To be honest I’ve been much better at starting than finishing things lately. I’ve been having some existential angst about graduating and leaving school for the first time in my life. I know I want to graduate and not be in school anymore, I believe it will be good for me. But it’s also scary. I’ve been doing school for as long as I can remember. I know I’m good at school, that I can deal with the things I need to in order to succeed, while there are more than a few not-school life skills that I’m not very confident about.

Like, oh, applying for jobs. There’s something kind of disheartening about being ignored for so many jobs when I have literally never been rejected from any academic program I’ve applied for (except when I applied for two different summer research programs at Grinnell and only got into my first choice, the one that fit better with my long-term goals and that I was more qualified for anyway - then I turned down the other REUs that had accepted me…). I am just obviously so much better at convincing academics that I’m awesome that it can be discouraging to get so little interest from the non-academic world.

Anyway I did make this little joke which has been successfully entertaining for Grinnell students and alumni who have been paying attention to recent college news and are aware of the mixed feelings about the college’s latest president and general administrative direction.

I want to do more things with JQuery, but I’ve never been very good at just following tutorials (“here’s how to make this pointless thing you don’t care about! good luck trying to make anything else.”) and what I want to do is make my own sort of project. I am also not good at all with coming up with projects for the sake of using a tool - what I am good at and what I want to do is to learn the tools that will help me accomplish my existing goals. Unfortunately, “lots of job openings want people to have experience with it” is not a goal that inspires lots of uses for JQuery. But I’ve been given a couple of suggestions for additions to my portfolio site that wouldn’t just be tacky “look what I can do” additions (I like my minimalism, dammit) so I perhaps I will get some more of that finished.

It’s spring break right now and I’m in Seattle, which I was hoping would be a nice invigorating change. It’s been nice, for sure, but as far as that whole graduating and getting a job thing goes it’s been more distracting than anything else.

Still, I’m listening to energetic music and going through job postings and trying to soothe my anxiety.