Some reflections.

24Dec07

So it’s been a strange Christmas season. Christmas Eve is typically my favorite holiday, being this awesome day of height of advent/anticipation. Fortunately, Christmas this year is a week long in my family.

Because it doesn’t even feel like Christmas Eve to me. Or Christmas. First of all, I get too frustrated and annoyed and routinized at church to focus on “the reason for the season” and all that. I need to just freaking go to church where I want to go to church. My spiritual life is way more important than avoiding questions and grief from other people. Second, I haven’t played my French horn at all. That = Christmas, in my aural cavities anyway… or something.

I’ve been listening to Christmas music since October, but honestly, if I hadn’t been in charge of the holiday eCard at ChaCha, I wouldn’t have been in any kind of a holiday mindset.

My job search over this past year has been an interesting one. Frustrating interesting. Remember all of my posts over the summer about the numerous ways a person (er, me) could be rejected? (And I never even wrote about the recall of my second-round Google interview). Apparently, the list can keep growing. Frustrating, I think, because my standards are so high. Which is good, I guess. In a way. All through my education, my goal was to land a career I would enjoy, and be successful with, and feel purposeful about… because you spend way too much of your life working to be satisfied having it any other way, in my mind. And while I do believe that job exists, and I also believe I’m in exactly the right place for that job… I just may be a bit too early. Or maybe it was the right time and I just have to wait it out a bit longer.

And I’ve never been big on the whole “it’s a new year” thing… but I do feel like change (for the better) is going to happen this year. The sudden “end of my internship”, or should I say “end of internship: part 1 of __”, while abrupt and unexpected and temporarily/unintentionally upsetting, I feel is simply going to be a pivotal date whereby my role in the company (and my role in the world) takes a turn towards the purposeful and defined (as opposed to the random and fill-in-the-blank). I’ve semi-quit (as in probably) my weekend job to give myself room to grow. And by grow, I mean

  • time to organize my life
  • time to research things I’m thinking about but don’t feel right doing on company time
  • time to read and think and learn and draw and create for myself
  • time for a social life for once (provided I can learn to be social, whatever that even means)
  • time to fill in my own blanks

About the car that I will probably be losing? I found my replacement. While I’m not in the ideal auto-financing position, since I bought my Mac with the plan that my car would get me through at least the Spring (who plans things? why?), it is possible. With my dad’s help, I’ve found a great deal on an ‘05 Jeep Liberty that I will love for a very long time.

P.S. I forgot about my Office Hours tonight. I hope no one came. Panera was probably closed anyway.


Filed under: ChaCha, Eddie, church, creative, job   |  6 Comments

6 Responses to “Some reflections.”  

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  1. 1 2amsomewhere on December 25, 2007 said:

    One small administrative note… The link to the ChaCha e-card is a redirection link from the web interface to an Outlook mail server. For most of us unauthenticated and unauthorized mortals, clicking on the link will take use to a login page for the web mail site. You might want to edit the link so it uses this for the href attribute:

    http://akhost.chacha.com/files/ecard/holidayECard.html

    As someone who did two interviews with Do-No-Evil

    Interview 1 (scoll down to Powerball)
    Interview 2
    Rejection

    I’d love to hear about your own experiences with their human resources machinery.

    BTW, a Merry Christmas unto you!

    –
    2amsomewhere

    Reply
  2. 2 Hannah on December 25, 2007 said:

    Fixed. I was suspicious of that link when I copied it out of my e-mail and put it in there…

    I’ll write about that Do-No-Evil recall after my next set of interviews with them (if/when that happens)… nothing too elaborate… I was invited to be flown to Ann Arbor office one day last Spring, and a couple of days later, they recalled that invite. (Kind of a downer.)

    Reply
  3. 3 2amsomewhere on December 25, 2007 said:

    I’ve never had an interview pulled out from under me like that, but in mid-October I did have the joy of being “Delta Dawned”[1] by a local lead, a company up in the northeast burbs that originates and services student loans. I was about 2/3 of the way through the interview when I was notified that the hiring for the position was on hold indefinitely and that they hoped to resume the search after the beginning of the year. Given that the problems that gave rise to the freeze have only gotten worse over the past week, I’m glad I didn’t hold out for them.

    –

    [1] — a country crossover hit first recorded in the early 70s by Helen Reddy and then later covered by Tanya Tucker

    Reply
  4. 4 Hannah on December 25, 2007 said:

    This time you have a link problem. :) Your Delta Dawned link leads nowhere.

    Reply
  5. 5 Angela on December 25, 2007 said:

    “time to read and think and learn and draw and create for myself ”

    w00t.

    Reply
  6. 6 2amsomewhere on December 25, 2007 said:

    This time you have a link problem. :) Your Delta Dawned link leads nowhere.

    Touche! :-) Looks like I’ve got an anchor without an href attribute. How sloppy of me! Here is the correct link:

    Delta Dawn

    Lyrics to the song may be found here.

    –
    2amsomewhere

    Reply

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