Lots to write about but I've been very busy - Casey and Brynn's wedding, getting things ready for Tara's shower, the new job, interviews, yaddayadda... But I'm annoyed and thought I would rant a little bit.
By the way, I do realize that the content of my journal isn't very exciting to people who don't know me, and probably not exciting even if you do. The original intent of the journal was to keep family and friends updated, and also provide a place for me to babble. I do hope to write more fun stuff in the future but that time is not now! Oh, I am also writing a novel so my creative juices are flowing elsewhere. ;)
I visited my city boys today and, as always, a certain jackass greeted me with "Geez, haven't you found a job yet?" and his typical barrage of "you're lazy and stupid and worthless" comments. Methinks he hates women and has bitterness towards his mother or some other female figure in his life, because he hated me the moment we met a few years ago. I don't take his psychotic rambling personally. He's just an ass.
I have a job now, albeit part-time, so I thought maybe, just MAYBE, he would lay off.
Apparently I forgot who I was talking to.
"Oh yeah part-time, that's really "working"?! Get a real job! Even McDonalds is more of a career than what you do! If I were your parents, I would have kicked you out by now to teach you a lesson!"
He sounds like an old man. "Back in the day, we'd have none of this freeloading!" He's only 34.
Fortunately, I have a sharp tongue and quick wits and volleyed right back.
I started telling my other friend what I do as a "stewardship intern" - the township's parks are mostly non-developed and they place a lot of emphasis on preservation, education, and passive uses, and I am helping develop the program. They don't have althetic fields and haven't razed the land the way Novi does.
This sparks off another old fart - "What a waste of land. They need to tear it down and put in a mall or something to create more jobs."
Argh! There is no use to talking to people like that. Thank goodness he is too apathetic to vote.
The most frustrating part is that they think they are right, and that's how things are or should be. But really, times DO change.
I live at home. But so do nearly all of my friends. I recently read in the paper that 2 out of 3 college grads my age live at home. If you go to college, you can't move out at 18 like many of my blue-collared 30-something year old friends did. They started working at 18 and got married, end of story. Now they just bitch about it. For college, you are PAYING for four years, and right now even a degree from a great school with great grades such as I have doesn't mean you can find a full-time job. And it seems like a waste for me to work any old job that I will HATE when I don't have to. I do have the luxury of choice right now.
That's just the way things work where I live. Most of our high school class went to college, and now most of us live at home. I moved out for a while but I ended up back at home. Most people I know won't take a crappy job out of their field just to "work" unless they really need the money.
It's even harder to make them understand what I'm doing because they don't understand that the natural resources field works a bit differently than, say, engineering. There isn't a lot of money in what I want to do, so there aren't paid interviews (my engineering friend frequently had paid travel to their interviews - hotel, air, and food!). You need a degree, but you must learn most of it on the job and usually get paid very poorly, if at all. In the more "traditional" fields, you get trained at an entry-level career job; I have to mainly rely on seasonal jobs, as career-entry level enviro field jobs are hard to find.
I'm not complaning; I love what I do/what I am aspiring to do. I was paid to hike through a park and identify birds yesterday. It's just frustrating when people try to tell me how "things are supposed to be" when they don't know how it really is. It's hard to swim upstream when people like that get in your way, but at least I'm in the water. Figuratively and literally sometimes - worked in the rain every day last week! ;)
**This is Amicalola Falls in Georgia. I took it in March 2003. Tallest waterfall in the eastern US at around 723 ft or something like that.
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