The Long Departure

The first thing you should know when you read this post is that I've never quit anything in my life, ever.  Except for maybe ballet and piano, but I was like, six so that doesn't really count.  I mean, I think I've dropped a grand total of maybe three classes during all my years of education combined.  I've never downright failed at anything either (though the way this has affected my tendency to not try new things for fear of failure is for a new post altogether).  All my life, I've been an above-average student -- until law school -- and a pretty damn good employee.

But I guess there comes a time in everyone's life where that just isn't going to fly anymore.  Enter my current job as an Executive Assistant.

At the start of May, I officially gave my boss notice that June 1st will be my last day at our organization.  And though I've been thinking this through for a while, talking it over with Nate, making plans and preparations so I'm not left wallowing in a pit of unemployed misery, let me tell you, I really thought I was going to puke for the entire week leading up to that conversation.

But the meeting went as well as can be expected I guess when you blindside your boss during what's probably the busiest two months of our year and tell him that he'll be left high and dry and assistant-less in a month.  He asked if there was anything he could do to make me stay.  I said no.  He said that while he wasn't happy about it, he understood.  I said thanks, and I'm sorry.

Truthfully, on some level, I am sorry.  And there's definitely a fair amount of guilt I feel, but that's more because I'm just the type of person that will feel guilty for the fact that it's raining rather than because I should feel guilty about something.  This job just wasn't a fit for me.  It wasn't a fit in ways that a size 3 shoe isn't the right fit for a size 7 foot: so, it wasn't a fit in colossal ways.  And that made it an unhappy place, a draining place and, in the last few months, a pretty toxic place for me.  I came to despise everything about my job and who I was while I was at it and the fact that that person followed me home and became the person I was here in my safe haven too.  This job made me feel like I had nothing going for me, nothing to look forward to other than a paycheck every other week.  It didn't require me to use any skills I thought I possessed, it gave me no indication of what value I held and it just made me feel...useless.

So I finally got up the courage -- and put enough plans in motion --  to quit.

And since that day, I've felt so...liberated. Scared, yes, definitely.  The fear factor is pretty much through the roof at all times.  After all, how will I survive once the money I've saved runs out?  I can't rely on Nate forever, and there's no telling when I'll find another job.  And what about health insurance?  What about paying off my credit card debt?  What about paying my student loans?  What about being a responsible adult, sucking it up, and sticking this job out?  What about all the millions of things you need a paying job to do???

So I'm really, really scared.

But still, nothing compares to having a set date when this job will be over, when the stress of the everyday drudgery will be done, when I won't have to wake up in the morning wondering how I'm going to fail at something or forget something else today.  It's truly like a physical weight is slowly being lifted from my shoulders.  It's incredible.  I finally feel like my life is starting to move again.

And at this point, movement is all I'm looking for.

If My House Were On Fire

Yesterday, Kaimi (over at amor fati) sent me a link for a pretty cool blog called The Burning House.  The whole idea of the blog is for people to name things they would take with them if their house were on fire.  Would you take things of the most monetary value?  The most sentimental value?  The most practical?  We thought this was such a great idea that that we decided to do our own "if my house were on fire" posts.  Enjoy!

(Also, kudos if you can name the movie that talks about what you would grab if you had just enough time before your "60 seconds were up" and your house was on fire!)

Close up:

• Nate and Finn, obviously, though I'd hope they could run out themselves
• Koa box holding my irreplaceable jewelry, including my Hawaiian heirloom pieces
• Journals
• A flash drive that pretty much holds my entire computer, including my writing and publications
• Albums of family photos
• Pictures of my entire family
• iPod
• Passport
• Favorite pair of sweats that I swiped from the boyfriend
• Plastic files that hold all keepsake items from my travels
• Joy Equation
• Pencil holder my little sister made me when she was in high school
• Pink box of relationship mementos (includes: 100 paper cranes Nate made me, drawings he's done for me, a poem he wrote me on our 1st anniversary, etc.)
• Converse shoes (the most comfortable shoes in the world)
• Multi-colored throw blanket that my great-grandmother knitted
• Phone
• Wallet that holds my ID

So...what would you take?

Blogging Through My Debt: Goals Reached and Uncertainty Ahead

I've been on this journey to get out of my financially crushing credit card debt for nearly 2 years now.  But I've earnestly been on this journey to get out of my financially crushing credit card debt for only about 5 and a half months.  That's because, before January, I don't think I was really doing everything I possibly could to get myself out of debt.  Though I had cut my spending, I still shopped.  And though I made my monthly payments, those payments were never large enough to pay more than my accumulated interest.

