Piecemeal

          You know your life is pretty pathetic when you get enormously excited over the fact that your mother bought you Goldfish crackers and soy milk. And you are twenty-two.
          Sheesh.

          Have I mentioned that my parents got a dog? She's eight, and was a show dog, and is intensely and depressingly well-behaved. I'm used to rascally dogs, ones that are a little rambunctious and a lot effusive. This dog, though sweet, looks constantly chagrined and penitent - scared stiff that she's doing something wrong. I want her to relax, to be a dog. Her constant cringing, besides being heartbreaking to watch, is also making me feel like a monster.
          Run around! Bark at things, even! Eat sloppily! Jump up on furniture you're not supposed to jump on! I hope this dog learns how to be a dog. Being a dog is all about being hugely loving and floppy and full of happy, helpless, frantic, slobbery joy.
          I hope she figures it out. We're just piling on the love while we wait for her to catch up.

          My new job is ... interesting. It's always taxing to start new - I feel incapable and inept right now, trying to memorize policies and procedures and products and unfamiliar paperwork. I don't know enough of any one task to do it smoothly, yet. I'm mostly being trained on the fly - no real organization or schedule - and the piecemeal, haphazard mix of information I learn each day doesn't stay well in my memory. I hate having to ask to be shown how to do something again, but I'm finding that it's unavoidable. There's always some small, vital piece of information that was not properly explained to me because it's so heavily ingrained into the trainer that it no longer registers as a separate step in whatever process I'm supposed to be mastering.
          I'm taking notes, but they're not terribly helpful.
          Mostly this is making me more eager to find a different job; a real job, a not-just-for-the-time-being job, a job doing something for which I feel actual passion. Corporate policies be damned; I'm gonna open a bakery and set my own rules!
          ... in, like, forty years or so ... if ever.
          It's a nice dream, though. In the meantime, I gotta write me some cover letters.

          But! Happy fact: I'm going to visit my honey in five weeks.
          Now that I've bought the plane tickets, I'm feeling outrageously impatient. Although I know the weekend itself, once I get there, is going to be maddeningly swift. I guess I should savor the anticipation. Draw it out for as long as I can, so the intervening time becomes a part of the visit.
          Ha, right - there's no way I'm capable of being that patient and composed. I'm too excited! It's like waiting for Christmas when you're five. Who cares that it's always over so quickly. You just want it to get here!
          But knowing that it's actually going to happen soon has been keeping me cheerful - the prospect of a hug in the somewhat near future is a pretty effective tonic against loneliness.