Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Last of the Living - STOs on the Obstacle Course
I know it took forever for me to process these. Apologies. At the end of the blog is a series of shots I took on the Bourbon Trail and in my dad's garden.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Severely Unemployed and still missing my summer
I'm home! Not a week passed before a ticket cashier at a movie theater in my hometown was responsible for striking a strange love of home into my chest with the simple saying - "Oh bless her heart!" Despite the cultural tendencies for Kentucky to linger on the precipice of "Southern Charm," I hadn't heard the phrase once in my stay there aside from explaining to some northern folk of the ways of the South. It was odd to be driving home, weaving through the traffic I learned how to drive in six years ago. Unpacking the car, I continued to marvel at how much useless crap I'd taken with me and couldn't stop feeling like I was just home for the weekend before returning to my company and my work at Fort Knox.
Cue the entrance of joining the majority of my fellow graduates - unemployed and "actively searching." Along with packing and moving and packing and moving, I've embarked on paying the bills through free lance design jobs, only one of which have I secured of the paying variety.... and don't pay enough to cover everything. I've managed to set up house with some good friends of mine whose policy on rent is "pay what you can when you can," and I find that my adventures to Knox and back have probably given me the best gift there is - knowing whose really got my back.
Now I'm not saying that all of my friends and family should have been glued to their computers, eyes glazing over in the white-blue light of the screen, drool dribbling out of the right corner of their hap-hazard gob as they flip through my daily gallery, but I honestly feel about 600x more motivated and focused when I know that people are investing effort to see where all of my effort is going. Most careers, it's pretty straight-forward. You get up, work a shift, come home tired and grumpy, get paid, buy stuff, go to work... this isn't journalism. And I find now that my patience thins in explaining why I was out of touch this summer. I shouldn't have to. You should know.
This little annoyance is how I've discovered that I am SO incredibly, amazingly blessed with such kick-ass awesome friends and family who were checking on a weekly basis to "see how Heather's doing." And they didn't do this by calling (thank-you for that, cuz in all honesty, I was probably working), or complaining about not hearing from me, or sending me eighteen pages of "my life story for the last day and a half that we haven't spoken because you MUST know EVERY detail of EVERY day" (long title) that I did not have time to read, but rather, doing what I really wholly appreciate, checking my photo blogs. Not this one, I was pathetically horrible at staying with this one, but rather the one with the LTC website. Yea, the one I posted to my facebook when I had a day that I really enjoyed. The one that was my job. Yea, that one. Being home now, and hearing all of the comments from my own family and friends rather than people I've never met a day in my life - "I could really see how much you improved," "You did a great job, I loved those night frames!" "No wonder, those photos were with the cadets all day, and you could really tell" - I don't think I can even begin to explain how comforting it is to know that there are people in my life who understand what I'm trying to do here.
I miss Knox. I miss it terribly, and every day. I had been feeling so much pressure the last few months of college - a strange concoction of expectations, adulthood, and impending doom. It felt like a really bad massage. "This is supposedly making your life better but it's making you feel like shit." That feeling. And at Knox, it was like I'd sunk into a hot tub and the hours, the job, the people I worked with, the lifestyle, all of it just melted away all of that stress, the worries, the pressures, the incessant feeling that I was a new me fighting to shake off my old skin. I felt like myself. And now I'm addicted to that feeling, and I don't ever want to go back.
I don't know if South Carolina can be home anymore after a summer like that. I'm a brand new me, a me I really like, a lot. And I don't want to go back. Of course, I'll go (or stay) wherever the green takes me (ha, that could be money OR the army, did you see that? :P ), but I have to honestly say that I really hope it isn't here. I will miss my friends and family, but I truly feel that it's time for Heather to leave the nest and fly a little more.
Cue the entrance of joining the majority of my fellow graduates - unemployed and "actively searching." Along with packing and moving and packing and moving, I've embarked on paying the bills through free lance design jobs, only one of which have I secured of the paying variety.... and don't pay enough to cover everything. I've managed to set up house with some good friends of mine whose policy on rent is "pay what you can when you can," and I find that my adventures to Knox and back have probably given me the best gift there is - knowing whose really got my back.
Now I'm not saying that all of my friends and family should have been glued to their computers, eyes glazing over in the white-blue light of the screen, drool dribbling out of the right corner of their hap-hazard gob as they flip through my daily gallery, but I honestly feel about 600x more motivated and focused when I know that people are investing effort to see where all of my effort is going. Most careers, it's pretty straight-forward. You get up, work a shift, come home tired and grumpy, get paid, buy stuff, go to work... this isn't journalism. And I find now that my patience thins in explaining why I was out of touch this summer. I shouldn't have to. You should know.
This little annoyance is how I've discovered that I am SO incredibly, amazingly blessed with such kick-ass awesome friends and family who were checking on a weekly basis to "see how Heather's doing." And they didn't do this by calling (thank-you for that, cuz in all honesty, I was probably working), or complaining about not hearing from me, or sending me eighteen pages of "my life story for the last day and a half that we haven't spoken because you MUST know EVERY detail of EVERY day" (long title) that I did not have time to read, but rather, doing what I really wholly appreciate, checking my photo blogs. Not this one, I was pathetically horrible at staying with this one, but rather the one with the LTC website. Yea, the one I posted to my facebook when I had a day that I really enjoyed. The one that was my job. Yea, that one. Being home now, and hearing all of the comments from my own family and friends rather than people I've never met a day in my life - "I could really see how much you improved," "You did a great job, I loved those night frames!" "No wonder, those photos were with the cadets all day, and you could really tell" - I don't think I can even begin to explain how comforting it is to know that there are people in my life who understand what I'm trying to do here.
I miss Knox. I miss it terribly, and every day. I had been feeling so much pressure the last few months of college - a strange concoction of expectations, adulthood, and impending doom. It felt like a really bad massage. "This is supposedly making your life better but it's making you feel like shit." That feeling. And at Knox, it was like I'd sunk into a hot tub and the hours, the job, the people I worked with, the lifestyle, all of it just melted away all of that stress, the worries, the pressures, the incessant feeling that I was a new me fighting to shake off my old skin. I felt like myself. And now I'm addicted to that feeling, and I don't ever want to go back.
I don't know if South Carolina can be home anymore after a summer like that. I'm a brand new me, a me I really like, a lot. And I don't want to go back. Of course, I'll go (or stay) wherever the green takes me (ha, that could be money OR the army, did you see that? :P ), but I have to honestly say that I really hope it isn't here. I will miss my friends and family, but I truly feel that it's time for Heather to leave the nest and fly a little more.
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| The last sunrise at Knox. |
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