Being Positive can make you Deny Yourself

Shawn got a job in Austin that he started out liking, but it was hard. So he decided to be positive to make himself get through it. He was positive, but he was also working 70 hour weeks and getting paid as little as $300 and sometime less. In a sense, he was denying who he really was. For what reason, I am not sure, but this weekend he realized that he was not happy with the job. We are both alike in the fact that we are free spirits, and anything that confines our spirit or our ability to think for ourselves makes us unhappy. That’s why I’m so anxious about starting a job in the corporate world. I guess I’ll see if I’m cut out for it. Anyways, being positive in a way can make you deny who you really are. I won’t argue that negativity is not the best way to go either. So many people are pessimistic and have more health problems than positive people. But lying to yourself doesn’t help your health either.
A few weeks later, Shawn quit the job. He was nervous about it, about being without money for a couple of weeks, but I encouraged him to do it because I knew he wasn’t happy. I knew that if he stayed with it, his unhappiness and instability due to his work program would affect our home life. Turns out it was a good thing that he quit- a kind of affirmation, so to say. A couple of days after he quit, his manager and owner of the company was relocated to Canada and the only other reliable person on the team quit as well. I’m not surprised. The company was sketchy and the job was really hard emotionally. Shawn has had a couple of interviews in the last week, and I have no doubt he will find something that he really likes. I’m not worried, but Shawn is. He wants so bad to provide for our needs and make my parents happy. It’s a tough job to do. But I’m proud of him… he’s doing a great job. Right now, all we want is to be a couple and enjoy our life together minus everyone else. It will be great to be married and finally settle for a little while in Austin. I miss him so much when I'm here and he's there. It's just such a let down that I only get to see him for a little while a couple of weekends out of the month. It's weird. I feel one way when he's here and another when he's gone. Not like I'm being a different person, but he makes me so happy. I feel alone when he's gone. I'll be glad when we can be together and I know he will be too. Austin here we come... Then we’ll see where life takes us!

Fragility of life: How marriage makes you feel old and makes life feel short

I had quite a scare last weekend. Shawn surprised me for the shower that we had on April 5th. I was under the assumption that he wouldn’t be in town until late on April 4th, but he arrived around five o’ clock with a bouquet of tulips to surprise me. I was so excited to see him! He always surprises me. I feel like I am a much happier person when he’s around. He just has this way of calming me down and making me feel like everything is ok. Friday night we went out for a few drinks, just the two of us. Saturday morning I woke up and felt fine. About an hour after I woke up, though, I started feeling disoriented and I lay down on the couch. Shawn woke up and noticed my distraction, but didn’t realize what was going on until about 15 minutes later. I was having an insulin reaction. My blood sugar had dropped so low that I no longer could remember things, make conversation or act normally. My heart beat very fast. Shawn advised me to lay down and eat some peanut butter crackers, but I still felt like I couldn’t make sense of anything. Everything felt like a dream; like I was swimming in a dream-like ocean. I knew what was happening in a given moment, but a second later, I forgot it. Later, my blood sugar was still dangerously low, so Shawn drove me to get a coke. After ingesting some sugar, I began to think normally, and I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last hour or anything that had happened to me. It scared me that I could be caught that off guard. I was frustrated because I am usually able to detect a low- I’ve had diabetes for three years. For some reason, though, that morning I couldn’t. The combination of the early dinner the night before, the alcohol and the increased dosage of insulin I was taken must have taken its toll on my body. I was just glad Shawn was there and knew what to do. Not many people know about the extremes of the disease, especially for Type 1. When I was diagnosed, Shawn took it upon himself to research and educated himself all about the disease. He now knows more about it than some of my family members. He says he researched it because it was a part of me, and he loved every part of me. He realized that if he didn’t know all about it and how to take care of me, he wouldn’t be loving me the best he could, so he did. I am so thankful that he was able to act quickly. When we finally tested my blood glucose after he realized what was happening, it was 34. Normal blood glucose is supposed to be between 70-110. I hadn’t had that bad of a low since I was in the hospital three years ago. I can’t imagine what would have happened if Shawn hadn’t been there.
As I reflect on the situation this weekend, I am overcome with how fragile life is. My life could have been wiped out in an instant. I often think I am so invincible, but I am not. I realize I need to embrace life for what it is and life it as an adventure; not a list that I cross off every now and then. I want to have conversations with people that I have a spiritual connection with, that embrace me and take my hand and tell me that they believe in me. I want to believe that love at first sight truly does exist a lifetime. I want to be sure that I can accomplish my dream and that I can be satisfied as a middle class female adult and not be pressured into a mold that I am not. I want to believe in the extraordinary, the mystical, the phenomenons that not many people believe in. I want to be open minded and encourage people on the spot. I want to reach for a goal and know that I am capable enough to accomplish it.
I want to be so much! I often feel that the institution of marriage is confining and can shorten a person’s life. But I don’t want to be that person.

