Losing Time Or Making Time

  My dad likes to say that age is nothing but a number. I think that's something older people say because they don't like to feel old. I think age is a lot more than a number. Sometimes it can indicate maturity, legality, and other times, it's just a social identity that shows we relate to our peers.
    I feel distinctly old today, being it's my birthday. While 24 isn't a very big number to some people, it seems pretty big to me. I'm leaving my early twenties for my mid-twenties, and I feel like this is a milestone in my young life. 23 seemed young enough to still play the college-aged young person card, and 24 seems like the real line between youth and adulthood.
    I have been really struggling with the desire to become independent and self-sufficient and the desire to remain somewhat innocent, footloose, and fancy-free. On the one hand, I want to be financially independent, but on the other, I would really enjoy having a little more free time than a full-time job allows. Not so I can go to the brewery every day or watch TV even more than I do already, but because there are things that I want to do that I don't have time for right now. Like this blog.
    I want to have more time to write. I want to have more time to read. And yes, it would be nice to have more time to go to the movies or watch them at home. But it's more than that. I want to have time to cook for myself, shop for groceries more than once or twice a month. I want to take walks and do yoga. I want to spend time with my friends and my family. Plus a million other things on my to-do list. And I feel like right now, I'm budgeting my time as thinly as I'm budgeting my money.
    I feel like I'm missing out on some of the things I should be enjoying, some of the things I think I have a right to enjoy, because I don't have time to enjoy them. Most people would diagnose this as having my priorities mixed up. If you have your priorities straight, you can always make time for everything. I don't think this is always true. There are a finite number of hours in a given week, and there is only enough room for a portion of everything you want to accomplish. We end up sacrificing so much of what we want to do in favor of what we are obligated to do.
    It isn't easy juggling your wants with your obligations, especially when time or money is the constraint. But the only way to achieve your goals and make your wants become a regular part of your schedule is to say yes to yourself and those wants instead of no, procrastinating and making excuses why you can't. You still may not be able to get all of them in every single time, but you can at least make the effort.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

