Legend of the Corsair

If you aren't following both my twitter feed as well as here, you may be unaware of the fact that I'm trying to get another job. I have been thinking about it for a couple of years, but the market has been scant since about a year or so into the recession for my jobs in my profession. I got a LOT of calls from recruiters during my third year - when I was still uncertain about my skills b/c I got no formal training and not a lot of support from my employer. As a matter of fact, my manager did his very best to derail my confidence and belief in myself and my abilities; he specifically took advantage of the fact that their offer was the first white collar position I'd ever had - before I'd even graduated - and low-balled my starting salary. What did I know, right? And then it was a continual fight of me trying to be involved in things (projects & committees, etc.) and continually being shot down b/c all they wanted me to do was what I was doing. Which I wouldn't have a problem with if they actually PAID me what I was worth. So now I don't feel valued.

That is the set up of how I found myself - through market research that I started last year - getting paid $30K below industry standards. That is how, when presented with a great opportunity, I ended up applying for THE PERFECT JOB (the one that appears out of nowhere, fits you to a tee, and that you hope that you land b/c not only is it a perfect match with potential for advancement, they'd be paying you just above the industry average to START.) And, right now, I find myself inspired to watch Working Girl tonight b/c THIS IS MY STORY. Or at least a reasonable facsimile.

Seriously. I grew up dirt poor, urban poor, inner city poor, and from a starting point that is likely much below our eventually empowered protag... but the ESSENCE of the story, the arc of having your hard work, instinct, knowledge, gumption, and determination to better yourself is PERFECT to my looking back at what I've done and what I've yet to achieve.

On to the main event. The inspiration of why I've got to watch this movie. Monday. Monday is the day that I have my THIRD interview with a recruiter - after two phone interviews, this is where I get the in-person treatment and the discussion about "next steps" because he's told me that the CEO is ready to start interviewing now that they've got a strong pool of candidates. The funny thing, sort of, is that the recruiter actually thought, up until partway through the second interview, that I was applying for the intermediary position and not the top position. Huh. I'll be talking about that with him - if he thinks I should apply for both I WILL.

This job. If it goes through... I don't want to say too much b/c I don't want to jinx it. Let's just say I really, really hope that this goes great on Monday and that I not only get the in-person with the company but that it lands me the job. Both my experience in the profession and my social engineering skills - like noticing what the women in the company wear and mimicking that style. Hey. What can I say? I am going to take every ethical tack I can maneuver into in order to land this job.

Back to the movie: really, I see greatness and possibility in both Tess and Katharine's characters in Working Girl; if only Katharine had been less back-stabby and underhanded and Tess had been truly mentored by her. Perfect. But, no. It had to revolve around a man and having to be set up in a system where a woman has to outperform every man in order to stand out enough to be taken seriously. I remember this from when I worked blue collar jobs, but there you only needed to prove yourself once to be taken seriously and be considered part of the team. Or maybe that's just me blue-skying my memories.

I don't need a white night. I don't need a Harrison Ford to rescue me, to take my side, to open the door for me. All I need is a chance to shine in a light of my own making.

In the end - I'm going to prep myself backward and forward on this. I both want and need this to happen in my life. So those of you who are in the know, keep wishing me good luck.

Good morning LJ. I woke up out of the most disturbing, yet enlightening dream just a little while ago.

I don't remember exactly how it started but I believe I was running some kind of errand - or just traveling. It had morphed from something to do with school to this; during which I was in the middle of a classroom surrounded by my peers while going through either a locker or a magical (bottomless) bag of holding that was doubling as a mailbox... People kept on asking me what I was doing, or just looking at what was coming out of the bag/box and then either commenting or just "ooooh-ing" - like when I found this huge wad of large denomination American dollars. *I always have and will want one of those bag/boxes, ever since I saw one in an old Spiderman one-off graphic novel back in the late eighties / early nineties.

