Colorado Ponderings

Not that I'll start every post this way, but wow it's been a long time since I blogged. It literally took me 15 minutes to remember my password. Hey guys, remember when blogging was cool and not, like, a marketing strategy? 

Anyway, I've been sick all week and I'm staying home from church so I don't make all the babies and old people sick and accidentally kill them. I'm nothing if not noble. But I'm lonely and pondering, so I guess I'll dust off the old blog. 

Um, so I'm guessing you're friends with me on facebook, which means you know that we are living in Colorado. We are, if you didn't know. So I'll include some pictures of our adventures for you while I write my thoughts. 

The anniversary of my graduation is coming up, along with the end of the year, and I've been thinking about it a lot. This year has been very blessed in many ways, and also pretty tough in many ways. After graduation, I felt acutely lost, but excited to try out the "real world" (which is ridiculous because no world is more or less real if you are a conscious human). But here's the thing. I am still living a student life because Jake's in school, but I don't have any of the benefits of actually being a student. So this year has been a weird limbo time for me. I want to go back to campus and tell all the students, Slow down! Milk it for all it's worth! The real world is scary and unfriendly. 

I expected to love my job as a technical writer, and I did, sort of. My boss was great, nice coworkers, decent pay for Rexburg, etc etc. But after three months, I was bored out of my mind. I loved tech writing in school because I'm good at it, and I had a totally different assignment every few weeks and new classes every three months. But doing the same basic tasks every single day for nine months just about killed me. How do people in the "real world" tolerate their lives? Maybe if I'd been doing something a little more involved or creative, tech writing wouldn't have been such a drag. But as it was, my experience was my greatest nightmare: boredom. I hated my field that I'd studied so hard for. This was not supposed to happen.

Anyway, so then Jake lands this amazing internship in Colorado, and we move out here. It's been so great. We've made an effort to really enjoy our time here. My boss agreed to let me keep working long distance while we're out here, which is why it was such a shock when he told me last month that I'd essentially worked myself out of a job. What? As much as it dragged, we were relying a lot on my paychecks to save for another year of school. Living costs here are about triple what they are in Idaho, and Jake's pay has us just above breaking even. Ugh. I hate being poor. We have always been incredibly frugal, but now we've stripped our budget down to the bare bones. But we'll be fine. It's not a crisis if we have to take out a small loan to hold us over for the last six months of Jake's degree. We have no other debt now, and we haven't had to dip into our emergency savings, so we're statistically better off than like 80% of America. But losing my job kind of threw me off the horse, so to speak. I've always been the employee that everyone begs to stay when I quit. I've never ever lost a job. This is a new experience for me. 

Since we're here for such a short time, it's been next to impossible for me to find work here, understandably. In my search, however, I've found that even though I graduated with top honors and three internships, I'm still not as competitive as I need to be. Most writing jobs require a knowledge of programming, web design, graphic design, or advertising/social media campaigning, none of which I have a lot of experience in. This, combined with A) hating the job I wanted to love, B) losing that job, and C) the vast amounts of free time now afforded me has me seriously rethinking my life. What am I supposed to do now? Do I try tech writing again and see if I like it better? Do I take this as a sign that I'm not supposed to work and just stay home and make babies? Do I go to grad school? Do I try to get a job in another field? Do I go back to school for another undergrad degree? 

It's an important crossroads. I know a lot of women who decided to have kids as soon as they graduated, which is a great choice. In our student ward, I can't think of a single couple who'd been married as long as we have who didn't have a baby. There's definitely an unspoken expectation to have kids as soon as you graduate or even before. And that's obviously a great thing, and I don't feel judged because we don't have kids yet. And, yes, I want a family. I want to have lots of kids and homeschool them and have fun and hold their foreheads while they vomit and enjoy that time of life. But I don't want to default into it because I don't know what else to do with my life. (Plus, we're broke.) I also have felt this year, more than just missing school, that my education isn't over yet. And I'm worried that my marketable skills turned out to be so lacking. I don't want to be a working mother, but I want to have a back up plan in case I ever have to be. Life is long and has a lot of twists and turns, and I want to be confident that I could provide for my family if I had to. 

So, after a lot of prayer and fasting with Jake, I'm going back to school. Through BYU-Idaho's online program, I can get an associates degree in web design and development. All of the general education reqs are waived, so I'm only 34 credits away from the degree. Half of them are graphic design classes, which I'm really excited for, and half are CIT, which I'm curious about. I'll only take a few classes at a time, because I don't qualify for any financial aid anymore, but I think that this will give me the edge that I've been missing and get me a job I'll actually enjoy. 

So that's the plan for now. For the present, we're just enjoying our last sunny days of the year and loving spending so much time together. Living the dream, Colorado style (minus the weed)!