pinkhairthing

Yeah I haven't been posting for a while because I keep waiting for something to happen, and then a bunch of things happened, and now I have no time. I am working a lot at school, teaching, supervising, and administrating. It is strange to be on this end of things, I keep doing stuff like signing charts on the student instead of the supervisor line. But it is good and I like it. I find myself stressing over how my students are doing, whom I may have left behind, who needed more help, who needs to get it together on her own.
And then there is a bigger decision looming. I have an offer to share space in Evanston with a few Shiatsu practitioners, but it means a lease with no actual prospects of patients coming in. That would mean serious, hard-core patient recruitment for the next six months, which you might also recognize as the six months before I get married. It would probably be a good year or so before I am profitable, and then we begin to enter baby country. Do I want my practice booming just as I need to slack off from it? And then I am paying for my own health insurance. And let's not forget student loans. And two rents, two sets of bills. OR should I try to find an acupuncture job somewhere, with maybe some pay and benefits, but less time to see patients and maybe a boss and a schedule and a dress code, getting away from all of which was a central motivator in going back to school. Private practice could in the long run be profoundly more lucrative. A job would be more steady. What's the job? I don't know, but they are out there, I need more information, but the Evanston space is happening soon. Is public health better because it is morally better or am I too lazy and scared to start a practice?
And then there is a sort of joylessness to right now. Not enough money to do holiday things, or anythings. Still a dirth of friends to do those kinds of things with. And then our opposite schedules preventing us from finding our own cheap solitary fun. Our apartment, big but boring and a little too cluttered, already. We need paint and storage units, but guess what? We can't buy that stuff right now. I am in a mood to paint every room in my house green. I think I should. Different shades of green, of course. The inside and outside of a lime, a blade of grass, moss, seaweed, the sea. Grapes. Spinach. Pine.
I am waking up anxious and going to sleep exhausted. I don't think I will look back on this time as one of the best ever, but then I think of the year after I graduated from college. scared, broke, clueless, stressed over how to get ConEd turned on, jobs, life, and everything. It is weirder now, because I know how to do things, but there are so many fewer possibilities. I am not going to become an inventor of third-world farming solutions, nor a journalist, nor an actress. I am what I am going to be when I grow up. But I am new at it. And when I look back at that post-college time, there is something wonderfully raw and wild about my memories. The pockets of comfort stand out so vividly: a PBS marathon of Tales of the City on a really snowy night with a best friend, Hudson Bay Blanket, and pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk; a weekend away in a cabin upstate; a weekend in the Berkshires; drinking $2 Rolling Rocks with a table of gorgeous friends listening to the Cranberries and Johnny Cash at the Blue and Gold, wearing a ponytail; looking up and seeing a cross of clouds in the big blue sky when all things came together perfectly in a single day - love, job, acting. And the rest is just a vague blur of anxiety and a deep desire for a big glass of OJ. I wonder how I will remember this time.