for crying out loud.

I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble with this. I very much want to keep writing, to maintain this little presence. It doesn’t feel like a chore, it doesn’t fill me with anxiety, and I’m not ridiculously busy, so I don’t know why I ignore it.

I had a very odd, totally random dream last night where one of my ITMI classmates and I went to see a Hamlet production starring Robert Downey Jr. I mean, really, I do not know why any of that is the case: why this particular classmate, who I completely adored but no more than any of my other classmates (okay, maybe a teeny bit more, because he is awesome), why Hamlet (other than having listened to David Tennant’s Desert Island Discs interview yesterday) and why Robert Downey Jr. (I mean, I am currently completely obsessed with Sherlock, but with the BBC’s Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, not Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock, although I do love him too.).

Anyway, I thought it was funny, so I e-mailed him through Facebook to say hello and tell him about my wacky dream and that I hope his move was going smoothly (he is relocating to San Francisco) and that I was really looking forward to seeing him in January at our symposium in Atlanta, and he wrote back with such affection and positive energy and it made me sink into a little daydream about those amazing 18 days in San Francisco in October, and I wanted to write that down, make note of it.

I needed to hear his words of encouragement. The grudge work of finding a job is not something I’m particularly good at. I mean, the patience part of it. The waiting. The sending off of resumes into the great and powerful void and hearing nothing back, not one word, about 90% of them. (Used to be, when I got out of college, back in the dark but civilized days of bond paper and the U.S. Postal Service, you’d send a resume to a company and if they didn’t call you for an interview, they’d at least send you a thanks-and-we’ll-keep-your-resume-on-file letter back. It is so incredibly frustrating how many companies don’t acknowledge a resume at all anymore, not even bothering with a generic auto-responder that can at least let the person know that the resume has been received.) The accepting that I’m going to have to start doing something else temporarily, and soon, or I’m going to run out of money.

Anyway. I do have an interview next week, with a student travel company, so that is exciting. The work won’t start immediately, but it’s a bite and I’ll take it. And I know that Atlanta is going to be a crucial step in getting work lined up for the high season. I just have to bide my time, get my DC license, try to make some money in the meantime, and find some zen.

I’m also going to try lightening up around here. Maybe it’s the nothing-but-navel-gazing approach that has me down. Maybe I need to write a story about how I made shepherd’s pie from scratch with no recipe and it was so unbelievably awesome, I sat there and ate every bite marveling at my own cooking prowess. Or about how my dad has suddenly discovered texting (I so wish he hadn’t). Or about how much time I spent filling out the forms at Bureau of Communication to send to people I would never in a million years actually send but totally wanted to. Or about how a woman’s knitting podcast has kind of changed my life. Or about how much I want this map of Paris.

And, well, let’s be honest, it might be about Sherlock. We’ll see how it goes.

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