The Times They Are A Changin

  Truer words were never spoken. However, despite my desire to blog and share everything that's been going on, I've been a little afraid to do it because of who might be reading... Remember last year when I was like, oh, I think I'll leave grad school to go to work full time because I like my job? Yeah. The tides have turned a bit. I don't regret leaving grad school, and I don't regret starting work full-time, but it is taking a toll.
    My physical health is not terrible, but it's definitely affected by working at a computer all day. Sitting at a desk with a gigantic monitor (that always seems too bright no matter how low I turn the brightness control down--I think it's at 35 right now out of 100) for 8 hours a day is bad for your health. Period. I get up, walk around, grab a snack, chat to my coworkers, but then I have to go back to my desk and work after a few minutes of break time.
    I know I have eyestrain. I know my posture's not great anyway, and looking at a computer all day doesn't help. I have started to get a little twinge in my lower back sometimes from my desk chair, even though it's probably more comfortable than some of the office chairs we have. I get tingles in my hand sometimes from using my mouse if I have to do the exact same task for too long in one day (there's a name for this I read the other day, but I can't remember what it is right now). I even have a trackball mouse, which is supposed to be more ergonomic and easier on your hand and wrist, and most of the time, it is, but you do anything for too long and you're bound to get some carpal tunnel symptoms. Not only are these things I could tell my doctor, but I'm also stressed. Eight hours is just a long day. And I always feel out of the loop or behind on my work which stresses me out.
    We currently have an influx of interns at our office which is causing me more stress. Our new three year plan is to have a company "fueled by interns." Now, they're all nice people and I don't begrudge them coming in to get job experience, and I certainly didn't go to business school to say whether or not this is a sound business plan. But I have to admit, it makes me a little nervous. I'm not afraid that one of them will come in and take my job. I'm more afraid that interns won't be enough to keep up with the workload we have because they aren't trained well enough or aren't there enough hours in the week.
    I was hoping they would arrive to relieve some of my workload so that I didn't have to worry as much as I do about how much stuff needs to get done. I find that lately, I've been a little more forgetful than usual about some things, which makes me think I might spread a little too thin between doing my administrative and assistant work (aka my job title) and my more time-consuming and more job title fitting duties of managing and editing the content for our websites.
    It's really hard to switch back and forth between playing the admin role and the editor role, and I have to do it several times during the day. I have brought it up to the boss about being shifted into a job title that fits my duties more accurately, but that would mean they would need to find another assistant, and with the intern plan they are running on now, they seem reluctant (if not downright adverse) to the idea of actually hiring someone for pay.
    On the one hand, the intern plan makes a little sense to me. They sell it as, we want to make sure the person likes to be here and likes the work here before we hire them, and we want to make sure we like the person and they fit in and do good work before we decide to hire them. But on the other hand, these are all kids. They are college students who don't see our little college town as the end of the road in terms of career options. I don't blame them. So it's hard to find an intern that is not only good at what they do but wants to stay here for longer than their 3 month internship requires. There are plenty of talented, smart, hard-working kids that are coming in, but that also means that they are talented enough to find a job somewhere else where they can make more money and live where they want to live.
    I'm not going to complain too much about the money, because it's not my main complaint to make, but technically, I should be making three times as much as my rent, and right now, I'm only making about two times as much, not including all the damn utilities. And, technically, a competitive wage for the type of job I do is quite a bit higher than what I'm currently making. I currently fit into about 10 different job descriptions--no, I'm not exaggerating--and some of those jobs are supposed to pay three times as much as I do, based on current industry trends. Even though I don't have ten years of experience, I am still doing a job that someone with ten years of experience would be doing, and I think I'm not doing too bad at it either.
    But my main focus, as I said, is this intern thing. What I think is not being said, or unfortunately, perhaps not realized, is that more interns will go than stay. It is not only somewhat inefficient to have to interview so many new people because you're always looking for replacements and people to fill new, previously unfilled positions, but it is also inefficient because a lot of these interns need to be trained and acclimated to how our company works. That takes time that an intern who's there for maybe 8 to 10 hours a week doesn't really have.
    Again, I have liked all the interns we've had so far. They're all nice people and most of them are doing a good job at what they've been assigned. But I know most of them are not going to stay past their internships. They're going to graduate and move somewhere else. The incentive to stay here is just not high enough. While they may enjoy the work, they don't enjoy it enough to stay in town. Or, they may enjoy the work, but they don't enjoy it enough to get paid what we pay.
    I have stayed because it was enough. I like the work. I like living here. But they're raising my rent when my lease ends in April, which is going to spread me even thinner than I already am. I budget like a champ, but this is going to be a little rough without another raise. And with all these changes that are happening, I'm not entirely confident the company will still be here in three years if the intern plan fails.
    Although this new plan is the major cause of my concern for my job security, there is also the fact that they fired one my coworkers a week before Christmas. I haven't quite gotten over that. Not because it was right before Christmas, and not because we were friends. It's the principle of the thing. He worked harder than all of us did, stressed out more than the rest of us did, and was pushed and judged harder than the rest of us are. He didn't deserve it, even though he is probably better off not being here anymore because I know he is way less stressed now than he was.
    What it comes down to is that without him, we are down to two full-time employees, including myself, and with all the new work and new clients and stuff that we are planning on adding, we are extremely, perhaps dangerously, understaffed, no matter how many interns we bring on.
    All in all, I'm worried. I'm stressed out from working forty hours a week, I'm too tired at the end of the day to take care of myself as well as I'd like, I'm worried that I might be on a sinking ship, and I'm worried that I might have to move in with my parents again if things do go south. (Yes, I'm mixing my metaphors. Deal with it.)
    As much as I complain here, I have started a "positivity journal", thanks to a handy-dandy free app that I got for my Kindle (my over-budget Christmas present to myself). I have been told I'm too negative and complain too much, so I started trying to track some of the good things that happen to me during the day so that I have some of the good to balance out the bad. I think it's helping. But it's not going to stop me from sharing my thoughts here because they always come out so much more cohesively when I write them than when I tell them to someone else.

Late night, come home, work sucks. I know. 

What do you think of this 3 year plan? Or my poor health? Or life in general?

Tell me about it in the comments!

