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What Do I Do With Me?Thursday, May 7, 1998, 11:45amWhat I wonder about is what I'll do once it's all official. Jevim will have his degree, and his job, but what will I do? I suspect he wouldn't have too many objections if I wanted to just stay at home and take care of things, do my writing thing and what have you, but I really want to do something with myself. I don't know what I would have done with my life if I'd been given the chance, but it felt like I never was. Mom dragged me up to the Social Security office and got me signed up for disability income the day I turned eighteen, because of my heart problems. Granted, my problems are severe enough that I had no problems getting SSI, but dammit, just because my heart is defective doesn't mean the rest of me is! Heck, the summer after I graduated, the army recruiting office called three different times, trying to get me to enlist based solely on my ASVAB scores. They must have thought I was good for something! Maybe I should have tried to get a job after I graduated. But I was seventeen, didn't have a license or a car, and on a bad day, even walking to the bus stop was enough to do me in for an hour or so. What was I supposed to do? I remember at one time, I really thought I'd like volunteering and then working as a regular employee at the library, but that was a longer walk than the bus stop. Mom wanted us both to volunteer at the community hospital, but on the tour for the prospective volunteers, I wound up making myself sick with nerves (the hospital thing) and that just didn't work. To be honest, it wasn't something I wanted to do, anyway. Now look at me... I'm going on 27 years old, and not a day of paid work experience in my life. Who's going to hire me? I used to say I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Well, here I am, all grown up, no job and all the time in the world on my hands. Do I write? Hardly! Later, it would be 'I want to work with computers.' I took FORTRAN at the community college in California, and I did decently, but that and COBOL were the only languages they offered at the time. The math they required for FORTRAN was a bit over my head. I had to take a trig course as a refresher, and really they should have had precalc or calc as a prerequisite, for some of the later assignments we were given. I dropped out of my precalc class in high school because I thought the instructor was terrible, and I wasn't really learning anything. I wonder, if I'd actually had the math abilities under my belt, if I'd have done better in the class and liked it more. I did pass with a C, but that's very unlike me. At any rate, doing math type stuff really wasn't the kind of programming I wanted to do, but at the time, I didn't know there were other languages out there. COBOL didn't sound like my sort of thing either, but I guess maybe I should have given it a try. Now, I don't seem to have the dedication to teach myself C++; I think I could learn it, but without structured classroom meetings and deadlines, I always find myself getting distracted and falling behind until I give up. Maybe next month while I'm with Jevim, I can do better. I won't have net access while he's at work, and since that's my major distraction, maybe I can manage to sit down and study and devote myself to actually learning the stuff. After all, I'll have my own private tutor. We'll see... || Home | Journal Index ||
 
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