current musings--deeply personal and probably not terribly interesting. :)

Well, I was going to go to Cowboy Monkey tonight. But I'm in some pain and discomfort, which has been quite common for me the past couple of weeks, and if I'm going to make it to Rigoletto in Chicago tomorrow, I have to get up around eight in the morning.

So I have applied for about three jobs and readied my applications for four others that have to go in the mail on Monday. I have to apply for every single job for which I'm remotely qualified that comes up between now and whenever I'm given a decent job offer. Come May 16, I will be out of a job, an apartment, and school. So I'm royally screwed if I don't have something lined up by then.

I went to a lovely tea party today, which was super nice--great conversation and company. It was a wonderful idea for my friend to have a tea party and invite people she doesn't get to talk to or see very often. I hope to see more of the people who were there, and I made a brand-new friend!

Since I'm the queen of wearing my heart on my sleeve and my blog, the following is going to be quite personal. Shred and I were discussing the ins and outs of acquaintanceship today and how everyone deals with some of these issues from time to time, in one way or another. So if you continue to read, I hope that you may sympathize with some of these thoughts and feelings at least:

I'm still a bit mopey over my left-outness with some people I used to hang out with around here, but I should probably assume I'm not hated or too offensive and that somehow to those people I just don't jive or something. I come back around to these insecurities every once in awhile, no matter how old I get. For some reason, the universe and the people with whom I come into contact have to remind me every so often that I am an introvert, that I'm not like a lot of other people, and that in spite of feeling a bond with some people, it's not always there (I'm usually the last to find out, however). Ultimately, too, almost without exception my closest friends are like me--they tend to bond with individuals, not groups, and enjoy spending big chunks of time by themselves (or around one or two like-minded people). Such is not the way of the vast majority of the world, however.

I hope someday I'll stop getting my feelings so hurt when people discontinue their friendships with me. I'm sure everybody deals with this in his or her own way. Because I am such a strange combination of outgoingness and introversion and opinionatedness, I've struggled my whole life to find a balance and to more smoothly engage with people socially. It will always be a struggle with me. Also, people naturally flow in and out of contact with each other all the time, and while I take it a bit less personally now than I used to, I still can't help but sometimes think it's because of something I did or said. These particular acquaintanceships of which I talk have rather odd situations, too, that definitely warrant my paranoia. I won't get into the details here, but I think I'll just have to chalk the incredible weirdness up to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Only at GSLIS can friendships or acquaintanceships be so incredibly convoluted sometimes. And I should know--I went to Smith, and socially it was pretty normal compared with GSLIS. :)

Some of the peculiar problems I have socially with GSLIS might very well be geographical. I have dealt with a completely different kind of human animal here--the Midwestern human animal. Everywhere else I've lived, the people I've met have been, in many cases, drastically different from some in the Midwest. There is a woman who is one of the most distinctly Midwestern people I've ever met (so much so that we could never have been good friends) and she wound up in a job on the East coast. I doubt she'd ever even visited there before she moved there. I wonder sometimes how she's holding up, because I think she just belongs in the Midwest. And with the same token, I certainly don't belong here. I don't even know if I really belonged in Chicago, even though I loved it, but I'm completely and totally out of my element in Central Illinois. I suppose I knew that when I moved here but that doesn't make it any easier.

But being out of one's element and not fitting in with people one initially fit in with makes one self reflect and come to terms more with self acceptance, no doubt. I will always be grateful for my experiences here and for the close friends I have made and kept and hope will be lifelong friends. I should concentrate on my blessings and not on people who don't remember me or care about me. Isn't that what life is all about? :)