dianaschnuth

Being at home with Aaron for a week — and during *this* week in particular, biologically speaking — has made for some interesting dynamics.

Left to my own devices, I’ll sleep for at least 10 hours and stay awake for between 12 and 14 hours. This, as I have already learned in the past, is not good for my mood. I start to feel lazy and depressed, and become less productive, since my normally productive and creative afternoon hours are suddenly my sleepy morning hours. Rolling out of bed at the crack of noon needs to stop.

At least I’ve been making myself to-do lists to keep myself busy. Follow-ups, hitting job-search websites, and driving to BG for outplacement workshops have been on my agenda.

Still… after a decent amount of job rejection, or getting no response and counting that as rejection (and fielding website restructuring requests that feel like rejection, but shouldn’t), I’m starting to feel a little stressed. I hadn’t realized it until I had a little mini-breakdown today, for no good reason. I’m still chalking most of it up to hormones.

My diabolical plan is to add more structure to my days, and to get up earlier. Instead of going to aikido this evening, for instance, I’m going to attend tomorrow’s (and Thursday’s, and Saturday’s) 10am session. I’m also going to meditate daily, like I’d mentioned before that I wanted to do.

I need to not take everything so personally. I also need to eat better, exercise more, and get out of the house every day. Otherwise, I’ll sink into a funk from which I’ll never escape. And that’s not a good way to find a job.

Update, 12:45am: It’s amazing what a difference just ten minutes of meditation can make. That 8pm session of zazen, plus a solid and genuinely excited decision to attend aikido tomorrow morning, along with a shitload of job leads from one of Aaron’s friends, have all acted to calm me considerably.

Lights out in fifteen minutes.

Day One was spent recuperating from the incredible Flaming Lips show in Cleveland on Sunday. Slept in, chilled out, and came up with a battle plan. Day Two saw the initiation of said battle plan.

I identified two major issues that I need to address: productivity in job-hunting and organization in general. One affects the other, but I can’t just go at them one at a time. I need a pleasant and clean workspace to feel happy and productive; but I can’t clean to the exclusion of all else, and THEN go find a job. So, I set myself up a list of priorities for cleaning my desk space, starting with my file cabinet, moving to the stack of stuff on the floor, then the stack on top of the file cabinet, then the pile on my actual desk, and so forth. (Anyone who saw my immaculate desk at work wouldn’t believe that my desk at home is such a disaster.)

As for job-hunting productivity, I launched up my long-neglected Palm Desktop application. It has a task list and calendar, which is mainly what I need. I’m basically doing like I did when I was coordinating the database project with James: set up a short but vital list of tasks to accomplish the following day, so I feel super productive when I finish those plus more.

I’m also logging everything I’m doing in an Excel log, so I can track my productivity. For example, today I searched through all my del.icio.us jobhunt bookmarks and found two jobs I’m going to apply for tomorrow. I also followed up with a potential employer and sent my Personal Marketing Plan (i.e. my list of skills and target employers) to a former colleague to look over.

Since I got all that accomplished during the day, I didn’t feel bad spending my evening playing Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD on the 360. 🙂

If I can keep this up, I’ll at least feel like I’m not squandering my time at home. Still, this super-extended vacation is going to be weird.

So, I’m starting to realize (with some help from my friends) that any job I take at this point is going to be entry-level. Not coffee-bitch entry-level, maybe, but college-grad entry-level. Basically, I’ll be pretending that the last five years never happened when I’m looking for potential jobs. Granted, I’ve learned a lot of valuable office and interpersonal skills since graduation six years ago, but I’ve only meagerly advanced my technical knowledge in my field.

Speaking of: what *is* my field, anyway? We had this discussion before, to a degree, where I bemoaned my lack of advanced skills in any given field. But even assuming that I’m getting a glorified intern job… I have a clean slate, assuming someplace will take me. I could go marketing, or IT, or something else.

I’m even contemplating taking evening classes, once I get myself a new steady job. Maybe get a certificate or an Associates at Owens in… IT? Marketing? Something that will get me where I want to be in my new company. It’ll depend on what kind of tuition reimbursement my new employer has, if any, and if I end up getting any on-the-job training in things I want to learn, like .NET or some other technology.

I still maintain that this is a delicate balance. I have to be receptive to whatever comes down the pike, and be prepared for just about any opportunity that presents itself. Winds of change, and all that.

It’s kind of like aikido: I could be thrown down and be totally unprepared, and get hurt. I could be thrown down and be excessively tense and resistant, and get hurt. Or I could take the energy that’s directed toward me and use it to my own advantage, being ready for what’s to come, take the fall rolling and come up on my feet.

I’m not terribly good at that physically yet; maybe the mental concept will come easier.

I decided to take a different tack on the job hunt this evening, and look one-by-one at each business that’s located in the business development where I currently work. I’m a big fan of the location, being that a.) it’s a fifteen-minute drive from home, and b.) there’s a fantastic wooded walking path through the middle of the area. So, I sat down with a list of (most of) the businesses in the park, and went to all of their websites, and determined whether their industry is something I’d be interested in pursuing, and looked for job postings.

I found a few that sounded vaguely interesting, and a few that I’d already known about — but I found one business that finally sparked my interest enough to get the job-hunt juices flowing again. It’s a national firm, an IT services and solutions provider, and I’m only vaguely familiar with most of their offerings. All of it made the geek girl in me drool, though.

Only a computer nerd would look through a list of technology solutions and think, “Ooh, HP Storage Area Network. I’ve never heard of that! Sounds cool!” Lots of the names like Altiris and Veritas and Citrix, and lots of the buzzwords like Web Content Filtering and Business Continuity Planning, all sounded familiar to me, but not enough so that I’d even be able to talk for two minutes straight about a given one.

The only section of their services where I know I can shine is Web Development, including website design and development and website management services. That I can do. The other stuff… it harks back to a day when I went around with Kirkum and installed new network cards in pizza-box Macs. Or imaged computers in the labs. Or installed a right-angle adapter in my own legacy Mac so I could install an ethernet card.

At any rate, I got fired up enough (and undepressed enough) that I worked on my Personal Marketing Plan like the nice outsourcing lady told me to. I have a list of about a dozen companies that may or may not be hiring, but that it would be pretty cool to work for. You can all expect that, once I have my Marketing Plan done and ready for prime time, I’ll be sharing it with you and asking you, “Do you know anyone who works for…?”

Snicked from talcotts, via khath, via clawfoot and crystalkirk:

1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their “Career Matchmaker” questions.
4. Post the top fifteen results.

My results after all three sets of questions:
1. Multimedia Developer
2. Video Game Developer
3. Business Systems Analyst
4. Website Designer
5. Animator
6. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
7. Computer Programmer
8. Web Developer
9. Film Editor
10. Market Research Analyst
11. Professor
12. Webmaster
13. Artist
14. Desktop Publisher
15. Graphic Designer
16. Technical Writer
17. Computer Animator
…
32. Photographer

I’ve actually considered most of these careers, except maybe Market Research Analyst or Business Systems Analyst. Some of these (like Computer Animator or Video Game Designer) I would have liked to have done, but require more or different training/schooling. Some (like Artist or Cartoonist) I’ve long since lost the skills to do. Many of the others are viable options, and I feel that the quiz gave surprisingly accurate results — especially considering how blasé I was with my answers, for the most part. I only ventured away from the neutral choice when I had a strong feeling for or against a particular job task.

All righty. Video Game Developer job, here I come…?

Right.