Quiet the Mind.

Tomorrow I have an interview at the Tag office. I’m hoping that after tomorrow I’ll be able to bring home a paycheck for the first time in a month and a half. The longer I’m out of work, the more discouraged I become in the whole ability to join in the ranks of the employed. Given a preference I’d rather be employed than unemployed, even if I could afford being unemployed. I need to work because I need something to do other than catch up on all those television series that I missed out on due to being in college and working full time or even almost full time.

Sitting at home all day has never been my thing. In high school I was always doing something, either working on a play, at Tae Kwon Do or hanging out with my boyfriend or friends. The few times in my life that I’ve had the opportunity to just veg, by the end of the first day of vegetation I was bored out of my mind and starting into depression. I am one of those people who will move until they die. Vegging has never made me feel refreshed afterward.

I’m pretty sure that it’s a rare occasion that I don’t move in my sleep. I toss and turn all night, talk in my sleep, and have been known to sleep walk, etc. Stillness is one of those things that makes me nervous and uncomfortable. It took me years to be able to just sit in silence. I still can’t do it successfully: if I’m in complete silence I fidget. As a theatre major I participated in a lot of exercises where I was instructed to “clear your mind,” I couldn’t do it. I would end up thinking about my biggest concerns, my current flavor of the week, or making up things. I felt like my brain was going to shut off, and I was going to turn into a vegetable or something. Highly irrational, I know.

I’m the same person that thought I could be born from a Martian seed disguised as a crouton placed into my mom’s salad 24 years ago, and that they would come pick me up and take me back any day now. I grew out of that phase in 5^th grade after I went to space camp and they insisted that there is no life on Mars, not now anyway. Clever, if I do say so myself, but irrational.

I had all the kinks worked out too. There is no denying that I was a spitting image of my mother, when she was in grade school, so I rationalized that because Martians are far more intelligent creatures then humans, that the seed replicated my parents DNA to create a being that would resemble them, but would have Martian intelligence, thus explaining why I was so much smarter than my parents. I also rationalized that there must have been a Martian salad guy working at the restaurant which is how the crouton was placed there. I was born right on time in the Martian world, and not weeks early like the doctor concluded. Also the reason, why she almost died during childbirth, seriously, how could a simple human successfully birth a Martian? Which is why I, like Macduff, was not born of a women, but from my mother’s womb untimely ripped. Well, I guess timely ripped, but still. The things I came up with when I was younger amuse me. Hell, I’m still amused by the theories I come up with.

It is a rare moment when I’m not thinking about something, which is why I’m always annoyed when people say they weren’t thinking about anything when they have the blank stare. I categorize myself as very normal, even though I often call myself weird, so if other people can stare blankly into the oblivion, they must be thinking because that is what I’m doing when I have that absent look on my face. I can’t see, properly because I’m visualizing whatever idea I’m entertaining in my mind.

These past two weeks without a job and not being on a constant road trip, I have been going absolutely stir crazy. I don’t know how to manage, when I don’t have people to hang out or things to do. My mind gets all wrapped up into itself and by 4 O’clock every day I’m ready to head out the door, coincidently, if not on purpose, before my dad gets home to greet me with awkward formalities. I’m partially embarrassed, “no I didn’t find a job yet,” “Today was boring, didn’t do anything but fill out applications, surf the Internet and watch TV,” and “I’m hoping to be a productive member of society, soon.” My dad means well, but after our brief chat, he turns his conversation to the TV, and I hole up into my computer, hoping it will bring me closer to social interaction.