And then at the end of the 2010 and the beginning of 2011, I started to really think about my future.  About growing up and buying for quality instead of quantity, about saving for things like a wedding and retirement, about one day owning a home, and about traveling without practically breaking my credit card in two trying to do it.  And I realized that I seriously needed a financial make-over if I was going to accomplish any of that.  I needed to get out of debt.

So that's when shit got real.

And what do you know?  When I really try, when I really put my mind to something and work at it, things start happening.  Because as of a few days ago, my credit card balance has looked like this:

Now I know this may not look that impressive, especially considering that I'm still almost $12k in debt.  But, that number used to be a lot higher when my Platinum and VS cards didn't read $0.00.

And so I've officially reached my second Blogging Through My Debt goal: I've paid off my Small Credit Card.  

Unfortunately, while in any other normal circumstances this would mean that all that money previously being funneled into paying off numerous cards could now be spent on just one, that's not the case for me.  Because I've recently put in my notice that I'm leaving my job and, as of June 1st, I'll be unemployed and will have no income to speak of.

....

Don't you like how I just casually dropped that in as if it weren't a huge deal?

More on the job will come this week, but as far as how much it will affect my getting out of debt...I'm still working on that.  I know the speed of this journey will take a hit, and I'm prepared for that.  I just don't know how big of a hit at this point, and that's really the scariest part.  Because who knows how long it will take for me to find another job?  Who knows how much that other job will pay me?  Who knows what kinds of financial crises can occur between now and then that will send me scrambling to bring the balance up on already-paid off cards?

I just don't know.  But I'm going to worry about that tomorrow.  For today?  I'm going to bask in my accomplishment.

A Quiet Compassion

I don't usually get very political on this blog, and I don't really have the energy (tonight) or the desire (ever) to really start getting political now.  But with the world experiencing so much change lately, with so many conversations both said and unsaid, and because it's all I've been thinking of for the past three days, I'm going to go ahead and talk about it a little.

Now if we can believe everything our government says -- and I'm not saying that we always can or should, but I admit that I usually, sometimes naively, try to give them the benefit of the doubt -- during a clandestine military operation this past weekend, America's Enemy #1, Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed.

I think for the most part, the initial reaction felt by the nation was fairly consistent.  Shock.  Distrust/disbelief.  Belief.  Acceptance.  Relief.  I, for one, definitely went through those stages, feeling each one pretty keenly until finally allowing that feeling of calm relief -- however short-lived it may have been -- wash over me.  I can honestly say that I believe the world is less one more dangerous person. Dangerous in the really get-you-at-your-core sort of way where they're willing to die in order to cause the destruction of others.  That kind of a dangerous person, the kind who acts as if they have almost nothing to lose, scares me the most.

But right on the tails of my relief came other reactions I saw on videos, heard on the news, read online in places I have no excuse for visiting (case in point: Why was I on Sarah Palin's Facebook page again???).  Excitement.  Celebration.  Elation.  Mockery.  Righteousness.  Validation.  People were waving flags.  They were chanting, "USA!  USA!"  They were quoting scripture in one breathe and applauding death in another.

And I was left feeling...confusion.  Disappointment.  Resignation, but no understanding.  I was embarrassed.  I still am embarrassed.  It just seems to me that, over the course of the past 10 years, we've lost sight of something incredibly important as we freely label people as "the enemy" or "other" or "they" or "enemy combatant" and most definitely "terrorist."  We seem to have forgotten that they're human.  That this is human life.  And that no matter who it is or what they've done, the loss of human life is never something to celebrate.  It's never something to be casual about.  If we do, if we are, then we become the very thing we say we're fighting against. 

As Americans, even those of us with military families, we have the luxury of distancing ourselves from the consequences of our actions.  We don't see the costs of our war until it's too late, until our soldiers come back wounded in ways we can't begin to understand, until news reaches us of 12 year old children being blown up by bombs meant for their grandfathers.  Until towers collapse and we lose things we can never get back.  And, given that we've experienced that loss as a nation, and that others have experienced it much closer to home, I can accept that everyone deals with things differently.  That everyone would deal with the news of Bin Laden's death differently.  But this can't be okay. 

Celebrating death can never be okay.  Can it?

There have been a bunch of articles written in the past day or so that seem to express my feelings much better than I myself can.  If you're so inclined, this has been my favorite: "USA!  USA!  is the wrong response"