Is There Life After Silkworm?
Current mood: pleased
Category: Life

 I recently, if you can call six months ago recent, was released from my very first Accounts Receivable position at Silkworm, Inc, a promotional screenprinting company located in Southern Illinois. I had been employed there for three years, first as a data entry operator and second as the Accounts Receivable Clerk, and had believed that my work performance was, if not perfect, at least above average.  Unfortunately, I had become discouraged with working and began to make mistakes due to my general malaise and apathy. Even so, I was somewhat, I say somewhat because I don't believe in my heart of hearts that it was totally unexpected, surprised when I was fired.
There were tears, on both mine and my supervisor's part. I had to say goodbye to several friends. I had leave behind three years of relationships and work. The emotional impact of being fired is hard to deal with. I had to deal with the idea that I might not be a good and accurate worker, something I have prided myself on ever since I began my working career. I had to deal with the somewhat shameful fact that I had to go on unemployment to help support my family. I don't like receiving help from the government, even though unemployment is insurance made up by both the employer and employee to protect against one losing a job. It is still a blow to the ego. Lately, I have to deal with the depression that comes from not being employed, except at only part time positions. It's the lack of a goal or the impetus to get my but up and have somewhere to be.
The one thing that I have noticed, however, is how people treat you after you've been fired. It's as if someone has died in the family and you have to whisper your condolences. The stigma of being a poor enough worker to cause you to be fired has been placed. When they meet you in the store, they tread carefully and ask in a concerned tone of voice, ?How are you?? Others, out of not knowing what to say or afraid of saying the wrong thing or, simply, out of lack of desire to associate with one who has been fired, avoid you. When you tell someone that you were fired, they become distant, whispering good wishes to you and your family. They seem afraid that they will say the wrong thing and offend you. You begin to think that something is wrong with you. That you lack some fundamental thing that makes a human being human. I went through this. I would even go so far as use it as a small factor in my depression. What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I keep a job? Why did I let myself get fired? Is there something wrong with me? I don't believe there is. In fact, I don't believe that this experience tells anyone how good or bad a person I am. I believe that it tells people what I did and how I acted in a specific situation. And that is all.
Now, granted, this is what I wanted, just not the way I wanted to go about getting it. I was hoping and planning to quit at the time I was fired. I realized, at the time as well as now, that I probably should have resigned six months before I got fired. The mistakes were mine and I accept and claim full responsibility for them. I realize that they came from my desire to no longer work; to spend time with my family and focus ..ing my children grow. I wanted to focus on my life. I wanted to decide what I truly wanted to do with my life and work towards my own goals. I didn't want to work for someone else when I felt I was getting nothing out of the job except a decent work environment and a paycheck. My job didn't further my life. It paid the bills, certainly, and let us have some good times. But it wasn't fulfilling. There was an empty place in my soul where my career and passion should have been. I just couldn't do it anymore. It was a struggle and it was painful to rise from my bed, leave my home and go to a place I didn't really want to be. To leave my family, especially my two year old son. I had been working since he was six weeks old and I no longer wanted to miss any part of his life. I wanted to study and prepare for grad school. And here I am, after six months, satisfied with my life.
I have spent the past six months trying to relax, thinking about what I really want out of life and how to get it, spending time with my children and fiancee, and slowly becoming more content and happy with my life. My family has grown by two, friend and child merging with my family to the extent that we all want to attend the same grad school. I'm engaged to my loving partner of sixteen years. My life is going in the direction that I have chosen and I can't begin to express how thrillingly happy I am.  I am able to make the decisions I need to make and follow through with them. I am completely free, as long as certain responsibilities are met, namely making sure my children are well taken care of, to choose the life path that satisfies me. That gives me deep peace and happiness. My whole world is laid out at my feet and I control every aspect of that. My life is what I choose, and what I choose is this. My dreams, my hopes, my choices, my passions. My life.
So, thank  you Silkworm for allowing me the opportunities and experiences that I gained during the time I spent with you. All the good and the bad. Thank  you for all of the friends I have lost and found. Thank you for standing by me while watching my children grow. And thank you for recognizing, when I couldn't, that it was time to part ways. Thank you for my life. And is there life after Silkworm? Yes. Yes, there is

2:29 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Work and Meaning
Current mood: blah
Category: contemplative Goals, Plans, Hopes

            I sit at work and wonder what people really do with their lives. How they go to work five times a week for eight hours at a stretch, snatching time with family and friends when they can manage at night and on the weekends. Getting time to themselves to think about their lives, or just plain relax and not have any demands made on them, is almost nil. How do people not go stir crazy? How is this a meaningful or satisfying life? If you have a job that you truly believe in and enjoy, I can understand. But, in a job such as I am (Accounts Receivable for a small screen printing company), where I'm not doing my passions or staying home to raise my children or even pursuing any of the passions that I have, I find it very difficult to not become discouraged.  I want meaning in my life. My only meaning right now is to bring home money so my family has bills paid, food to eat and, occasionally something fun to do. I try to be a good parent when I get home from work, but it is difficult because I'm tired and I have to cook, get the kids ready for the next day, find time to relax myself and spend time with my husband. The whole point of this life is to spend it with the ones you love and to find something that fulfills your mind as well. The point is to be challenged. To not go with the flow and find the thing that truly makes you happy and do it.

