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It’s a Weekend Open Thread Again!

Tell Auntie Selena all about your week! I’ll bake some cookies and we’ll all put on our comfy pants and have a wonderful evening.

By [E] Selena MacIntosh*

Selena MacIntosh is the owner and editor of Persephone Magazine. She also fixes it when it breaks. She is fueled by Diet Coke, coffee with a lot of cream in it, and cat hair.

73 replies on “It’s a Weekend Open Thread Again!”

So, on the off chance that there is someone still in for the open thread, I could use a bit of advice.

I need to have a really ugly conversation with my boyfriend of 4 and a half years and I don’t know how to bring up the subject. I’ve never really had to do this before. The relevant details are thus:

  1. He is a good person. I like him. We have fun together. I like his friends. I like the social part of our life together.
  2. I am not hugely passionate about our relationship in romantic terms, but I am not a hugely passionate person in general terms, so I don’t know that that is a problem necessarily
  3. I work a day job with regular hours.
  4. He just took a new bar tending job. It’s all evening shift stuff and mostly on the weekends. He keeps saying it will be a full time gig, but I have yet to see him work more than a five hour shift or more than four days a week. The job has no benefits. I see no real room for advancement in it either.
  5. This is his second job. The other one keeps him busy on the weekend in the daytime.
  6. He took up the idea of going after bar tending jobs like this on the suggestion of his father more or less on the fly.
  7. Previous to that, I had been encouraging him to look for welding jobs, because that is a skill he has and those are jobs that can be quite good. I got him numbers to call, whole nine yards. He made positive noises, then did nothing with the information I got him. Seems to have given up on the idea.
  8. This sort of thing will never not be a night job. My job will always be a day job.
  9. I feel like I am doing all the heavy lifting in terms of keeping an open schedule to find time to see him.
  10. Before the bar-tending there were a number of other shitty odd hour jobs with crap pay.
  11. I am beginning to feel like he has zero ambition and will keep working these dead end jobs forever. I am not okay with that. I want to move past the post college job scramble, odd job working funk.
  12. We have a trip planned together next month. I really want to go. I can’t afford to go without him. I feel like a miserly bitch for even bringing this into my considerations about the future of our relationship. I don’t feel I can ignore this problem for that long.

I know he needs the money from both his jobs, and that jobs don’t just grow on trees, but I feel so frustrated with him right now for not looking for something more stable. He’s a sweet good person, and I want to give him a chance to make good, but I don’t even know what to tell him that I want exactly, other than more grown up type behavior. It doesn’t help that I know his mother has been making snide comments about how I “sold out” because I took a full time career type job in a non art field (we met at art school). That doesn’t have real bearing on how I feel about him, but I suspect that it means she’s encouraging all the temp job shitassery while encouraging him to hold out for the unicorn perfect job. THAT JOB DON’T REAL! AHHHHUG. Even if it is out there, tell me please how you have time to look for it when you are working all hours of the day and night? I just can’t. This is all just such an ugly mess.

Thanks. I think part of it is that I just really need to untangle the ball of twine that is my thoughts on this. I don’t want to come into the conversation with, “I feel grumpy, but I could’t tell you exactly why. Now fix the problem!” He deserves better than that from me.

Sounds like a wise idea, to untangle things. Whenever there are difficult conversations to be had, I’ve found for myself at least, that it’s immensely helpful to figure out quite what it is that I want to discuss and to banish what I can of possible uncertainties with what I’m thinking.

Can you start with telling him that you feel you’re making all the effort and see how it goes from there? And then you can also think about what you want your life to look like 2/3/5 years from now – does he share that?

I suppose my first impression is (a) just because someone is a good person and you love them, isn’t a reason to make a life with them, but also (b) breaking up with someone just because they have a job you don’t like isn’t good either.

It’s probably a good place to start. And I guess I should clarify that while the job doesn’t thrill me, I am more frustrated that he doesn’t seem to be making any real steps toward finding a job that isn’t “just for now” and the whole attitude that is coming with it.  It would be different if I thought he really enjoyed tending bar, and wanted to make a serious career out of it and was treating the job as such and trying to get to the point where one bar tending job was paying his bills. But it feels like he’s just taking the path of least resistance and that’s good enough because it lets him pay his bills even if it leaves him with no social life or time to search for something better. Hey he has a job of sorts now, and that’s it. It’s making me question if the relationship has a viable future.

