Let me live before I die

I bought myself a new notebook yesterday. I need somewhere organized to store my French vocabulary and verb conjugations. But I know myself and I know that it'll end up with agonized non-LJ writing and then I'll hate the messy, ugly sight of it and ignore it, French and all. But I always feel optimistic when I buy new notebooks, so I don't really believe that right now (or I don't mind, anyway). That's one of the reasons I buy more than I need, and that's why I had to reassure myself that this was a reasonable purchase.

The other reason I buy more new notebooks than my life requires is because I can. I grew up with a love for words but nowhere to put them. My mom must have thought I was a system for turning notebooks into a garbage can full of crumpled wads of dead trees, and wasn't inclined to buy me any precious paper that wasn't required for school. I used to sneakily buy them on my half-hour lunches in high school, undeterred by the problem of having nothing to say in them. It was just a big deal to have them. Cheap optimism, even if it is fleeting.

Growing up with such scarcity, it's easy to get excited.

"Books!" lostpositive said, and I was already thinking exactly that because I was looking at the link she'd just sent me. It was for Library Assistant jobs at Manchester University: shelving books and checking stuff in and out and whatnot.

She found it while looking for something else, and, my feelings about job-hunting being so well known thanks to pouring my heart out to LJ, she sent it along to me thinking I might appreciate it.

My feelings about job-hunting being panicky and miserable, I was astounded at how easily this had been done; rabbits out of hats never impressed me so much.

I quickly got excited too... albeit with a twinge of appreciation for how pathetic I am for being excited about a simple job that doesn't need anything more than GCSEs... but that's just evidence of how I've been polluted by the intense ambition of the people I work with: even the other nursing assistants all have degrees and are getting secondments to more impressive jobs and things like that. One of the nurses said his birthday's this week and he's going to be 26...which is the age I am already, and he gets to boss me around and make tons more money.

But then I realized I don't really care about that. I'm not them. I don't even want their jobs. Lots of interesting people don't have degrees and lots of decent jobs don't require them. I just didn't want to focus on that, didn't want to tiredly go through the motions of self-flagellation yet again. Better to concentrate on the fact that, for the first time in my life, I've found the possibility of a job for which I am qualified that actually seems interesting to me, something I might like.

I'm not used to that. I'm not used to it mattering if I like something. I didn't like school. I didn't like never having enough words to read or write, enough records or CDs, growing up. I didn't like not having friends. I didn't like crashing and burning in college. I didn't like feeling torn between the US and the UK. I don't like being poor and cold and wet and depressed. I didn't like working for a bank, I don't like the way Andrew's been playing too many Monkees' songs lately. I'm used to it.

I'm used to scarcity, like with the notebooks. Oh, I grew up with, and continue to have, all the food, shelter, clean clothes and education I could need, but I'm always short of contentment, of feeling good about what I do with my days.

I know I have a reputation for someone who gets very enthusiastic about very small things (I'm a horror for this when I'm drinking... not when I'm drunk, but when I am tipsy or when I haven't realized yet that I am drunk). I remind myself of something Mark Steel says in one of his lectures about the way little kids are, how they are always saying things like "Ooh, look! Look look look look look! ... A cup!"

But that feeling doesn't scale up at all. And maybe that's why I'm so likely to get excited about riding on trains or QI or burritos or making chocolate cake. I've always been proud of myself for taking my fun where I can get it, not sneering at uncool or unironic pleasures, and not even needing mind-altering substances to get them.

I'm happy that I have such helpful friends, even though I'm sorry I need the help. This is going to be a breeze. I already downloaded the applicatilon form, right there on the site lostpositive sent me to. I texted (with great excitement) a friend who works in a library because I thought he'd be glad to hear this, and he said he knows all about working in libraries and to let him know if he can help. I told taimatsu, who also knows how much I hate looking for jobs, and she offered help too. I told Andrew, who seemed surprised that I'd already gotten this far on my own... well, it looked like"on my own" to him!

But really, I'm one of those kids who was good at the game where you stand in the middle of a circle of your friends and lean backwards, hoping that they'll grab you before you fall. I am lucky. It seems there's always been someone there to catch me.