Under Construction

Big life changes in the last few weeks. Mostly good ones. I graduated, got a job, and made some decisions.

I'm working for a tech startup, and it's pretty fun and exciting so far. I have been learning a lot, and I'm getting opportunities to write, to be creative, and to take on responsibility. It's a big change from my last few jobs...in a very good way. The funny thing is, I applied for this job the week before graduation. I had signed on with a temp agency as a last resort, because all of my resumes were going out into the void with no response. Temping wasn't quite what I had in mind for myself when I went back to finish my degree, but I was down to the wire with no good leads. Still, I had this superstitious kind of feeling that if I kept looking, I would find something at the very last minute that would be perfect for me. And then I did.

The mixed blessing is that I'm only working three days a week right now. This makes my checking account sad. I'll have to figure out a way to make more money before too long, but I'm scraping by for now. The upside is that it's giving me a lot of time to focus on some personal projects, and it seems like this is a good time for me to be frugal, go to the gym, spend some time on my own, do some cocooning, make some progress, and figure out some long-term plans for myself.

I'm participating in a writing workshop this summer, and I hope that it's going to help me gain some creative momentum. I worry that - now that I'm out of school and don't have deadlines or assignments - I won't be able to find the motivation to keep working on my writing projects. I'm probably going to apply for an MFA program in creative writing, and I can imagine it being very easy to keep putting it off until next year, then the next, then the next. So, in the workshop, I'm trying to get rolling on the project that I'm planning to use as my portfolio. It's a non-fiction project that is rather close to my heart, which makes it easy to think about and talk about, but it's difficult to meet the standard that I have imagined for the piece. I think I may have had a breakthrough on the subway yesterday, though, so hopefully I've reached a turning point. The goal is to get it in shape by the end of the summer, so I can send out applications at the end of the year...