This post is none of the nerdy and analytical posts I've been mulling over lately. This one is a spur of the moment musing mainly to (as usual anymore) give vent to some of my life angstiety (do you see what I did there?). Because tonight I finally forced myself to get back to that loathsome task of looking for a new job. I got that interview last week and I sort of just stopped thinking about the job hunt. But I was supposed to hear back from them on Friday and I still haven't, and even if I do and they decide to offer me the job I am deeply divided about taking it. Which is all to say that I need to find some other options.
So tonight I decided to look for some other jobs to apply for. Interestingly, I'm realizing I don't really want to continue in my current field. To be sure, in the end I might not have any choice. But I still have a little bit of time to look around, and so I found myself trying to find alternative employment to PCB Assembly (what you google if you want to find jobs like the one I currently have).
Of course, my immediate thought was "Ok! Let's see what kind of jobs are available in the world of publishing!" because I have no grasp of reality. After too much time wasted wandering around the internet, conducting penetrating searches like "publishing jobs" I had the brilliant idea to google instead "how do you get an entry level job in publishing?" I came across this very interesting and useful article which, unfortunately, convinced me merely that if I wanted to get a job in the publishing industry I should have started the process in January.
Mulling over this failure of time management of course led me to consider my other planning-related failings, specifically, my absolute lack of life-planning. Once again I looked at my trajectory in life thus-far and marvelled at the absolute lack of navigation. It is astonishing that such a haphazard existence has not yet crashed into a metaphorical telephone pole and combusted vigorously. It began as soon as I graduated high school with the selection of which college to attend. And by "selection of college" I mean that I simply neglected to reply to any other schools which admitted me, and thus ended up at BYU without putting any real thought into it at all. Once in my carefully selected school I proceeded to spend a very long time getting a very little education. I did manage to score a degree...in a superlatively generic field of study. And I did nothing else in my decade-long tenure as a student that might be useful to me now, like an internship or involvement in any campus programs. Despite my father periodically asking me about such things, somehow they still never registered on my radar of activities I should (or indeed could) actually do.
The thing is, even if it had ever crossed my mind to look for an internship or to get involved in some campus program, I wouldn't have had much idea which ones to pursue. Because my ultimate problem is a lack of real ambition. This is no new revelation. I have known for some years now that I have no idea where I'm going in life because I have no idea what I want. Or, those things that I do aspire to I immediately write off as unrealistic fantasies, and thereby avert the anxiety and hard work of actually pursuing them.
But tonight, reading about the process of wedging a toe into the publishing industry, I found myself experiencing a magical fusion of two previously entirely separate branches of my anxiety. As I sat here thinking about my life and where I want it to go and how I need to find a goal...suddenly I had the mental equivalent of one of those creepy Vertigo zooms. I leap-frogged right over picking a goal and started looking at the process of achieving that goal. Specifically how long it will take. And suddenly my 10 years of college became so much more of a waste than they've ever seemed before. Most people my age have spent the last 5-7 years slogging through the initial stages of that process, but here I am literally starting from scratch and on the eve of my third decade. Even if I start right now, by the time I get through the same things I could be nearly 40.
You could say that this job hunt, delayed and ignored and put off, is a microcosm of my life--when I finally decide to take it seriously I am on the verge of too late to find the right thing and may simply have to settle for the most expedient. And I don't know which is worse: to continue drifting haphazardly through life or finally deciding on a direction only to realize that my chance to pursue it has come and gone.
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