Thursday, June 4, 2009

This monkey's down with the sickness...

Woke up at 3am this morning, flat on my back, mouth open, breathing like a fish out of water. My tongue was swollen, and dry like the Sahara at high noon. I am thinking major dehydration. I woke up a couple hours later with what I am going to call for now 'upset stomach'. After 30 minutes in the bathroom, I decided that today was not a good day for 20 minutes running, then 25 miles on the bike, then 30 minutes run again. Now that it is several hours later, I have decided that I chose wisely.
If you were like me when first starting out, you had a problem. You did not have a car, but you needed a car to get a job, and you needed a job to get a car. Likewise, you needed a house and a phone to put out your resume' but you needed to get your resume' out there to get a job to get yourself a house. In the same fashion, many people who wish to change locations or change careers have the same problem. If you want to move across the country, you have to be across the country to get a job there in order to move, and if you want to change careers, you need to have experience in the new career before someone will pay for you to do it for a living, otherwise you need to either start at the bottom and work up again, or spend all of your spare time doing the new career or learning about the new career, so that you start somewhere in the middle. I know many people in these situations, either starting out at a new career, or wishing they could do something else but can not afford to, or wishing they lived somewhere else but not being able to make the move. Lots of people never realize their whole potential because they either move to a new place and have to start over with a new company, or they have decided that they are not doing something that they want to continue doing. I know of people who are in jobs because they are stuck there, and are working for the weekend, and others who leave their jobs without knowing where they are going, or what they will do tomorrow or the next day. These people are the majority in my opinion. The minority of people are let go or downsized when they are completely content in their job, or at least brow-beaten enough that they are content enough with what they do that they can work to support their family or their playtime.
I have toyed with some of this over the last two years. Wanting to change jobs, wanting to move locations, so on and so forth. We have moved several times over the last 15 years, and I wonder if that has impacted my career success. When I was in college and just after, I changed my mind several times, and even as recently as 5-6 years ago I thought I wanted to go back to school and get my teaching cert and teach kids in high school. 3 years ago I thought I might want to get a Master's degree. I am not sure what I would have done with the Master's degree, but I thought it would be a good idea. At this point, I have analyzed myself into a corner, because now I have no idea what I would change if I could.
This concept of not being able to change is a factor in a lot more things than I have described above. A great example is my inability to get a tan. I can not go out in public at this point because I am so pale. I am really pale. The sun rays bounce off my skin like a mirror, and there is no 'tan'. My skin does not get brown either. It goes red, then freckles, then goes away. prolonged exposure will eventually brown my skin, but it takes a while. So, I cant get a tan unless i am tanned already. I will have to do the equivalent of borrowing someone's car and staying with relatives until my 'tan' appears. I am still trying to figure out what my metaphor actually means I am supposed to do.

1 comment:

Tri Mommy said...

I could definitely see you as a high school teacher. Not sure that means you should do it, but I can definitely see it.