![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI received my economic stimulus payment today. The IRS sent me a letter last week telling me to start expecting the check last Friday. This is two postal days later, which is astonishingly timely for government work!
I'm going to dump half of it into my IRA (yay retirement planning), and the other half is sort of retroactively covering some of the purchases I made over the past few months (DVDs are expensive...), so I suppose I've already done my part to keep consumer spending up and the economy ticking over as smoothly as can be hoped for. :-)
---------------
In other real life news, my sister got her Masters degree on Saturday. Three cheers for Vicky!
...
I swear, I have got to pull my act together and go back to college next year. I think I'm the only person in my family for three generations who doesn't have at least a BA. And considering that my mom has two MAs, my dad has a Ph.D, and now my little sister has an MA, I look really inept by comparison. *headdesk*
It's not that college was ever hard -- actually, I might have done better if it had been harder, because I would have been forced to concentrate more, which might have helped counter some of my depression-induced tendency to drift loose from my life. It's partly that I went to college without having any real purpose -- I went to college because in my family, that's just what you do -- and it's partly that, when cut loose from my established support systems, I fell all the way down the rabbit hole into a very bad headplace that I'd tenuously been avoiding during my last couple years of highschool.
I find that it's much easier to keep my head straight if I'm doing something that feels... meaningful isn't quite the right word. Solid, maybe. Pragmatic. Work grounds me. When I tried going back to college after only one year off, it felt like I was stepping off the earth into a bubble world, and I went right back to drowning in guilt, avoidance, melancholy, and all the bad habits and thought patterns I'd just spent a year trying to unlearn. So I dropped out for real and spent the next two years properly rearranging the inside of my head.
I think I could cope with part-time classes now.
The trouble is, I'm not sure I can pay for them. And I still have no driving need to major in anything, or to go into any particular technical field... but I would very much like to have a piece of paper certifying that I am a reasonably intelligent person who can jump through hoops like a good trained monkey. It makes it so much easier to find a decent job.
It would also make me feel better about myself -- in a very real sense, I would be getting a degree just to prove that I can so do that sort of thing if I want to.
Also -- and people will probably squirm if you confront them with this flat out -- a lot of Unitarian Universalists are intellectual snobs. There's a tendency in my church to assume that if you're young-looking, you must either be a college student or work at a local computer company or something. When I tell people I'm a shop clerk, there's a strong tendency for people to say something along the lines of, "Oh. Well. That's interesting," and then rapidly change the subject.
Getting a degree wouldn't change that particular conversation -- at least not until and unless I get a different job as well -- but it would at least make me feel more secure in my utter lack of ambition. :-)
I'm going to dump half of it into my IRA (yay retirement planning), and the other half is sort of retroactively covering some of the purchases I made over the past few months (DVDs are expensive...), so I suppose I've already done my part to keep consumer spending up and the economy ticking over as smoothly as can be hoped for. :-)
---------------
In other real life news, my sister got her Masters degree on Saturday. Three cheers for Vicky!
...
I swear, I have got to pull my act together and go back to college next year. I think I'm the only person in my family for three generations who doesn't have at least a BA. And considering that my mom has two MAs, my dad has a Ph.D, and now my little sister has an MA, I look really inept by comparison. *headdesk*
It's not that college was ever hard -- actually, I might have done better if it had been harder, because I would have been forced to concentrate more, which might have helped counter some of my depression-induced tendency to drift loose from my life. It's partly that I went to college without having any real purpose -- I went to college because in my family, that's just what you do -- and it's partly that, when cut loose from my established support systems, I fell all the way down the rabbit hole into a very bad headplace that I'd tenuously been avoiding during my last couple years of highschool.
I find that it's much easier to keep my head straight if I'm doing something that feels... meaningful isn't quite the right word. Solid, maybe. Pragmatic. Work grounds me. When I tried going back to college after only one year off, it felt like I was stepping off the earth into a bubble world, and I went right back to drowning in guilt, avoidance, melancholy, and all the bad habits and thought patterns I'd just spent a year trying to unlearn. So I dropped out for real and spent the next two years properly rearranging the inside of my head.
I think I could cope with part-time classes now.
The trouble is, I'm not sure I can pay for them. And I still have no driving need to major in anything, or to go into any particular technical field... but I would very much like to have a piece of paper certifying that I am a reasonably intelligent person who can jump through hoops like a good trained monkey. It makes it so much easier to find a decent job.
It would also make me feel better about myself -- in a very real sense, I would be getting a degree just to prove that I can so do that sort of thing if I want to.
Also -- and people will probably squirm if you confront them with this flat out -- a lot of Unitarian Universalists are intellectual snobs. There's a tendency in my church to assume that if you're young-looking, you must either be a college student or work at a local computer company or something. When I tell people I'm a shop clerk, there's a strong tendency for people to say something along the lines of, "Oh. Well. That's interesting," and then rapidly change the subject.
Getting a degree wouldn't change that particular conversation -- at least not until and unless I get a different job as well -- but it would at least make me feel more secure in my utter lack of ambition. :-)
