amieable

Amieable: “So where does Ironman get his powers?  From his heart thing or from all of that science?”

Tomorrow I begin the 30 credit road toward my bull shit BS degree in Psychology.  I begin my journey with a math class.  All week I have been avoiding brushing up on my math because I’m terrified that I will be terrible at math.  I mean if you have doubts, please re-read my scientific declaration above; I pretty much equate science with magic.  I’m much more comfortable in the bare ass BA realm where there’s no correct answers and I could wheedle my way around with my beguiling prose.

Amieable: “I have a little secret”
Longball (from the kitchen, while making pizza sauce in my blender): “What’s that baby?”
Amieable: “I think Algebra is fun!”
Longball: “Oh. My. God”
Amieable: “It’s like a fun little game.”
Longball: “Well I definitely think it’s the right decision for you to go back to school.”

Let’s hope math thinks I’m as much fun tomorrow at 10:30am.  Wish me luck.

PS: I also love predicate logic.  I could “play” predicate logic all day!  I also think my sister loves it too.  We’re weird.  Remember, we were home schooled.

Yeah we’re still under construction over here. In the meantime, let’s roll along with some additional content. And photos to distract you from the stark blue.

***

The Who, What, Where and Why of Our Circumstances

Who: Longball, Gladys the Shark and me.

What: We’ve picked up and moved.

Where: Generally, here:

Specifically, here:

Well actually right now, here:

You’ll probably want to click on that to get to the flickr version so you can see it up close and detailed. Then light a candle in my honor and weep. Go ahead, look at it. I’ll wait.

The three of us have hauled off and moved to Pullman, Washington. Pullman is in the lower right corner of Washington and is home to Washington State University. WSU is usually known best as the “other” state school, the one with good Veterinary Med, Education and Agriculture programs and the one that UW usually beats in all collegiate sports. Longball grew up here (although didn’t go to college here) and has family and friends in town.

The town is about 27,000 and the school enrollment is about 19,000 so that puts the full-time residents at 8,000. It is therefore a small college town in a rural area. It’s located on “The Palouse” which is a part of Washington and Idaho which is typified by fertile rolling hills. Appaloosa horses also originally called the Palouse home. Now us.

At this very moment we are living in Longball’s dad’s basement until our home is ready on June 1. Since this is a college town, most of the leases run summer to summer so the earliest we could get a place was June. In addition, we are currently unemployed and broke so having a temporary place to rest our junk is a blessing. Longball’s dad’s basement is a treasure trove of interesting finds. He collects Snoopy items. Lookie here:

There are also three couches, three armchairs a television and billiard table so we could throw quite the party. Come visit!

Why: Gawd you are nosy. Why. We were bored.

Ha ha, you think I am kidding. Okay while that is the real reason, there is some logic behind it. First on our list is that I wanted to go back to school in Psychology. I need a lot of additional undergraduate level courses as prerequisites before I can even apply further. UW is a great school (Go Dawgs [whispers]) but they only offer a research PhD. Even though I wasn’t applying directly into the grad program, I wanted to be immersed in a department that did counseling so I could get a feel for the programs and meet some of the professors. WSU offers a PhD in Clinical, a PhD in Counseling Psychology, as well as a Masters in Counseling. In addition, UW is in Seattle and Seattle is expensive. I couldn’t afford to take classes and work part-time and live in Seattle. Living here in Pullman gives me the opportunity to hack this financially.

Furthermore Longball wanted to pursue some career options, and experience where he grew up as an adult.

Lastly, we were bored with Seattle and wanted an adventure. Seattle kicked us to the curb last year what with surgeries, lay-offs, ill-suited jobs, being priced out of our neighborhoods and the like. I grew up in a suburb of Seattle and have lived there all of my life. I wanted to try something new. Sure, I could have moved to another city in the states but save for a few places, it would have been basically the same as living in Seattle. I would have done the same sorts of things and hung out with the same sorts of people. I wanted to try something really different, so I moved to the country.

We are standing over Palouse Falls but you cannot see it due to our offensive and ridiculous mugging.

Welcome to Pullman!

If you’ve navigated here today, I apologize. As you can see, I’ve reverted back to the Kubrick Wordpress theme (the old standby) while I futz around with some new stuff behind the scenes. Hopefully when I’m done this site will be a little more fun.  If CSS doesn’t eat me alive.

In the meantime, pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

Where were we?

Oh yes, I had NO IDEA what I was doing with my life. I believe it was September of 2007, and I had a bad haircut.