Talking Bout My Generation

  I read an article today that made me think about my generation. People in their mid to late twenties, and sometimes even early thirties, have had to put their lives on hold because of the economy. Fifty years ago, people were getting married at my age, buying houses, having babies, and starting that grown-up life before they had even fully grown up. Now, people my age are prolonging their youth, not entirely by choice but by situation. We are largely unemployed, homeless (meaning, without our own homes or apartments), and we are often broke, or damn near. [Thanks, Pete Townshend for a good lyric to put in my blog title ;) ]
    While I am the exception--I have a job, and as you read recently, I just hit the one-year mark (*hooray again*); I have an apartment that I am paying for all by myself; and I am extremely frugal and meticulous about my money, so I am never really broke. I may not have any cash on me sometimes, but I always have some money somewhere. On the other hand, I know that many people in my generation are broke, don't have their own place, and can't find a job. This was all my life before I found my job. I was unemployed for nine months after graduating college, I had moved back in with my dad, and even after I found work, I was still living with my mom for a few months until I could find an apartment.
    Moving forward in life has become overly complicated for people my age. I personally feel like I've hit the peak of adulthood. I don't have those same goals as firm, set-in-stone goals. If my life moves in a certain direction, yes, I might eventually want to buy a house. If my life moved in another direction, I might consider getting married. And if my life moved in a really different direction, several years from now, mind you, I also might consider kids. But right now, all of those possibilities seem so distant, not only financially, but in terms of my own maturity. I can't even imagine having any of those things right now. Five years from now though, who knows?
    Still, I can't help wondering about the other people my age who are broke and want to take those next steps in their lives and just can't. It's not pity, but frustration I feel about this whole thing. Why are we the ones denied what many of us consider to be rights of passage and a natural progression of life when our forebears had full access? Why did these people in control of the economy and the economic future of this country not think about how their decisions would affect their children? (Make no mistake, we are at about the age that those people's children would be--just because their kids have trust funds doesn't mean we're not part of the same generation.) Why, if they did think of our futures, did they not care enough to stop what they were doing?
    The Almighty Dollar wins again. Greed was good twenty five years ago, but the "free market" economy has spiraled out of control in such a way that the rich cling desperately to their wealth, while the poor, or the working and middle classes, must cling desperately to their next paychecks, knowing they may still have to rely on credit to meet all their financial responsibilities.
    I am, by no means, an economist--in fact, I have no idea how I even passed my high school economics class with an A because I don't remember a thing--but some of these things seem so simple that I can't understand how how people could have screwed it up so badly as to leave my generation in the position to try to move forward and clean up their mess without the means to do it.

Greed sucks. Unemployment sucks worse.

Have you been unemployed? How did you deal with it? 

What do you think about the economy and its effect on Generation Y 

(i.e. people born between about 1985 and 1995, if that)?

Discuss it in the comments below.

I Feel Way Too Old

Not only have I got a birthday coming up, dear readers, but I find myself complaining and scolding America's youth like someone 40 or 50 years my senior. These young kids these days, I tell you. Grading homework last night was positively brutal. Not only was I so exhausted I felt like my brain was disintegrating inside my skull, but I was doing an extremely mind-numbing and loathsome task that is fast disintegrating my hope for the future.
    These punk-ass kids, as my wonderfully witty and entertaining capstone seminar professor so aptly named them (or us, at the time), are doing absolutely nothing but wasting both their time in college and mine. If you're not going to actually try to do the homework, even to the point of mediocrity, why bother turning it in? Consistently getting 2s and 4s out of 10 points on homework is not going to help your grade that much. And the seriously abysmal ones always take so much longer to grade because I either: a) can't read their handwriting, b) can't figure out how they could have possibly gone so wrong, or c) can't find enough margin space to write everything that's wrong with their answer.
    It hit me last night, as my poor little brain was hanging on by a thread to both sanity and wakefulness, that these students are not just a bunch of punk-ass kids--they are the biggest group of underachievers I have ever encountered. I'm an achiever myself. So underachievers are, by definition, unacceptable and often useless human beings that are just sucking up too much oxygen and failing to recycle too many valuable resources.
    OK, that may be a bit harsh. But I do worry. Seeing so many underachievers--even in a class that may not be that enjoyable or useful to them--in one small corner of my microcosm worries me. This is the future of America's youth? I may as well move to Canada and be done with it. Why would you bother doing anything if you're not going to at least try to do well in it? Maybe you'll fail. But putting forth so little effort and still expecting to see results from it seems absurd.
    I don't know if the reason for this is laziness, lack of motivation, or just this mentality that if it's not easy, it's not worth it. I don't particularly care for this class that much either, but I'm still putting forth a substantial amount of time and energy to do well in it. I'm not doing an outstanding job, and I probably should be putting at least another hour or two's worth of time into it each week to be excelling in it, but I am doing the work. I am trying.
    Maybe I'm just venting because I was so inhumanly depleted of energy last night, and seeing what poor effort was put forth by these kids was so incredibly discouraging. But still, it has always baffled me that some people can be so blasé about things. Even if it's a class you hate, it's still part of your education, and if you value your education at all, it seems that you would have to put in a certain amount of work if you want to at least pass the class.
    I really hope these kids try to do something useful with their lives besides playing beer pong and video games for the next ten years out of their parents' basements. The world is in poor enough shape as it is without a bunch of underachievers bringing up the ranks of the new generation.

You've gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya--punk?

-Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry