Technical difficulties, dude.

That's gonna be the blanket statement I use to describe basically EVERYTHING right now. Career, bank account, hair, weight, blog layout, Seattle's weather  - TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. If I were to, oh, Venn Diagram all of these, the point of intersection would be a lovely black wedge of mild depression. Speaking of Venn Diagrams, I went ahead and made one. Nothing says "company's dollars hard at work" like Heather, MS Paint, and the circle-drawing tool. Also speaking of Venn Diagrams: my sister and I were at our hilarious best in the middle of a particularly boring logic class a few years ago when we decided the entire chapter on these diagrams was immediately more fun if we re-named them Vin DieselGrams. Heh. See? Funny.

So, about those technical difficulties.

Career. Ugh. Big sigh. Big, long, obnoxious sigh. I've spent the last dozen years KILLING MY RESUME. SLOWLY. With a spoon. Or a dull, plastic fork. Or a garlic press. Name your utensil. I don't yet have an entire college degree under my belt. I work in a tech support job (a resume-killer in its own right, since "telephone software support" doesn't easily segue into ANYTHING ELSE, let alone a job that uses the parts of my brain I actual ENJOY USING), AND climbing out of this professional hole, re-directing the career ship, even starting over from scratch have ALL (repeatedly) proven to be EXCEPTIONALLY difficult, daunting prospects.

And these prospects fight back, dammit.

They're not just like, big, brick walls standing in front of me, keeping me from any type of professional fulfillment, they're walls with teeth and Uzis. They're the Duke Nukem of prospects. And for the most part I keep my spirits up by rambling about celebrities here on these pages, or by working on my novel, or by drinking champagne. BUT, now and again....the spirits sink. Like when I realize how desperately removed I am from the career I assumed I'd have since I was eight years old.

It's my own fault, sure -- I've accepted jobs in a panic-stricken bid for health insurance, I've chosen shoes over college credits, I've opted to put myself on hold for years at a time -- BUT, the course correction seems to be nothing but switchbacks. Expensive switchbacks. Switchbacks that force me to toss all hundred or so college credits out the window in order to start from scratch yet again. Frustrating as all get out.

So there's that.

Then there's the bank account. That's definitely experiencing some technical difficulties.....but enough said there -- who hasn't struggled with that...?

Hair. Uh, because I'm vain and obsessed and no amount of Bumble and bumble seems to lift the follicles from damaged and frizzy to damn fantastic, I've declared the hair my Beauty Blue Screen of Death. 

Weight. Yes, I'm still a pound or two from my personal panicky maximum. Finding very little willpower (see above reference to lifting spirits by drinking champagne).

Blog layout. Uh, darn you, Google+ with your difficult-to-interpret cataloging of albums that led me to delete photos that were uploaded as part of this blog. SO, I'm going to have to re-attach photos over the next few weeks. Yippee. And the layout needs an overhaul in general - thinking I'm going to start self-teaching myself some web design junk and fix it myself. It's in need of a facelift. Apologies for the missing pictures (which, unfortunately, render a few of these posts sort of comically incongruous).

Seattle's weather blows, dude. It was raining, dark, and 50-something while I drove to work, listening to some in-home care nurse on NPR telling the rest of the country how to keep cool in the "dangerous heat wave."

Oh really?

Tell them the best solution would be to come visit Seattle, where it's rainy and cold and barely likely to hit 70-degrees in these last few days of July. Holy mother of bubble gum, it's almost insufferable how little sunshine we've seen this year. 78-odd minutes of temperatures over 80 degrees do NOT a summer make. And I'm a summer girl. I'm impervious to humidity, I'm like a lizard for the heat. Send me into the desert and let me bake - I'm never warm enough, I've been "too hot" only once in my life (and then, only because it was windy in the 122-degree situation, so it felt a little hard to breathe), I drive with the heat on in the car in the summer, I WANT TO BE WARM. Yes, I live in the wrong part of the country. No, I'm not planning on fixing that any time soon (see "bank account technical difficulties").

So, beneath all of these gripes I languish.....moody and whiny while I abstain from junk food and bubbly and
Buying Things between bouts of moderate motivation that find me trolling the webernets for online degree completion programs with the vague idea that if I spend the money to finish the school, someone will find me as qualified as the other 22 year-old recent grads out there and offer me some sort of entry-level opportunity to do formally what I presently do recreationally. You know, the way MOST people go about getting the jobs they want.

It's not cheap, it's not quick.....it doesn't make for entertaining blog material, but hey....it's life. It's my personal Vin DieselGram.