September rolled around and finally my mood stabilized and Longball and I got back into the swing of things and started getting along again. My stamping feet and slamming doors period faded and I began to enjoy life a little bit more, except the career part. Now that the rest of my life had regained some sense of normalcy, it became quite clear that I, I repeat, had no idea what I was doing with my career. I happily made two friends at work who helped me untangle why I was so unhappy. I just flat-out was not interested in the industry or the work.

I applied for two jobs for which I was both way overqualified and yet unexperienced. They were essentially office jobs and I could do an office job in my sleep, but they were also at non-profits in a specific field for which experience is important. Both jobs were at organizations that worked with animal-assisted therapy. Both jobs were immense pay cuts. One was in Bellevue and the other was somewhere further than Tacoma (for those not in the Seattle area, one was a thirty minute heinous commute into the suburbs and the other was a two hours away in the middle of nowhere). They were both ridiculously “unwise” choices for someone who was 31 and making okay money. I applied anyway because I was genuinely excited about both. I was rejected for both. I couldn’t even land what could be considered a sub-par job.

So if memory serves me well, at this juncture I cried a lot. I cried on my way to work, I drove to Longball’s house on my lunch break and cried. I remember calling my dad on September 30th to cry for a few hours. I am a crybaby.

Not only had the stress completely snapped me, but I felt stuck. I didn’t like the career I was in, but I had painted myself into a corner with my experience. In order to start over in a new career, I would have to really just

start over.

Ctrl+Alt+Del

All the jobs that I wanted to apply for necessitated an advanced degree in Psychology. Back in 2005 I had thought about pursuing an advanced degree in Psych, but it seemed like a pipe dream, I didn’t think I could do it, and a guy I was dating discouraged me.

Well now I’m desperate for something I enjoy, AND I am dating a guy who encourages me.

I started yapping about how I wanted to go back to school. Instead of saying, “you try that every two years and fail,” Longball said “you should do it.”

I off-handedly said that I was looking at the two PhD programs at WSU (where Longball grew up, you might remember) and he decided we should move there. At first (for a few weeks) I thought he was kidding and I played along. Then I believed him.

Now you are mostly caught up. Stay tuned for the next post which will detail the current events in my life (where I am and what my plan is).

Longball and I sit down to watch Eastern Promises.

Amieable: Sable says that there is some full-frontal Viggo Mortensen action.
Longball: Congratulations.
Amieable: Yeah I’ve been waiting for this since the first Lord of the Rings movie.

Suffice to say that the full-frontal is decidedly not sexy. Ball sack slapping on cold tile is not what I dreamt of. Please take note: if you anticipate being in a knife fight, get dressed first.

So I realize that I owe everyone a LOT of explanations. 

(I’m trying to plumb my apparent need to start posts and sentences with “So.”  Is it because I like to have readers feel like we are in the middle of a conversation?)

Sometime last year I stopped blogging with regularity, I would pop in for some vague drama and then disappear again.  And now I’m writing from Longball’s father’s basement in Pullman, Washington.  How did we get here, you ask?

As long as I’ve had this blog I haven’t had a job that I liked.  In fact the only job I’ve liked is my first job after college at an online education company (working with Musician Friend, Josh, Rachel and Gaby).  I was laid off from that job and had also decided to go back to school to be an elementary school teacher back in 2003.  I dropped out of my Masters in Teaching program after one day because I changed my mind.

Then I found myself jobless.  I worked as a Respite Caregiver with Rebekah (the girl with MD) and had a BALL but it didn’t pay enough so I eventually did temp work.  My temp job of course was fruitful because I met Longball (he was my supervisor) but it paid $11/hr and it was pretty mind-numbingly boring.

The temp agency got me the next permanent job at an Engineering firm in downtown Seattle, where I worked for 2+ years.  I was the Admin Assistant and I pretty much hated it with the fire of a thousand volcanoes.  The people (engineers) were all very nice and some were cool but I

1. am not really cut out to be an Admin and

2. thought engineering was really boring. 

I felt really stifled there; I was not learning anything or being creative at all.  Because there was nothing going on creatively, I did start this blog.  My creative brain was silenced while at work, so I started the blog to have a creative outlet.  That was a bonus.  Also while working there I ran into Longball on the bus (after a year of not seeing him) and we started dating.  He worked across 4th avenue from me and we would meet all the time on our breaks and lunches. 

