Small life update: I fucked up at work and was very scared I was going to lose my job. Fortunately, that is not the case and I’m just on probation for the remainder of my time in my position. That’s stressful in its own way, but compared to the alternative, you’ve got to be happy with it.
Due to this circumstance, I’ve been nursing the beginning of a panic attack for the past 30 hours or so. Even now that everything is concluded and judgments have been passed down, I still feel very…unsafe? Uncomfortable? Compromised, surely. It’s the same pit-of-stomach feeling I have when I’m too far above ground. Vertiginous. I just don’t feel all that great, which is completely understandable given the circumstance. I’m disappointed in myself, my behavior, and my lack of judgment, and I’m especially disappointed that I was unable to separate my general nihilism from my job duties and expectations.
I mean, I had my excuses for being generally unprofessional. For one, yesterday was the day I was finally going to sell the ring. I had it and the receipt with me all day and was going to head to the jewelry store I bought it from to see if maybe they’d make a refund exception and at least give me some percentage back. If that didn’t pan out, I know a pawn shop. I’m not looking for money, honestly. It’s more so about the act-of. Call it a final release of all future expectations, call it a cleansing of bad juju, call it a resignation to the state of things, call it a white flag, anyway, that was the plan yesterday. Understandably, I was sort of in shambles emotionally. Still, no excuse, have to be better.
But it was a learning experience all and all. I definitely need to work on my professionalism and boundaries. These are things I’ve never necessarily had to work on, just due to the different jobs I’ve worked- always lowest on the totem pole, always the least amount of power in a situation. That is not the case now. So that’s one wake up call. The second, which surprised me, is that when facing the worst-case scenario, being homeless, tuition-less, and jobless, I didn’t really consider my life over. I mean, it’d be hell, a fantastic follow-up to already potentially the worst year of my life (so far). But honestly, it felt manageable. Over the past day and a half, I’ve done a lot of planning. What’re my options, do I move back in with my mom and apply to a new school next year? Do I see if a friend has a spare bedroom and work literally anywhere so I can afford rent? My classes certainly can support an 8-5, so maybe that’s not a bad plan. Do I drop my cats off with anyone who will take them and go sleep in my hammock in the national forest every night and shower at the rec in the mornings? I don’t know, usually, I would just be very pessimistic about the whole thing and give up, chalk up my whole life to one big fluke and imagine crashing my CRV into a tree somewhere off of I-85. But that just wasn’t the case here. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve already been coping with so much, but this one, there were possibilities, there were ways forward, it was manageable, I could manage this. My future was fine, I just needed to be creative with the solutions. This kind of optimism is new to me. It’s nice when your brain doesn’t automatically go to “well, let’s just get out of here” when things go bad.
I mean, I still feel like shit. But I am trying very hard to learn that just because you feel like shit, that doesn’t mean it’s an excuse to be mopey and inert. All you can really do is keep going. It’s like how in every relationship, there are only two options, either you get married or you break up. Well in life, it’s the same. Either you keep going or you kill yourself. When phrased like that, I don’t know, it does make a lot of my problems sort of fade into grey. I’m not going to kill myself, so I might as well keep going, even if it’s tough.
Well, to distract myself from the feelings of impending doom that just won’t subside, I watched a movie I’d been meaning to rewatch for a while, Grosse Pointe Blank. I’ve been on a Cusack kick lately, sue me. I’d only seen the movie once before with my mom sometime during college, the only things I remembered was that I liked it and mid-90s Minnie Driver is a goddess.
Yeah, I don’t remember that movie at all. It’s so fucking weird. For one, the dialogue in that movie is insane, everyone talks a mile a minute and says the strangest things and acts the strangest ways. It’s like the writer sat down and said “What if we made a romcom where every single character is Al Pacino from Heat, but on even more cocaine and also with a traumatic brain injury?” It’s not like the movie is bad, it’s just weird. The plot generally makes no sense, Cusack is a hitman who goes to his hometown for a job and also for a 10-year high school reunion, meets up with the girl he abandoned at senior prom, and tries to win her back. It works effortlessly, there’s literally no conflict, and they have amazing chemistry. Or they have terrible chemistry. It’s really, really impossible to say, the best description is that the two of them are just marbles in a glass jug that’s being shaken, just constantly smashing and colliding and being generally hyperactive. But not in like a “wild and immature relationship that’s bad for both” way, in a “what the fuck is going on” way. It’s really hard to explain. Well, she finds out he’s an assassin and leaves him for all of about 6 minutes of movie time. Then he swoops in, saves her and her father from other hitmen, and then he proposes??? and then they’re smiling and the movie ends?? What the hell is that. I mean, certainly there’s more of a moral quandary when you find out your ex-love kills people for money. Nope, not in this movie. Maybe the whole thing is a commentary on wealth and assassin as a job is supposed to be substituted for some other high-pay, low-ethic career. I don’t think so. Maybe the whole thing is a deconstruction of the generally unrealistic aspects of romantic comedies and how when you strip them to base components or substitute those out with even more absurd ones, the whole genre falls apart. That can’t be it, either. I think it’s just a weird movie written by a coke addict who was too into the idea of an assassin in love. I mean, the writing is quite funny sometimes, and it’s generally an endearing movie, but holy. Another note, the gunfights are some of the absolute worst I’ve ever seen in a movie. Cusack will be double-fisting pistols and just blindly firing at crotch level at some random guy. It was awful, almost intentionally so. I might chalk this up to something I just don’t get on any deeper level. I’d watch it if you really have no idea how to kill an hour and a half, just so at least I have someone to talk to about how strange the whole experience is.
So, that’s been my last couple days! I feel like things will only get worse from here on out, I don’t know why- when it rains, it pours and all that. But if it does, I’ll be okay.
jeez, louise 