Teeter-Totter

I have 260 exams to grade. Boo.

I'm almost done with a project I've been working on for a year. Yay!

The online class I'm teaching is yomping my ass. Boo.

I made it through the first cut of candidates for the job I interviewed for last month. Yay!

Now there's another 3 weeks of tension in store before the next cut. Boo.

I don't have an abcess in my lower left wisdom tooth, which would probably eventually require oral surgery. Yay!

I have to get another crown instead, requiring approximately $700. Boooooo.

It's been a fun week! I'm also still trying to get my downstairs den back in order, which involves going through every damn thing I took out of there (boo) and either keeping it, Goodwilling it, or selling it on ebay. Last week I got $20 for a Playmobil toy I've had for 10 years; apparently there are people who collect that stuff just as rabidly as I do Star Wars figures or Green Arrow merchandise. (I'm thinking of spending my ebay proceeds on some original Mike Grell artwork.... it's like Geekswap.) This week I have 8 people avidly watching my auction for a box set of the Paranoia RPG--I'm hoping this will result in a brutal bidding war on the last day. And there's oh so much more to sell. Joy, joy. But there's also all the stuff I can't sell, or don't want to sell, or need to keep ("Hey! So that's what happened to my copy of my 2004 tax return!") and going through it piece by piece is just fabulously slow and boring. I'll finish.... but it's not fun.

De-Funked

I'm about out of my funk (well, the most recent one, I'm sure I'll have another soon. I'm due to find out I didn't get the uber job any day now. In retrospect, I should've waited to buy the suit.) I've finally been forced to migrate my other blog to New Blogger, and so far nothing disastrous seems to have happened. One thing I do like in New Blogger is the ability to tinker with my template on the fly, as evidenced by my continual adding of links in the last week. Old Blogger required you to go into the template html, and dig around to find where you wanted to stick your new link, and then copy and paste code from existing links to make sure what you did matched up. New Blogger gives you this keen little toolkit icon when you're logged into Google, that lets you add links to the roll on the side of the blog pretty much at will. So I've been going "oh yeah, I forgot to add so-and-so!" to my little blogroll all week, and I've added a few comics that I've picked up in my daily reading regimen. I've finally added Beaver and Steve, which is sometimes a little sick, but usually impresses me with its all-out weirdness; and Questionable Content, which didn't impress me the first couple times I ran across it but now it's grown on me a bit--we'll see if I stick with it. Animals Have Problems Too isn't to everyone's taste, but there's something about it that just hits my funny bone consistantly--I'm even thinking of buying his book, and I've not even done that with Sluggy, my first and best internet comic love.

I'm debating putting PvP on there, even though I do read it daily. Not sure why, other than that I've been finding it less and less funny lately, and Scott Kurtz's persistant ranting about the cruel unfairness of a world that won't let him easily transition from webcomics to newspapers gets on my nerves. Come on, dude--your comic is targeted at a very narrow market, in the grand scheme of things, and wouldn't fly to the average newspaper reader; there's nothing wrong with being a webcomic. If you wanted to be in print medium, you need to be doing something that appeals to a wider range of ages/interests/personality types. Hell, I'm a big ol' nerd, and half the time I don't get the joke in PvP coz it's about World of Warcraft, or an in-joke about Penny Arcade, which I don't read.... So I get annoyed with PvP, and keep thinking I'm going to stop reading it, and so I've not added it to my list. Kind of lame, really. Much like this post! But I figure, even if you didn't like the post, you can go read some of the comics...

Little Mary Gloom-shine

I'm fighting off a mood crash, and it's not helped by the fact that the entire downstairs of my house is an utter Pit of Despair at the moment. Everything from the den has been disgorged into the other 3 rooms down there, in order to make it possible for the gentlemen from the carpet place to remove my stinky and gross old carpet, and replace it with newer, fresh smelling carpet. Which is a great thing, and I'm happy about it, but the prospect of going through all the crap and disposing of the excess before reinstalling it in the room is..... well, depressing. Add to that the fact that I didn't get a call for job #2--not even an interview, at the place where I've been volunteering for 4 years and you'd think they'd at least give me a courtesy call for god's sake--and I'm beginning to strongly suspect I didn't make the cut for job #1. So my prospects for the summer are bleak. One of my friends keeps offering to get me a job at the brokerage house where he works.... and while the prospect of steady income is tempting, the thought of working there makes me cringe. Not my cup of tea, plus I just can't stand the thought of throwing away yet another degree. Why did I bother with grad school at all (I ask myself in my more frowny moments) if all that work and time and money isn't going to get me a job I like and want? Which means, the summer will likely be much like last summer--ie, a financial near-disaster, with correspondingly spikeing stress levels. Lord, but I'm tired of this.

This May will be the 5th anniversary of my losing my job at the Game Store. And while I do often get fed up and tired of my present situation, depending on my parents for money and working piecemeal jobs, I very seldom have any regrets about getting off that boat when I did. Though my leaving was not by choice, and though the experience was very emotionally painful and damaging in some ways, I think I'm far better off now than I would have been had I stayed. Even with all the frustration of unemployment now, it frankly beats one of my alternatives! So things aren't so bad after all.