Back from wherever I was

Hello dear friends who read my blog (if any of you still check it, since it's been so long since I last updated). I apologize for my absence. My summer has finally started, so hopefully I can write a little bit more consistently now. Here is a short list of what I've been up to that's been stressing me out so much lately:

- School (4 summer classes that demanded a lot more of my attention than I thought they would)

- Work (2 jobs, one at Starbucks which is pretty straightforward, one at a law office where I'm just supposed to get as much work done as possible whenever I can, which made me feel like I should always be doing work, and I probably should've done a lot more than I actually did)

- Job search (looking for a full-time teaching job - a fruitless endeavor in this county, so I'll probably start looking elsewhere soon. More on that later)

- Moving (you know, from one apartment to another)

- Short trip home (for my cousin's wedding! That was this past Saturday and was much more of a joy than a chore. Sooooo beautiful)

So I was really stressed out and don't handle stress well, so I sort of cut off communication with everyone except for those who actively sought communication with me. I'm sorry for that. I'll be better now.

Lately, I've been learning that I need to return to my focus on patience. I have very very little. A couple of years ago, I was really thinking and praying about it a lot and thought I had gotten a little better about it. Since then, I've become a stressed out crazy-person (sometimes) and need to return to this focus. I need to have patience when I'm driving or talking to someone who is taking a long time to get to their point. I need to be patient when I don't want to be doing the activity I'm involved in with friends or whomever. I need to be patient when I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life and feel like my little plans are thwarted. I want to be more fluid, to just go with the flow and remember that things will work out for the best and probably not at all how I thought they would go. I had this plan in my head that I would get a teaching job in May or June and would have the rest of the summer to plan. Well here we are on the first day of July, and I still have no job. I just heard back from the school where I really wanted to work that the position I was applying for was filled by a tenured teacher from another school because he'd been laid off at his school due to budget cuts. The school district has to protect its people, and in this time of hiring freezes and gigantic budget cuts, they can't afford to take risks on brand new teachers. My current line of thinking is that maybe taking a year to substitute and continuing to work for the lawyer to get some different experiences would not be a bad thing to do at all. And we're probably going to be leaving Gainesville next summer anyway, so working at a school for one year and then leaving isn't really fair to the school anyway. But, as my mom and Matt say, who knows what will happen in the next few weeks before school starts? Only God, and He wants me to work on patience, which means I don't get to know the plan. Not bitter about that... really...

I know that many many people are in this same position. Some teachers I know are in the EXACT same position, but more broadly, a lot of people are struggling with being uncertain as to what the next step in their lives should be. I guess it's pretty common for our age group. These "transitional" years get shoved into this category of something to just get through, and then we can start our real lives after that. I don't like that at all. I would really like to consider myself as someone currently living, not someone who will be living at some point. So let's work on that. That, and patience.