find a job for the summer

This summer I’ll be the Clinic Coordinator at my school clinic. I’ll mainly do phone screenings for potential patients and create databases from old files.

I might also be an as-needed paraprofessional counselor at Planned Parenthood or an assistant supervisor at an extended school year program for autistic children.

Well, this morning I FINALLY managed to drag my sorry ass over to the place I worked last summer. And, lo and behold, my old boss gave me my old job back, starting part-time next week, and going full-time once the semester’s over. So. My money problems are solved, more or less, for the immediate future. Woo hoo!

As always with stuff that I put off and put off and put off, I find myself wondering this afternoon why it was so hard to just get over there and start a conversation with the woman. It’s always really scary for me to be worrying about jobs and stuff—I generally do fine once I have one, but getting them has been troublesome in the past, and money worries completely paralyze me, and all that. But then I finally break that paralysis, and do what needs to be done, and it turns out fine, and in fact the way I wanted it to, and I think about all the energy I expended worrying about it for the last few months, and how much worrying I did about “what if I walk in there, and she says no”, and all that.

The best way to screw oneself up, it seems, is to sit around and be afraid and not actually do anything. I need to keep that in mind. Of course, I always say that to myself, and I always seem to forget it. But maybe one of these days it will stick. Hee.

In any event, this one can be crossed off the list. Decent job, decent pay. I say again: WOO HOO!

I dunno.

The convenience store up the street from me has been hiring for months, and I’ve worked gigs like that before, and trying to live in a high-rent area on no more than my student loans hasn’t been working out so well.

I been thinking about it for weeks, actually, but, partly on the strength of this 43things business, when I went in there for beer tonight, I asked the dude behind the counter for an application. I’ve even got it all filled out now, and I expect I’ll drop it off tomorrow or Saturday. That’s actually kind of a big thing—this sort of business, like the housing issue, tends to paralyze me. Funny, how putting one’s needs and intentions out into the world, more or less publicly, can make them more viably actionable. Working in the C-Store isn’t going to solve my money problems for the summer, certainly, but it would certainly help with the short-term cashflow issues, which I’ve not been dealing with thus far. So.

Anyway. I’m still going to try and talk with my old employer, and talk my way back into that game—gonna go and see her Monday morning. But at least I’ve been roused to do something. That is, actually, a huge step for me. So. Right on.

It’s actually kind of funny….my plan for this morning was to venture out to visit the woman I worked for last summer and see if I could talk her into hiring me back. It’s not the best place to work, but the pay is about as good as an itinerant grad student is likely to find in these parts. But instead I discovered “43 Things”, and so here I still am.

I don’t know why I keep putting this off….I mean, the worst that can happen is that she’ll say no, and I’ll just have to look elsewhere. I dunno.