Greetings from Wally!

Merry Christmas
from Wally the extendable moose!



He brings me joy. He's also my substitute sister(s) for the day. Yay Wally!

The Joker, The Job Search and The Wanderer

I never thought I'd find career/job search encouragement in the Joker from The Dark Knight. But I (and many others) did.

After a particularly worry-rampant night (hah. I almost typed knight), I woke to find a post from The Simple Dollar entitled The Best Career Advice: Do Stuff. It had some excellent advice and pointed to this wonderfully freeing post from the blog Hoehn's Musings. Here's a snippet:

My favorite part of The Dark Knight is when the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital, and he says: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just DO things… I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.

Heck yes.

Unfortunately, as much as I resonate with both posts linked above, what I tell myself about the job search and my future and how I actually feel about it aren't always on the same page.

The Perils of Geeking Out

Today's neglected todos go a little something like this:

1. Research China language studies. [top]
2. Resume Round Two. [top]
3. Send transcription resume. [top]
   
4. Water plants. [high]
5. Illustration job read up. [high]
6. Call ISIC, get refund. [medium]
   
7. Cover letter, Round One. [medium]
8. Illustration job sketches. [medium]
9. Jobs and the Joker blog. [low]
   
10. A conglomeration of other items. [low]

Several todos happily went home with check marks to validate their worth.

The rest were witnesses to the hijacking of their creator's attention by her itch to tweak and bend new technology to her will.

The culprit?

Take the scissors to the head...

"Staring at a computer screen can be hazardous to your hair. I did it all day, got really antsy, then decided to give myself a haircut. This might end very very badly. On the bright side, I can always resort to a buzz if this becomes a failure of epic proportions."

--The Facebook Status Update

On the tail.

The tail. This is what I call the end of my journey down under. Because there's never really a definite moment where the trip ends and life back home begins. I may have just touched down in my home country physically, but my body still thinks that it's in a different timezone.

Even after two weeks of being back in the homeland, I still haven't completely shaken my new habit of walking on the left hand side nor have I completely figured out which direction I need to look when crossing the road (on foot) or at an intersection (by car).

Not to mention the fact that my brain still wanders back unexpectedly through my Australia and New Zealand travels and that my heart feels a sudden pang when I read facebook updates of friends I met during my travels who are still gallivanting down under.

Still, being back home hasn't been that disorienting. In fact, the most disorienting thing about being back is how un-disorienting it's been!

I still have loads of pictures to go through and geotag and hopefully upload. I still have many pictures I promised to send to various people along the way that I haven't sent. And I just barely finished posting all the blog posts I wrote in my journal but didn't have the correct combination of wifi, laptop and time to type up and post. Bad blog etiquette to post retrospectively perhaps, especially since several of them were only finished once I got home, but never mind that. Here are the retrospectively posted posts:

• On Driving on the "Wrong" Side of the Road
• On the threshold between life and death 
• On Art and Animals, or Seeing the Real Thing 
• On Australia and New Zealand 
• On being indescribable, or Bungy! Scuba! 
• And this is just the airport...
• Or, just go to the front page and read straight down!
  

My travel bug has turned into a good-natured travel leech that refuses to let go of me. My direction for my life is not much clearer than before I left. The economy still sucks. But no matter. Life goes on!