I *Cannot* Handle Any More Job Applications!

People, I am seriously going stir-crazy here. Supposedly it was going to be a great thing that I was done teaching and had a week off from my other part-time job, because I was going to haul ass on job apps of all kinds. But seriously, people, I got more done when I was taking an hour every morning before work! I hate this.

You go to HERC or whatever and find some jobs that potentially fit your experience, and you work up a cover letter from one of your templates, and spend 30 minutes or so re-entering all your damn cv resume information into their on-line forms, and then you upload your cover letter and resume, and then you're done. Except you're not, because you have nothing else to do all day except find another job and apply to that, and another, and another, and after about four, which, since you are doing them back to back, have had no time to move forward or gather any positive response yet, you feel like the whole project is futile.

Doing any more than four could put you into despair, because applying to the same type of admin job over and over really gives you the feeling that the whole exercise is pointless and you will never get this type of job --- I mean, you just applied to three! And you applied to a bunch of the same yesterday! And nothing has happened! And there is nothing else for you to do all day besides continue down this dizzying feeling of pointless insanity, or stop doing it and just sit around. Then, if you pick option 2, you get to beat up on yourself for not doing anything to get a job and your general lumpishness.

So yesterday I only applied to one thing. Today, none. And I am sooo glad I will be able to go back to my crappy pittance of a part-time job on Monday --- seriously, this was no vacation for me at all. And I should be able to send out more apps ---- when you're hurry hurry hurrying and yelling at the on-line system that it shouldn't crash any more because you have to get out four apps before going in to work, for some reason, it's just way easier to function. Plus there are people to talk to at work. Plus it's easier to make the time pass.

Today I worked all morning on a neglected part of my to-do list: my accepted article, which has to be proofed and fixed and permissioned and all that so that it can actually get published. It was pretty nice, reading in the coffee shop all morning, and saw a dude from film who I talk to regularly and got caught up on campus gossip, and then I went home and ate lunch and had a nap, and really, the day isn't much different than my grad school summer schedule was. I'm collating two different revision versions and then marking all the reviewer suggestions and made it through about a third of the article this morning.

This afternoon when I went back to the article, I started feeling really weird and depressed. I couldn't figure out why I was getting so upset, and then it hit me: this part of my article was my job talk.

I can't work on this any more right now. Maybe later. I'll go find something else to occupy the time while I wait for my job apps to work their way through their various systems. No idea how I'm going to make it through this shitty weekend.