Anyway, I want to give him the chance to respond to me about this, I just don’t think that this is going to be a fun conversation.

So, I ended up losing the teaching portion of my TA job this semester since I still haven’t been able to get my shit together.

Despite everything, part of me feels a lot better. I’ve known for a while that I haven’t been in a good enough state to handle the workload I’ve had, so knowing I don’t have that extra failing responsibility on my plate is really a relief. Especially since now, if I absolutely need to, a medical withdrawal for mental health reasons will actually free me from what I have to do…which it wasn’t fully going to do as long as I had to teach.

My only hope is that they’ll give something to me next semester, when I’ve had enough of a respite so I feel strong enough to actually, you know, do shit.

The fact that they gave it to you in the first place means that they have faith in your work product and the quality of your ability to help others learn information.  Everyone has a time in their lives when they just can’t handle shit, and chances are all of your advisors know that and know how awesome you are.  I hope that having a little less on your plate helps you and that everything turns out all right for you!

You are too kind. :) The BF told me similar. It’s rough, cause I’ve never felt like I failed so thoroughly before, but I also know I was pulling the best effort I could muster.

I’m glad that this happened in my second semester in the program rather than the first, because I’m usually the paragon of being on top of school-related shit. I can only hope that the folks in charge understand that this is not the norm for me, and that they decide to put faith in me again.

I’m also glad I’m not going to an expensive grad school because now I’m going to need more loans. BOO ON LOANS!

Would you talk to a friend the way you talk to yourself?  That’s a thing I need somebody to tell me sometimes.  Other people don’t think about others in such a black/white pass/fail kind of way, and it may be quite obvious to them that you just need to take some time for yourself.

You know, that thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but you’re absolutely right. If I was seeing a friend do this, I would be encouraging them to do whatever they felt was necessary for their mental health. It doesn’t matter that they were able to do the school-related work through mental health issues all the times before. If they’re having problems now, it would have to be for a good goddamn reason. Actually, ESPECIALLY because they were able to push through it and do the work before.

That hadn’t occurred to me. Thank you.

Earlier today I finished Bryn Donovan’s “An Experienced Mistress.” It was *very* good and inspired me to work on my portfolio for awhile. Are there any other Persephoneers who have written romance or fantasy books that are available on kindle?? Don’t be afraid to plug your stuff to me. I am asking, after all. :P

So because Bryn’s book put me in such a good mood I decided to go ahead and spoil it by reading a recap of 50 Shades of Grey. Went over to Jennifer Armintrout’s blog and read this part of her recap –

Why can’t I take a little more pain for my man?

I’m sorry, I just rage blacked out for a second. Did I miss anything?

*laughing*

Got the first adult employment rejection yesterday.  Everybody’s response was, “You’re going to get rejected a lot.  Quit freaking out.”  YEAH.  But in two months, my soul will be without hope and I will be dead inside and nothing will hurt!  Right now I am DEVASTATED.  So then my day got progressively worse, and I ended it by hitting what I thought was a cat while driving home.  It turned out to be a skunk which got stuck under my car and made everything smelly.  And then Diet Coke exploded all over me.

The End.

I hear ya.  I just moved away, and everybody was so lazy that they only wanted to see me when it was convenient for them, even though I had a lot of shit to do, since I was, you know, moving.  I would have much rather gone out once than had to have coffee ten times while I was trying to pack.  It’s too bad someone else couldn’t organise it for you.

I’ve worked for the same company for the last 9.5 years. Last year, I went to massage therapy school and now I’m a registered massage therapist. I’d ideally like to find a massage therapy job that would allow me to keep my current job because I have good health insurance and they contribute to my 401k, two things I’m VERY unlikely to find doing massage therapy.

How does one go about finding a job?

Most of the massage therapists I know (like 2 of them) work for spas, but one of the girls also has her own side business- she has a room in her house set aside just for her massage practice. Would that be something that would appeal to you? I think most of the spa work is part-time anyway.

Having a room set aside and running your own place can work pretty well. I know a lot of people who use this approach. If you don’t have one, you could see about using a space that someone else has for a lower rate than renting it yourself, or even doing house/office calls. If you can get your own table, you can basically do it anywhere- I’ve seen people set up in parks because they couldn’t be in an office at the time.

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