep here tonight if you want."

"No," I said. "I want my own bed." (HA!)

And so he submitted to driving me back, sweetly, without complaint, dipping into theatrical French as we approached the apartment. "Pauvre petite.." he cooed, "Trop de cafe! Oh la la."

And dropped off, alone, sighing in relief, I took a cold shower and came to where I am now -- lying in front of the fan, gratefully in solitude, still feeling toxic but basking in relief on my soft, familiar, wonderful, greenish-gray bedding.

Too much. Too much oxytocin, too much dopamine, too much kissing and compromising on dinner and waking up early while he sleeps on and watching the Mel Brooks-related Youtube videos I Simply Must See. Holy crap. This is an overdose. The girl needs a break.

We have worlds, our own worlds. We'll never lose them. But we have to tend to them.

Mom's First Text Message

(After convincing her somehow to get us Android phones with her Verizon credits.)

"Hi b aby, I am sending you my very first text : )this new phone is incredible,,,a little supercomputer, email,google at your fingertips. I am tetermined to lrarn all of the features.I have 2oo msg a month, you have unlimited to -eri."

...

"Verizon people only and 3oo to other carriers. I love u. Mom"

Thursday, July 01, 2010

finding yourself in the stacks.

Good decision, I think: taking Fridays off (for applying for jobs, I tell myself).

Do you have especially neurotic days? Like, days where you actually feel crazy for a while? Like you pull back the burlap flap of your mind (or the dangling hippie beads, Choose Your Own Metaphor) and enter a territory completely out of touch with your everyday existence? I think this is supposed to be a state one can enter in meditation, but if you work in a job that requires no advanced thought, lots of solitude, and a willingness to engage solely in mindless tedium, you sometimes crawl into this mindspace.

And crawl I did, today. I got so stressed out, I considered the possibility that I might actually have (diagnosable) anxiety. I have thought about this more over the last few years; last year I went through a period over the summer of experiencing an uncontrollable rapid heartbeat, but I figured it was the coffee and it ended when I cut that out. (Odd, because I only stopped for a while and then picked it right back up again, but haven't had the rapid-heartbeat issue. Placebo effect?)

Mostly, it's because I have such intense physical reactions tied to my emotional state. I wonder sometimes if my body is not, in fact, physically oversensitive. Speaking in class, for example, will usually turn my fair-toned face an almost frightening shade of deep red. I get seriously nervous before first dates, even coffee with a new friend, and it sometimes impacts my speech (speaking too fast, mixing words). Along with the red face, of course. My face will turn red at any provocation. A presentation in front of the class--or (my worst nightmare) a skit in a foreign language--will kill me. I will be visibly terrified, and visibly trying not to be so.

There are two really frustrating aspects to my body's quick descent into anxiety.

One: much of this is a psychological condition that feeds into itself. My body thinks: this is a stressful, high-stakes situation. OMG, you know what would make it worse? If you completely forgot what you were doing. If you just went blank. Can you imagine how bad that would be? And then, there I am, staring, stunned, actually distracted by the thought that it would be a horrible time to lose my train of thought. Seriously. I cannot tell you how many times I lose track of what I am doing by becoming literally self-conscious. Suddenly only aware of the fact that I am thinking, breathing, existing. Like the concept of being is so weighty it takes up all the space in my brain for a bit. The knowledge of what there is to lose causes me to compulsively lose it. It's like if you point at a doorway and tell my brain, everything falls apart if you go through that doorway. Then I have to go through it.

(Another especially alarming thought: What words could I scream in this scenario that could completely change this situation and ruin my life? For example, you're in an interview and you say "Penis" or yell "FORKS" or say, quietly and in response to nothing in particular, "Yes." And you are almost certainly immediately not going to get the job. Your ability to damage everything--job prospects, social prospects--is that easily accessible. One word, even whispered. How frightening is that?)

The truth is, this happens a lot, even in situations that are not inherently stressful or give me much to lose, like spending down time with an old friend. I will suddenly shift into a zone of being hyper self-conscious, able to think about nothing except for the fact that I'm thinking about nothing. It's like being the outermost Russian doll, unable to access the stuff inside. Does this happen to anyone else? I would be interested in strategies for either understanding it or defeating it, preferably both.

Two: I never used to be like this. I actually adored being the center of attention as a child, being called on in class, speaking in public, putting myself on the line. And not only was I cool and calm, I was reasonably articulate, even occasionally in off-the-cuff situations. This began to falter slightly in high school, but I really lost this aspect of myself and let anxiety take over in college.

I have seen the comfortable and self-assured part of myself come through on occasion, when I seem to have a mysterious grasp on a relaxed perspective--when I can manage to care about the material far more than the superficial appearance of a situation (to which I am unusually sensitive: long, awkward silences feel painful, and I will deliberately take a different route to avoid interacting with the girl standing in front of the library who wants my credit card info to support gay rights).

For this reason, I don't necessarily think I have diagnosable anxiety. I can somehow access the part of myself that is not anxious, the part that is even a bit risky and attention-seeking. I am the baby of the family: I am naturally attention-seeking. That is not to say I hope to be completely obnoxious, but I long for a consistent comfort in high-stakes situations again.

---

In my crazy state, it became necessary to find scrap paper and a golf pencil and document the figments of thought that fluttered through my head, half-developed, and then escaped out the door. These are the couple of things I wrote over a period of about an hour, if you can follow in any way:

  • "spread love like you're in the last throes of life"
  • "hamster + food pellet"
  • "holding in my head two conflicting scenarios"
  • "no security"
  • "do one thing every day that in no way resembles what you did the day before"
Understand? Yeah, there was a lot of synaptic firing in between each statement. Another thought I had at one point, is that maybe my brain is actually (by virtue of modern life and its accessories) losing the ability for sustained, deep thought. Instead it's thought-thought-thought-thought-thought, a rosary of random thoughts strung together, each only examined as long as another thought doesn't push it out of the way.

For example, the following might be a typical "train" of thought for me:

1. Mn, my contact hurts.
2. Could wear glasses.
3. Feel ugly in glasses.
4. What does this mean, that I feel ugly in glasses? Is it so important, am I that vain?
5. God, I'm vain. I only care about the way I look.
6. But doesn't everybody, kind of? Is this a big secret, is everyone equally vain? Is vanity related to actual, qualitative beauty? Would I be more vain if I were more attractive? Or is it more determined by your personality?
7. To what degree are we able to control our vanity, etc. through perspective? To what degree are we all wired the same?
8. Does wearing glasses make you a cyborg?

And on. And on. I have thoughts, but I don't sufficiently explore any of them. It feels like a fast-flowing river, as opposed to a deep one. This post only serves as an example.

And so, if we're friends, and you happen to notice that I'm being wildly inarticulate, or that I space out momentarily, here's what's going on in my brain.

(I like to theorize, generously, that it's actually going much faster than I can keep up with.)