Monday, April 26, 2004

So what is it all about?

I've been contemplating many things lately, and since I never seem to have an organized point anywhere in this blog anyway, I'm going to share it with you:

1. This blog. Why is it still named this? It needs a new name. Voluptuous is just a fancy word for "fat", and the only thing I'm Losing is my mind. I'm a failed dieter. I've gotta face it. I can't do it. Of course I'll try and try again, but God made me this way, and He seems to like me this way.

2. My career. Or really, WHAT career? Even when I was a freshman in college (here), I imagined myself as a journalist for The Washington Post, or some artsy fartsy literary genius that my Mom would brag about to the grocery store clerk. Now I'm going on the third year after graduating college (I just have to take a second to pause and scream oh my god...three years... what the heck happened?). I'm nowhere near the career I imagined. I work for the State of Louisiana pushing paper so that troubled Foster kids can go from one troubled home to another because nobody can afford to give them the care they really need. Why am I not living the dream of writing that I wanted to do?

3. This is really a continuation of 2. I am living some sort of dream that I write about all the time and you probably just want to gag from all this mushy talk, but of course, I did find something that I never thought I'd get - my husband. I didn't go to college thinking I'd spend my life married, it wouldn't be a wise choice to go to an all women's college to do that anyway. I didn't even want to go to England my junior year, and no way did I think I'd date over there and find someone. I don't know how it happened, but it did, and that year in England was the best year of my life so far. Still doesn't help me feel as though my college was instrumental in my career. I don't want a career with the State. I work with people who have worked with the State for 30 years and all they want is their retirement so that they can go poor and not have to push paper or make an act of Congress to get a new pen.

4. I'm reading The Purpose Driven Life right now, for Pete and I's Thursday night homechurch. I started reading it with the knowledge that some of my friends haven't heard great things about it and so I thought I would hate it. In fact I love it. It takes my worries and jumbles of thoughts and straightens everything out so that I can finally see it all in a straight line. It's amazing. It's a fresh new perspective on life and I love it. Thanks to Mum-in-law for sending the book over. We couldn't have afforded it otherwise.

5. Why can't I understand that I'm now an old person who needs to go to bed early? I think I'm stuck in a college sophomore's body who thinks she can stay up until 4am and still make it to work at 7:00am and class at 9. I don't know how I did it. They must have put speed in the dining hall food, that's all I can say. I feel old when that alarm rings at 6am and I have to wake up.

6. I want to go back to school. I miss it. I miss learning, I even miss the pedantic professors and the tiresome papers and the lectures that put me to sleep. But when I look at what I want to do, there's about four Master's programs I want to do, and none of them are remotely alike. Can I do it? Can I be a student forever? Then I have conflicting feelings telling me to go to seminary. Three years ago I wouldn't have even considered it. Now I'm pretending that I have a budget for this. What's going on with me? I just want to go back to school.

7. Life. It's expensive and I don't know how people afford it. After paying health insurance, car insurance, car note, prescription, chiropractor and gas money, there isn't any way that Pete and I can make Rent and Utilities. Thank God for our parents. It's humiliating, humbling and demeaning to have to live with parents at the age of 25 and being married, but there isn't any way that we could do this without them. How do young couples like us make it? And with kids?!?!? Are they NUTS? Ugh. I wasn't taught this stuff in college.