Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Beginnings

When I was in, let's say, fourth grade, my teacher noticed that my brain was a little bit different from the brains of the other children. I soaked in information and could spit it back out with ease. I thought about things in different ways; outside the box you might say. So, I was given a GATE test. That stands for Gifted and Talented Education. The first time I took it I failed. It was a test. I had no interest in taking a test for a class that I wasn't even in.

Then, once my mother found out about the test and what GATE was, she forced them to let me take the test again and actually explained to me what it was. I passed with flying colors.

The next year I was placed in a GATE class and I got to go to GATE seminars over the summers. I don't even know if they went on my permanent record, but it was all like a game to me anyway. We played with oobleck, stamps, and sock puppets. I learned to sew, research, and figure out clues. Learning became a game for me. The person that could pick up the most knowledge and answer the questions fastest won!

Monday, September 15, 2008

Nerdy GIrl is not a morning person!

No matter how long I have this schedule(up by 6am), I will never adjust to it. It might make it easier for me to get up before noon on weekends, but I will always feel half dead in the mornings. Strangely, it has gotten worse over the last two weeks.  It's not like I stay up til all hours of the night either! At the latest I am in bed by 11 - though last week I was in bed by ten many a night.

How can I get 7 or hours of sleep and still feel like a worthless lump in the morning? And, since I am not a morning person, it is truly difficult to get up with enough time to make myself some coffee and then clean it up also!

So far the only thing I have managed to find that gets me up in the morning is a bit of computer time. Before I started getting up a half hour early to spend time on the computer, it would have taken me five or six snoozes to finally be awake enough to know how important it is that I actually get up. Unfortunately, the computer time thing has a tendency to distract me just enough that I spend 45 minutes on it when I only planned 30.

Well, at least I am awake I guess....mostly.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A nerdy girl poem

My veins, slowing; the blood thick and dense
My head, full and aching
A dulling swallow waiting on the sidelines

Long and empty hallways, a blessing by surprise
Obnoxious, tiny dictator blasting all and sundry
With fake and mocking praise

Requiring more than needed
From people tired and full of caring
A strident tantrum waits upon the horizon.

A tantrum day...

Today...I feel like this:
Minus the smelly green indicator fumes of course.

Monday, September 8, 2008

I'm trying

I'm stuck in a place right now. There's not really a rock or a hard place, but figuratively I am stuck. I earned a master's degree in Child Development. This degree gives me the credentials to be either the director of a child center (daycare or preschool) or a professor of junior college child development courses. Unfortunately, both of these fields require a certain amount of experience. I do not have any experience in either field. Now I am unhirable. That is not a word. I do not care. I am being lazy and slothful.

I cannot get hired at my educational level for lack of experience. I cannot get hired for the lower positions because the HR personnel will look at my education and wonder what is so wrong with me that I couldn't get hired for a better position and dismiss me entirely.

In order to do what I originally set out to do(which was to be a therapist for children) I have to get another masters(or move onto doctorate) in counseling. This would require the completion of a Thesis. The thesis is what nearly killed my love of learning.

So...I have spent the last six months or so looking at changing my course and becoming a teacher in the public school system. In order to do that I have to complete a one year credential program. In order to get into a credentialing program I have to pass the CSET. In order to pass any form of the CSET, I need to go back to school to take some classes. I can't get into a school program without the CSET....unless I go backwards and sign up for some undergraduate courses.

I'm stuck. So for now...I am making my life about pulling myself out of debt, enjoying the romance I never thought I'd have, and slowly working out what I want to do with myself.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

How to anger a Nerdy Girl

Treat her like she's incapable of doing the job that you hired her for.

My hind-end is feeling rather chapped this week. I know what my job is. I know how to do my job. I always do my job to the absolute best of my ability. I don't need constant reminders from someone who has no idea how things really work from moment to moment.

If you don't think I can do the job without constant supervision, then don't hire me.

Ok, vent over I think.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Nerdy Girl gets swirly

Everyone has an Achilles' heel; a special weakness if you will. I am definitely not exempt from that. If we consider my klutziness and bad luck just a cross to bear, then we can consider a sense of "not knowing" my Achilles' heel. It drives me absolutely bonkers when there is something that I do not know.

If I don't know what my schedule will be for the coming day, week, or month, for example, then I spend the entirety of the time until I find out, agonizing over the missing information. Sometimes there is a series of related things that I do not know, and therefore I am unable to plan. This sends me into a brain swirl.

By brain swirl, I mean that all the different questions start to rotate in and out of complete focus in my mind at an ever quickening pace until I begin to feel dizzy. Once this starts I can no more stop it, than I can slow down a tornado. The loss of control over my brain only adds to my feeling of a lack of control in the first place.

Sometimes the over-active brain of a nerdy girl can be quite a drawback!

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Nerdy Girl is also a klutz

It's true. This past weekend, alone, I melted a very expensive bath product into a car cup holder, knocked over a soda in the same car, hit a bathroom drawer with my knee and knocked it off kilter, and something else that I am forgetting.

Perhaps my biggest klutz moment came at the end of my sophomore year. I was on the volleyball team for my high school. As part of our practice time the coach had us jumping up onto the bench portion of one of those high school lunch tables and then stepping back down(backwards). We'd done it hundreds and hundreds of times by this point.

About the only thing that saves me even a little is that some of the tables were a little misshapen by now and rocked a little bit.

For some reason, I lost my balance when I was stepping down after one of the jumps. I fell backward, landing first on one hand and then on the other.

My right wrist hurt so bad that the blood rushed through my ears blocking all sound issuing from my coach's lips. All I could think about was getting to the pool so that the cool water might ease some of the pain.

My mother had to come pick me up and take me to the county hospital(we were poor at the time) where I got some x-rays after a very long wait. They said nothing was broken and sent me home with an ace bandage wrap and some Tylenol 2(or something). Up to this point I had never been able to choke down a pill. Try to make me and you wouldn't like the reaction. The next morning I downed one without question.

Course, later that morning the hospital called my mother to say they'd missed something and that I had actually compacted all the bones in my wrist so that the cartilage was squished.

We had to go back. Then...the cast that they made me was loose. They said that was normal....until I pulled the thing right off over my hand...Needless to say they made this nerdy girl a new cast!