Still Learning

I started a garden recently. I think it's part of a nesting urge...but I've totally been jonesing to grow my oen fruits, vegetables, and herbs. So, I bought a couple of seed packets and some Jiffy peat pots and decided to test the color of my thumbs. For the longest time they've been the blackest thumbs around. I could buy a perfectly healthy, full grown strawberry plant and kill it within a week.

It's not like I was doing it wrong either. I was following the watering directions. At least I think I was.

Anywhozle...this go around I have been adding compostable materials to the soil as I use them. It's not an actual composting process, but any little bit helps I'm thinking.

So far I've at least gotten them to sprout and my cilantro looks like it's almost useable!

Chemistry Contest

When I was a junior in high school, I was in a chemistry class. I can't remember the teacher's name, but I remember that she was young and blond. She wasn't skinny and overly hot though, so I was able to really like her. She was one of my more favorite teachers that year. If I recall correctly, we even hung out in there at lunch sometimes.

The room had somewhere between 6 and ten large black tables. We sat around them in groups of four to six. I think it was a mixed class. By mixed class, I mean that there were both honors and non-honors students in the class. I spent most of my days in classes with only honors students, so the classes that were mixed were always a strange mixture of emotions and feelings for me.

In this class she had a particular difficulty getting all the students to complete the weekly homework packets and turn them in Fridays. Now, the thing is, I had trouble with this myself. Not because I wasn't doing the homework, but because I had trouble holding onto it all for a week and staying organized enough to keep it together so I could turn it in on Friday.

So, at the end of the first semester she offered us a contest. For every week that we turned in a complete packet on Friday, we would get a raffle ticket. On the last Friday of the semester she would hold a drawing and give the winner fifty bucks.

Well, for the poor girl that I was, that was enough of an incentive to really keep me going. I had never had that much money of my own before. It seemed like a fortune.

So, I turned in my packets every Friday and earned a ticket for every week. I think it was 11, but I could be completely off base on that one...

And, guess what...for the only time in my life to date, I won a contest.

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!

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.

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.

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.