It's been a month...must be time for an update!
2005-04-18 - 11:06 p.m.
I did, in fact, get hired as an assistant manager. I start at my new store tomorrow. Whee.
I've been applying for teaching jobs in the area. Hopefully one of them will pan out, statistically unlikely as that is. I guess I need to start positively visualizing. Or something.
I've noticed that I seem to have lost touch with my spirituality, so I'm looking for a church to start going to. I haven't told Mike this. I was looking for a Buddhist place, and there's a zen center in the area that I think I may look into. All of the other places that I could find have a very involved sense of Buddhism--text and ancestry heavy. Not that this isn't important, it's just that I don't feel allied to it. I feel awfully mired in myself lately. I used to get past this with runic meditation, but I haven't been able to tap into that in a while. I think that part of this is the prevalence of the television in the house. I find it toxic. It's on almost all of the time. Mike just keeps it on. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
I'm addicted to it.
This is the reason that I didn't have cable when I lived alone. Mike can't fathom a house without cable. But it's not healthy for me to have it around. I'm trying to convince him that we should cancel the cable and get a Netflix subscription, instead. He doesn't seem convinced. It's on right now. And he's out in the living room playing Worlds of Warcraft.
I grew up in a house where the tv was on almost all of the time. It's a huge time suck for me. I love to read, but there's this amazing allure to let my brain shut down and have stories poured into it. When I was in undergrad, I didn't have a tv in the dorm room, and that was fine. So, when I started grad school, I was fully prepared not to have a television. I didn't even really want one. But, my mother helped me move and brought one with her. It was a twenty-year-old set, and, without an antenna, I could pick up PBS, ABC, and the Trinity Broadcast Network. Eventually I got a VCR. And that was all fine. I listened to the radio a lot. NPR was a pretty constant backdrop.
When I moved to Lincoln, I got rid of the tv. Then, 9/11 happened, and Natalie gave me an old set so that I could watch the news. That's all I ever really used the tv for...that and watching movies. I spent a great deal of time on-line, and writing.
I feel flattened out by its presence. And, we could save about $50 a month by cancelling the cable. More, if we got rid of the local channels, too.
Bah.
In other news, Robin has a fabulous new harness. She walks better on it than she does on her prong collar. I can't correct her as well, but she walks quite nicely. I think it's mainly because the harness fastens in the front, so it's very difficult for her to forge ahead, unless I let her.
I had to go to Petsmart to get it, and one of their staff trainers got all up in Robin's grill, so of course I couldn't get her to listen to me. I finally had to tell the woman to go away, because Robin wouldn't settle down. I still feel a little guilty that I had to snap at her to get her to realize that she was making the situation worse. On the other hand, it's her job to be tuned into what's going on with the animal, so why wasn't she doing it? She didn't even ask if she could approach Robin, she was just suddenly there.
I also went to get help trimming Robin's toenails. I normally do it myself, but I thought that they would be able to do it better, or have some sort of secret. I was wrong. But, she needed the back nails trimmed, so it was nice to have a second pair of hands.
fin.
