Counting Blessings

According to the time, it's now tomorrow, but I haven't gone to bed yet, so...

My friend signed in tonight/last night/this morning (?) having just returned from seeing Toy Story 3, which we've been ogling and drooling over and anxiously awaiting for months now. What should have been a rave fest of how incredible the movie is quickly turned into me throwing myself a pity party. I have no money and no job, and don't dare ask my parents for ANYTHING because I know they will answer with a question about my job search, so the chances of me seeing this incredible movie I've been looking forward to all school year are pretty much non-existent... Oh, and it might be more than a small challenge for me to be able to feed myself this coming school year. I know my parents won't let me starve, but I'm sure they'd rather not have to help me, and I'd certainly rather not need their help.

So I could very easily wallow in my misery... Or, I could watch some Muppets, eat some comfort food, and count my blessings so that I'm at least in a good enough mood to potentially sleep tonight.

Today has been a good day. I took the dog for a nice, long walk--granted, a very HOT walk, but a nice long one. I exchanged the yarn Mom didn't want for the yarn she did want, which I wasn't expecting the store to have in stock, since they didn't have it when I went two days ago.

I've finished two blankets for Project Linus, both made from fleece from donated blankets that were too poorly-made to be given to kids as they were. I've never done that before. It felt good to finally feel like I did something for this organization I've helped in smaller ways before, to give something comforting to a child somewhere who needs it, and to take some good intentions that didn't quite work out and turn them into something successful. I've always wanted to actually make a blanket for Project Linus, and I guess now I finally have.

I even got to flex my writing muscles today, not just with the earlier blog post but by helping my mom with her annual "beg letter" for the Ride for Kids fundraiser for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation. She had one letter written, but wasn't satisfied with it because it didn't tug at the heartstrings. She was all set to start from scratch, but it just so happens that I specialize in tugging heartstrings, so I stepped up to the computer and edited the heart-wrench in. I usually feel evil (and enjoy feeling evil) for making my readers cry, but this was for a good cause.

I don't think I've quite absorbed that my writing can work towards a greater good, that I could potentially inspire people to get out there and start doing little things to change the world. It won't be one big thing to change the world, you know. It will be millions and millions of tiny things that you wouldn't think count, like smiling and holding doors and picking up litter. A lot of major religions are waiting and praying for the Messiah, for one person to come and set everything right, but one incredible person can't do any good at all if the world isn't full of millions of alright people.

One of the most-quoted Jim Henson quotations is probably this: "When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here. It's a wonderful life and I love it."

I've always liked that. From the first time I read it, I've had that same hope--to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here. And I guess the things I did today--the letter-writing and blanket-making--I guess they sort of help with that, don't they?

That isn't so bad. No, that's not a bad thing at all.

General Update

Progress on the job front can be so slow. I promised my mom that my cover letter would be done by the time she ate breakfast today so that she could mail my résumé on her way to work. Now, I was under the impression that she would wake me up (as she often does) before she ate breakfast and say, "Alright, where is it?" To which I would have answered, "It's waiting to print." But of course, she didn't wake me up, and in hindsight I had no reason to expect her to. So instead, I woke up in the afternoon, at which point Mom was long gone. So it was a good plan, but it didn't quite work out. I guess I'll be mailing it tomorrow.

In the meantime, The British Correspondent (who was expelled from The Muppet Mindset after Ryan's last vacation) seems to have hacked in again, and with Ryan off gallivanting in LA, it's up to me to stop him. Apparently, TBC seems to think that hacking in and taking over will help him win favor and earn his place back on the staff. Seems like a long shot to me, but if he wasn't crazy, he wouldn't have been hired in the first place.

In other news, it's been raining pretty much since I got up today, so there goes my plan of taking the dog for a walk. Instead, I wrote and posted some more fanfiction over on Muppet Central. A real tear-jerker of a chapter. I'm quite proud of it. I like to drag my readers through the dirt before I bring them to a happy ending. Unfortunately, when writing for nothing more than my own enjoyment, I almost never get around to that happy ending.

So, that's where I've been. Nothing hugely exciting, I suppose... This weather doesn't do much for inspiring excitement.

Résumé Blues

A few nights ago, my parents went out to dinner with a family friend, and I'm guessing they mentioned my thus-far fruitless job search. So a couple nights ago, he called them to say that one of his friends was looking for college kids to do some "college grunt work" for the summer, and that applying for this mysterious "college grunt work" would require submitting a résumé via snail-mail.