            Which brings me to the question: What do I want to do with my life? What will satisfy me and challenge me? What are my passions? That one is answered fairly easily: Theater and History. How can I create a valuable life with these two passions? If I really want to use the theater, my first and most important desire is to run a theater company. I would love to give people who have had no experience in the theater the chance to be a part of the theater, especially kids. If I can conscript kids into working for a theater company as a summer job or as an internship, get them interested in theater and make them realize that theater is not so highbrow a thing as to not be a part of their lives, then I have created a place where theater could become as common and enjoyable as the movies. (I have a whole discourse on this, but I will save that for a later time.) The second thing that I would enjoy doing with the theater, and which includes history and research, is dramaturgy. I love it! A dramaturg, for those of you that don't know, is someone who helps the director research the play and finds problem areas with the language or the time the play is set in. A glossary is a common product that the dramaturg creates. Words that the actors don't know but need to know in order to completely understand what their character is saying. Another product would be a study guide for students who come and see the play. They also usually write a little blurb on the play and it's background for a program. The dramaturg researches a play to help the people involved better understand what is really going on and the historical aspects of the play and any impact it has had on the theater world or society in general. It's an amazing amount of fun and hard work, but so worth the knowledge gained. My third choice, and this ties in closely with dramaturgy, is directing. I want to create a vision and be able to move the audience to new feelings, to see the world in a different way, to show them that things are possible if you want to put forth the effort to achieve them.

            But, now on to the history, which is the path that I believe I truly want to follow. I want to be a psychohistorian. What the hell is that? I originally got the ida from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and from my boyfriend. The Foundation series concerns the achievement of one man, Hari Seldon. He was a mathematics professor at a university a couple thousand years in the future. He tries to combine physics, math, history, and Psychology to create a future history of the world. This is not fortune telling. This is studying the patterns of history and look at all of the choices and derive a future if a certain choice is made. In this way, we can begin to see where our choices will lead us, what choices could be valid and what choices would not be valid and which choices would serve humanity the best. Note that I did not say human beings. I said humanity. What will help to keep the survival of the human race going? Do we need to go into space to do that? If we do, how do we do it to ensure maximum gain with little loss? Do we need to live on other planets? Which ones would be best? Can we survive long term in a space station or in a ship? What is the emotional gain or loss? How much are we willing to sacrifice to gain? Or would it just be better to stay on Earth? Things like this, except more and bigger. This is my first choice and love. I want to do research into this. Create a think tank in which to accomplish this. Find out the answers to these questions and fix what we need to fix and get us on the right or better path. In short, I want to change the world.

            Another aspect of the history is that I love museums. And yet this is another way for me to reach people and teach them new things and show them different ways of looking at things. I would love to work in a museum, as a curator or a exhibit manager. I think that if I could have some control over what the museum did or how it created it's exhibits, I could give people access to things that they have no fun doing. No one wants to learn passively. No one learns passively. The only way we truly learn and understand something is to interact with it. Become a part of it and actively work to make it a part of our world. Museums could do this if the exhibits they put forward were interactive and tried to actually teach people and let people explore on their own. This is the only way we can really bring the sciences and the arts to the people. Who cares if they're great at it, as long as they are learning.

            So these are my questions. I have many more to ask and I need to really figure out where my starting point is. I want so much that I just don't want to feel like I'm wasting my time in a job that is not completely rewarding for me. I enjoy the work, but I'm not really bettering myself because of it. And I want that. More than anything.

2:01 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Charter Trio
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: curious Romance and Relationships

I started out this specific journey in love with two other friends. Two men, one woman. Or I should say, two boys, one girl. We were wonderful together. There was love and trust and passion and joy. We were truth seekers, believing that all questions could be answered, demanding that truth, honesty (don't confuse the two), passion, love, joy, rationality be a part of our every day lives. We picked up others along the way, but what concerns me is the charter trio. Then, roughly ten years later, it fell apart. What happened? One tried to kill the other and, being taught not to harm women, pushed the other out the door. This is what I want to explore. I want to explore this from my point of view, as it is the only one I can truly speak of with any truth and authority. This is all from my perspective. I would love to hear what happened from the other two people involved.

1:48 PM - 1 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment