will work for homeostasis

Monday.  Waking up feels like any other day of my life.

But it's not like any other day in my life.  It's not summer and it's not the school year.  It has never seemed more truly the first day of the rest of my life.  Today I have to be more self-efficacious than ever before in my life, and I feel strangely energized by the probably over-dramatized weight I'm putting on this particular Monday, June 6, 2011.

We've been hearing for years that nobody's getting hired these days, especially not right out of college.  I've been reading on Facebook and hearing through the grapevine about friends who can't find a job anywhere.  I was feeling lucky the other day at the number of "we're hiring" signs, and the overall bright responses I received to the question "Are you hiring, by any chance?"  But it's another story entirely to actually present myself for work, to fill out an application and turn it in.  It seems strange that practically shoving my (very valuable, if I do say so myself) time and energy at someone would feel so much like stepping on toes, but it does.  Maybe it's just my pride.

Which I am trying to squash, for a lot of different reasons.  It's a hard balance, to be proud enough not to stand for things that are hurtful to my self but not so proud that it's an obstacle to action.  Not easy to figure out and not easy to do.  Better just to plunge into it and work it out later -- at this point inertia is one of the most terrifying pathogens I think most of us can imagine.

Speaking of balance, living seems to be right now a series of pretty precarious balancing acts.  In the front of my mind right now there's the social consciousness-financial feasibility tightrope: do we buy organic foods from the co-op downtown or buy everything for a dollar at Aldi?  After four years at an institution like St. Olaf that puts so much emphasis on sustainability, living "green," avoiding products assembled by blind children in third-world countries or sprayed with deadly pesticides, it's been a bit of a struggle not to read the label on every product before we buy it.  The truth is, it's just not practical.  I want to care for the world I live in, but sometimes that means eating canned black beans grown and processed who knows where for 79 cents a can, just so I can get through the day.  And I'll try to turn off the lights when I'm not using them.  I really will do my best.

Another unexpected shock comes when we have been, so far, locked inside our house before nightfall every night we've stayed here, with the alarm system turned on.  My work availability is limited because I am not comfortable, as a young woman, riding my bike home alone from a late-night shift or hangout at a bar downtown.  I'm hardly even comfortable walking past uncovered windows after dark, not knowing what's out there.  Even though this seems like a fairly safe, small town, I perceive danger in my gender and my age, and the fact that after four years at St. Olaf my street smarts are baby-soft like my feet at the end of winter before I start running around barefoot on beds of hot rocks full of biting insects.  Or some variation of that feat.

In any case, it seems our party days are over.  And for Bizz-squared(TM), this could be a big adjustment.

I realized today that, when left to my own devices, I Get Things Done.  I tend to feel paralyzed when I know that my actions impact someone else, someone's schedule or living space or conception of the world.  This is a good thing to realize, so that I can start to sort out what is important for me to do for myself and how much I can feasibly take into consideration other people's toes, as it were.  Inertia.  Paralysis.  Terrifying.

So today, I turned in 3 job applications.  I put an important envelope in the mail and rented a P.O. box.  I visited the Chamber of Commerce for information about local businesses; the county information center for new resident resources; the Lucky Cup Coffeehouse for lunch; and the local Edward Jones branch office for a quick refresher course in personal finance.  I imported all my mail and contacts into gmail.  I checked out The Help from the library.  And I sweated through every item of clothing I put on this morning.

I think I can go home satisfied.