Regardless of the fact that I have no idea what "college grunt work" entails, this all adds up to me spending today putting together my résumé and sincerely wishing I'd bothered to go to one of those seminars advertised at school this year on résumés and CVs. (I have no idea what the difference is between the two, if there is one at all. Most of the flyers I saw pertained to CVs.)

This is what I thought I knew about résumés before today: résumés should have your previous work experience, do not need references, should NEVER have typos, and should be one page in length.

Enter advice and examples from Mom and Big Sister, stage left. Big Sister took advantage of those résumé seminar things in college, so she's our in-house expert. Her résumé is--*gasp*--two pages! Oh, the HORROR!

So I use these convenient family examples as a starting point, I dig up the sorry excuse of a résumé I made for a sorry excuse of a class at the beginning of Freshman year, and I start listing my job experience. I slip in a mention of the fact that I'm in the Honors Program. I even list how ridiculously active I am in Hillel. Then I go so far as to get fancy by using a sans-serif font for headings and for my name, because sans-serif fonts take longer to read and therefore draw more attention. (That's a handy little tidbit you can pick up in a college education.)

Tragically, this beautiful list of mine is more than a page. It's not quite two pages; it's not even a page and a half. No, it's just long enough that no amount of finessing will bring it down to one page. And what's worse--the page break is smack dab in the middle of all my lovely Hillel experience.

Thinking I have the perfect solution, I divide the résumé into two columns. On the left, I have my work experience, and on the right, I list my education and extracurricular activities. (Sorry, little blog, you didn't make the list. You're just a baby. You're not much to brag about yet.) Of course, it takes a good five minutes of wrestling with the computer's auto-formatting to make it line up all nice and pretty, but I finally get a one-page résumé that looks good to me.

Again... Enter Big Sister, stage left. "Don't make it two columns," she says. Then she tells me to proof-read a dozen times, then have someone else proof-read it, and then proof-read it again. Then she goes to bed. (Note: By this point, it's the middle of the day, but Big Sister works nights, so it's well past bedtime for her.)

Well, grand. I undo all that wrestling and go back to one column. Now I just need to figure out how the heck to either get this all on one page, or just give it a less awkward page break. Using a smaller font size doesn't make enough of a difference. Eliminating the double-spaces between sections just makes it look crowded, and doesn't make enough of a difference anyway. No matter what I do, there's an annoying page break right in the middle of my Hillel experience.

Eventually, Mom presented the answer (as she quite often does). She pointed out that the friend of a friend who will be reading this résumé is probably about the same age as my parents, that being the age of reading glasses, and that the friend of a friend therefore probably won't mind if the font is bigger. Add a little white space, and my two-page résumé doesn't look half-bad.

Sometimes, things are just more complicated than they should be.

Well, That Felt Pointless

I was actually somewhat productive today. I cleaned the bathroom, washed my car, checked in at the bookstore where I used to work, and picked up some things at Wal-Mart.

And I have decided that being productive can also be a complete waste of time.

Cleaning the bathroom wasn't so bad. Yes, it took me three times as long as it would take most people, but I'm used to that. The point is that the faucet is shiny again. Give it twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and it probably won't be, but right now it is.

Washing my car was another matter. You see, my car was FILTHY. At home and at school, my car is usually parked under a tree. For those of you who don't know, trees are terrible for a car's cleanliness. They drop leaves, seeds, and--worst of all--sap. They're also a favorite hang-out for birds, and birds poop. Then there's the fact that driving a car usually involves hitting bugs. Now add in the fact Daddy has always taught me not to go to car washes because they scratch cars (not that I have much spare money to go to a car wash) and it all adds up to one very dirty car that hasn't seen a hose since sometime Fall semester (at my best estimation). So after I spent who-knows-how-long washing my car, it's still dirty. Much cleaner than it was, but still dirty. And now my face is sunburned and I have a sixth bug bite on my back.

When I poked my head in at the cute little bookstore I used to work at, I had a lovely chat with a former co-worker. As far as I've ever known, she's a wonderful employee--trustworthy, prompt, and good with customers, not to mention that she usually knew the store's inventory better than the computer did. The store is now under new ownership and no longer has a computer to look up books, so you would think that skill of hers would be particularly handy to have around.

But she works one day a week. Business stinks. So chances are slim to none that they'll be able to hire me for the summer.

So the only really successful thing I did today that will have any lasting effects is that trip to Wal-Mart. I bought a garbage can. Woo-hoo. Then I came home and parked my car under a tree again.

So tell me... What exactly was the benefit of getting up at a relatively reasonable hour and being productive? As far as I can tell, I just sped up the process of running out of things to put off. When that happens, boredom will reach all new heights.