the title of the post is (in my head) to the tune of a tragically hip song that no one probably knows. anyways....
so it's officially the end of an era, my parents are moving! i feel like they've been talking about it forever and have postponed it like 10 times, but now that my parents have some potential buyers lined up to see the house next week it's real. how weird that in a few months time if i try to go back to my house i'll get thrown out to the curb by the new owners like a piece of trash. the thought of it makes me want to shake my fist, that's my house! but it's good for my parents--my dad is retiring and they're ready to move on from NOVA. i definitely feel that--while in a lot of ways NOVA is a great place to live and raise a family, it also kind of sucks.
since i need to move out stat, i have spent the past couple weeks
digging through boxes from the attic and getting rid of things i
don't need anymore- like my cupcake dolls and my crazy bones (why i needed a pencil bag full of crazy bones i will never know). i also found a lot of really funny stories i wrote in elementary school that really make me wonder what was going through my head at that time. some of them are so great, but that will be for another post.
i started thinking about at 8 years old what i thought my life would be like at 25 years old. your sense of time and what's important is so warped when you're little. honestly, i probably thought i would have grandchildren by this point and be living the good life.
but
i never, ever thought i would have lived in my parents house until i
was 25 years old. whenever someone at work asks me where i live, i
always sheepishly tell them that i live with my parents. because they're
always like what's in annandale? annandale is such a random place for someone my age to
live. i actually don't really care that much, but it
does probably make it seem like i am unqualified for my job.
considering
that i have had some kind of job for almost the entire time that i've lived with my parents, i
must be an outlier compared to other people my age living at home right
now. that's special :)
but
here i sit in my room, the same room i have occupied since i was 12
years old when i upgraded from another room in the house. at least i
haven't been living in the same room my whole life, good god. who knows
how much longer i'd be here if my parents weren't moving soon.
living
rent-free since graduating has surely been the biggest perk of living
at home. and of course seeing my lovely parents everyday, except for
that 6 month period when they were learning how to use facebook...those
were the dark times. but i'm not sure if i would have had the financial
luxury to quit my job and pack my bags for china if i hadn't lived at
home. after a year of work in dalian, i brought home (like literally brought home,
i had it on me all through my plane ride home and my layover in tokyo)
20,800 rmb. that sounds like a lot of money, and in china, it really
is--it is more than enough to live there. however, converted to dollars,
that is $3,300. i'd like to think that the reason that amount is so low
is because i used some of my teaching money to travel to southeast
asia, but i'm pretty sure i used a different pot of money for that. i was only making like $1,000 a month there from my company, and just making a little bit extra from private teaching gigs. i have 0 regrets from that year, but i may have felt differently if i hadn't been able to settle right back into my parent's house upon returning to the US, because finding a job when i came back wasn't easy.
the thing is that when
i left for china, i didn't really even think about the consequences of
quitting a job (aka having to find a new job when i returned). or maybe i
did, i just didn't really care. i'm not really one to let such a
"minor" detail get in the way of my big plans. when i returned, i
realized that i had underestimated how hard finding a job was,
especially when i only had 1 1/2 years of real work under my belt, the economy still wasn't that great, and i wanted an upgrade in job responsibilities and salary from my previous job at united way. i had already worked 2 temp jobs
before landing my final temp job at pta, which by the grace of all
things good turned into a real job after 3 months and met all of my requirements. i think i got the job 10% because i
worked my butt off and 90% because i got really lucky with timing.
whatever, i'll take it. all together it took me 9 months from returning to the US to getting an offer letter in my hand from pta and it was probably some of the most frustrating
months of my life (even more frustrating than the dark times). the whole
temp and application/interview process thing wore me out. i got
so desperate that at one point i interviewed at a place called JC
tumbles. everything must have went well because JC tumbles invited me
back for a 2nd round interview, at which point i said JC tumbles you
have got to be kidding me and passed on the opportunity. i wonder if the
2nd round interview would have been more physical, like i would have to
prove that i could do a backward somersault while cloroxing the mat. oh
well, i'll never know, for my own morale, i couldn't do it. (for the record i wouldn't mind doing somersaults all day and may have worked there for a while if i had gotten it on the first go-round, i just didn't want to oblige them by partaking in their little ego-boosting interview game).
so
i got really lucky with pta and i don't know what i would have done if
it hadn't worked out. for one, the temp at pta was the only temp job i had applied to in weeks--i had sworn off applying to any more
temps because i was getting nervous about how long i was going to have to jump around until i found something and wanted something permanent. the only reason i applied for it was because i
thought the pta might be up my ally....so it was a total fluke that i even ended up getting this job in the first place. for two, unlike the other 2 temps, the pta temp was indefinite--there wasn't really a set project that i
was coming in and doing and i was kind of building my own work. so after a
few months...i realized it didn't really feel like a temp at all and i had
ownership of a lot of pieces of work. to think about having to start
over and do that again at another job made me feel mentally exhausted, i'm not sure how much longer i could have played the job game before i gave up and called JC tumbles to see if that 2nd round interview was still on the table.
it's really hard and much more stressful to find a job when you don't one to begin with. i'd much rather be in the position where i was currently at a job and trying to switch. but that doesn't even work for some young people--recently i came into contact with the word "permatern". it is someone who seems to permanently work for free or a stipend because they can't secure a paid position. these are smart people who are doing these jobs, how pathetic. i'm way too lazy to look up the exact statistics right now but obviously there is a huge gap between the number of young people in the job market and the number of (good) jobs that actually exist. and i feel like a lot of these jobs are never coming back. it kind of makes me think that going more towards a welfare state is a step in the right direction. if someone takes all the steps they're supposed to, and still can't make it (or make it in a timely manner), what are they supposed to do? do we say tough luck and let them fail at a chance of having a good life? i think some people just don't like the idea that their hard-earned money would be going towards supporting someone else. well, i also think about it this way-- if i was struggling financially and had no one to support me, i would be much more inclined to engage in alternative activities to bring home the bacon...and those would likely be illicit activities if you didn't catch my drift. impoverished areas are always the most dangerous ones, and poverty is a cycle. i'd rather pay a little out for social welfare to ensure that my country was a good place to live than sit inside clutching my piggy bank tight to my chest because i was afraid of going outside.
point of the story--maybe i would be a drug lord right now if my parents had not been around to house me. i learned some pretty good bartering skills in china :)
so it's another one of my classic rambling posts. i'm writing a book right now, and i'm going to need to hire a really good editor. sigh...
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