But in the end (actually even at the beginning) it was not a good fit.  I wasn’t using any of my skills.  I half-assedly applied for film school and was rejected all the way around.  After that I decided I needed to get a real job.  By “real” job I meant a job that paid well and sort of used my skills and experience.

(Now comes the part where I want to inform you all, but must be very delicate according to something that I signed.  So please feel free to read copiously between the lines and insert imaginative additions such as wicked stepmothers and dwarves).

In 2006 a friend and past coworker encouraged me to apply for a Project Manager position at his company.  They do computer-designy-adverstisy-stuff.  In the past at the education company, I had sort of been a Project Manager (albeit of pretty much only my friend, and truthfully we did a lot of dancing around the office and annoying others) for Flash games.  I applied and got the job.  At first I was really excited to have a “real” job - the first “real” job that I’d had since 2003.  It was a “creative company” (even though my job was not) and I felt that I had arrived, since I had always hoped to have a “creative job.”

But then I realized something.  There is something far, far worse than being an Admin in an industry that you don’t care about: being a MANAGER in an industry that you don’t care about.  I now had to pretend to care and rally my troops and do reserach about how exciting the web and advertising are.

Which…they aren’t.  I mean I love using the internet but I don’t really care HOW or WHY.  I enjoy the ends but the means are pretty dull.  By this time my friend was long gone and I wasn’t really a good personality fit with the company in general.  Plus?  I really wasn’t very good at my job.

After Longball’s first surgery is really when I began to hate it with the white hot hate of ten thousand volcanoes.  LB was never in danger of death, but he was in really bad shape.  That event put everything in my life into perspective.  I spent time taking care of him both in the hospital and after he was released.  When I had to go back to work I had a crying jag and my mom said, “it is probably hard to leave something that you are good at (taking care of people) and go back to something that you aren’t.” 

(This is becoming a very long, plodding post).

That was June of 2007.  At that time I didn’t even think about changing jobs because life was so messy I didn’t have time.  Things on my mind instead:

1. Longball was disabled and I was taking care of him.
2. Longball and I were fighting, and at one point broke up for an afternoon.
3. I had decided to come off of my anti-depressant in May (brilliant choice of timing) and was depressed all summer (you may recall bouts of throwing my phone at walls).

I didn’t have any energy left to think about WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING IN MY LIFE so I threw my weight into losing weight - and was successful.  Denial!  The new diet plan.

So between all of this, you are probably starting to understand why I didn’t post much at all last year.  There was just so much going on that I couldn’t talk about in this public place.

Hello Beautiful!

I think I remember asking for prayers on this site before. Probably for some stupid shitty reason like the Mariners or for sunshine or whatever. But now it’s for real.

If you’re the praying type, I’d like to ask you to add Emma to your list today. Emma is the daughter of my friend Ellen who is fighting for her life in Children’s Hospital today. She was born prematurely (along with her twin Ella) and needed surgery to repair her heart. She got an infection and is having a really hard time clearing the infection as well as fluid that builds up during surgery. So if you have extra space in your prayers for her and her parents, please pencil her in.  Actually, go ahead and ink her in.

I know many of you are not the praying type (I respect that) so I ask that you keep a baby, her sister and her parents in your positive thoughts. In addition, please hug the people you love today whether in person or via the phone or internet.

Read about Emma here.

She has been fighting so hard, and she encourages us all to push a little harder and fight a little harder for the ones we love.

Well there have already been some mishaps in my bracket.  It seems I fail at everything.  Fired from my own little game.  Most people didn’t get their picks in time and were rejected.  So some people are doing paper brackets, including my mother who is picking based on uniform aesthetic.  She has Duke winning and had a lucky break today.  I was a total lame-o and forgot to pick the winner of it all.

As long as I beat Longball though, I’ll be happy.

My sister and Tim are in town this week.  As Longball says, “the band is back together.”  We are maxing and relaxing.

Soon I’ll have more news about our plans.

I sent out invites to people who I don’t think read my blog or know it exists, but Longball wanted to invite all of you too. I don’t know how many of you follow College Basketball (or even sports for that matter). Well, probably three: my dad, Larissa and Andrew. Maybe Jennie? (I picked A&M for you in my bracket).

Follow the link and the instructions. No cost to join, just bragging rights. And maybe I’ll throw in a prize of some sort!

Our Bracket

Info:
Group ID#: 147822
Password: gladys

It will make you put in a Yahoo account but it’s free.  We wanted to keep it free instead of do a pay site.