New Job and New Home

Shawn and I finally settled on a place to live. We decided that if we had to be relegated to Texas then we would live in Austin. In the month that followed that decision, Shawn went on several interviews and scored a job in Austin. He stayed with my cousins for three weeks until I went to visit him during spring break. My sole purpose of the break was to find an apartment for us, which I did. It took a little longer than I expected to move in, but Shawn moved in a week later after I had already returned to Nac. Our apartment is small, in north Austin, about 20-30 minutes away from down town. I really like it. And I think I’ll like it even more when we actually get to put the things we got at the shower this weekend (april 5)in it. After Shawn moved to Austin, I attended a job fair at SFA. I spoke to a few recruiters, but the one that seemed the most promising was White Lodging, a hotel management company I had never heard about before. They invited me to go on an interview the next day. That night I debated whether or not I should go to the interview. I was still debating on what I wanted to do with my life and I knew little about the company. I ended up going anyway. I was pleased with what I learned and was invited to a second and final interview in Austin at the end of March. There, the three recruits of SFA(cream of the crop I was later told) would meet and greet GMs of several open positions with the company. I drove to Austin that weekend with anticipation. I was nervous. I had never been on a formal interview before, let alone one where I had to meet, initiate and pursue conversations with Managers about subjects that I knew little about. I was shaking by the time I got to the hotel. I arrived in the room full of recruits and managers. To my surprise, I was the only one not wearing a suit. I immediately felt self-conscious, but pulled myself together and began talking with a few managers that had just walked into the room. Our early conversations were mostly surface level, but as the night wore on and the drinks kicked in, everyone got more comfortable with one another. I was able to identify with quite a few of the managers and ask the questions that I wanted. I even got a few of their business cards. The “meet and greet” lasted much longer than I expected, but the time went by fast, and I was given an interview time of 8:00am the following morning. The night I spent in the hotel was long, and I was eager for morning. The next morning I went to the interview, bedecked in my new $30 jacket coat I had found on sale at JC Penny’s the night before. I wanted to look my best, and give myself the most edge I could. The interview went well; I did the best that I could, communicated who I was, but wasn’t sure whether or not I had the job. We toured several more close hotels and were sent home. I was told that the interview process would take up to two weeks. They called me the next day. They flattered me with compliments and it turns out that the woman who I had sought out the night before was my contact person. She had started out in event planning which I what I want to do. Though they didn’t have an exact place for me, they still wanted me and promised to start me at the front desk where I would cross train and eventually move up to management in a short amount of time. I was thrilled!!!The job would offer a lot of security and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore! They even delayed my start date to July 7th so I would have time to plan the wedding , get married, go on the honeymoon, and move in. I’m so glad they were compassionate! I am very impressed with the company and their honesty and friendliness. I think it will be a good company to work for and get some experience. Though I still want to pursue academics in the future, for now it will be best to get some life experience and earn some money to put away for school and other adventures.

Life is complicated

Life is complicated. I had an interview with a hotel management company on Friday and Saturday, March 28-29. It was probably the most extensive interview process I’ve been through, but it provided with good experience for later interviews if this job does not work out. I felt confident even though I was the only one there who was a psychology major, and not a hospitality or hotel management major. It was a little intimidating at first, but really, it’s all about talking to people and being confident in who you are. If you can sell yourself and your abilities, it’s pretty much all downhill from there. I’ve never had an interview, though, where I’ve had to dress in business attire or wear a suit (that might not be saying much about my career history  )so it was a little awkward to be so confined in clothing. Same goes for the job. .. I’m just not sure if my free spirit can be confined. It might spring out at any moment’s notice… I’m not the cool and collected business manager type, yet. But do I want to be? My biggest frustration with growing up, entering the real world and graduating from college is that I have to have a job just to have a job. I feel pressure from all sides of my upbringing. My parents want me to have a job that is responsible, a real job that will look good to other people; my professors want me to continue on with my education, others recommend that I just get some kind of 9-5 experience. I just hate that I have to have a job just to have a job, and that Shawn has to have one as well. When I thought about us living in Austin, I thought about all the opportunities to pursue art and music and take other classes and hang out with different people. I’m not sure now that we’re going to have time for that, and it’s frustrating. I just don’t think I can spent 50 years of my working life in a 9-5 job just so I can have benefits, or just so I can have this amount of money, or just so I can look good in the eyes of others. The other side of the coin is that I have a degree; Shawn and I are both capable of academic jobs, but they require more school and school requires money that we don’t have yet. So, we have to have a job to get money to do anything else that we want to do in life. And the jobs we have, have to be an entry level position, even though we have a degree because we don’t have any experience. I feel like I could do so much… but I feel like I’m limited in a sense and frustrated because I can’t do what I want. Heck, I would work at starbuck’s all day if I could, if it meant that I could meet people and be involved in things other than work. I just don’t want my enlightenment from life to end. I don’t want to get stuck, sucked into a job that drains me of all desire to do things that I want to do. It just doesn’t make sense and it’s frustrating . I can’t stand the thought that this might be it.