Anyway, back to the traveling portion. The great thing, which I didn't recognize immediately as a great thing, was that I was flying. No obvious machinery but it was definitely mechanical in nature and not magical. I was only about 10 yards or so off the ground... but I was flying. So along I go - and all of a sudden, something was acting up in the machine. As I start bringing myself down for a controlled landing I notice that I'm coming down adjacent to what (now that I think back on it, it could've been minimum security since there was only one fence...) appeared to be a prison. Inmates, wearing reddish jumpsuits, were lining the fence looking out and the fence had razor wire atop it. The buildings were back a ways from the fence and there was green grass between them and it but the building itself was an indistinct brick edifice. It reminded me a little of the minimum security prison over by the Uconn campus in Storrs/Mansfield, CT.

Anyways, as I came in for that landing I also noticed that one of the jumpsuit-wearing prisoners was outside of the fence looking in. He had this wicked awful mullet and reminds me now just a little bit of how I vaguely remember some X-Man character looked (in the early days of Rogue and Gambit being on the team (googles "x-men character mullet") LONGSHOT.



So. Back to the landing (man this is taking forever!). As I land, mullet-prisoner notices me and gets a nasty little smile on his face and starts to approach me. This is when the fear part of the dream starts - and I hadn't had the exhilaration that I usually have during flying dreams up to that point either. As he approaches I hop into the air a few times trying to reactivate my flying and as he gets to within a couple of yards I take off; he smirks an takes off after me. (In retrospect: AHA! That's how he must've gotten over the fence.)

Instead of facing the direction of flight, at first, I am facing him and he is facing me and we are flying that 30 yards or so off the ground parallel to each other as he tries to close in. I keep the distance between us and hit a button at the lower, right edge of my jacket in an attempt to speed up - knowing that I should be able to speed up - without being able to speed up. I start throwing things from my pockets in an attempt to distract/injure mullet-prisoner. The second thing I throw is a red pushpin. The metal on it flashes in the sun while the translucent top seems to glow. Oh crap! I just gave his a weapon of some sort!! He follows it down to the ground while I fly away home, knowing that as soon as he gets the pin he might be after me again and I want to get to somewhere I feel safer and can better defend myself.

I don't remember landing but find myself in a kitchen near the sink with earbuds in and am probably puttering. My DH is somewhere in the house (which I discover is a two story with a great room attached to the kitchen, with the great room having a cathedral ceiling and a series of rooms on the second floor all fronting an open corridor with a balcony to the great room below. All of a sudden, I notice mullet-prisoner had somehow found me and he was just about to enter a room (DH's office) that was diagonally across and upstairs from the open double door sized entrance to the kitchen. I start to try and yell for DH to alert him but sound seems to be constricted in my throat; I try again and again, and I realize that there are swords in his office which would be ever so much more dangerous than the pushpin and the panic roars up even stronger, and then realize I CAN scream but the earbuds are somehow dulling my hearing and I start to feel the screaming in my throat, it going raw screaming my DH's name and just flat out screaming like a horror flick. Mullet-prisoner decides to make a run for it now that my voice is so strong and as the front for is closing on his heels my DH and Aunt come running into the great room from the left to ask me why I'm so upset. At this point, as I think I start to tell them what happened, I wake.

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I lay there, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling, slowly calming down, and start to analyze the dream. I come to the following conclusions:

1. The prison was representing my workplace, at which I had just put in a twelve hour day to get quarter-end reports done so I could relax and enjoy the 4th.

2. The mullet-prisoner represented my never-ending stream of work projects (NESWP, pronounced ness-whip, which I coined on Twitter for a friend) that have chased me through life for a while now; how lately (the past year and a half really) I've felt like I was always scrambling to get things done with occasionally satisfying moments where I seem to catch up to everything only to be buried under another pile of NESWP. My coworker and I work for a commercial farm loan division for our regional farm bank and the third slot of our analyst unit keeps getting filled with people they want to eventually (pardon the pun) farm out to the branch side of the lending division so the last few years that third position has been almost like a revolving door and the work load on the commercial side for my friend and I has been getting heavier and heavier. The position just went empty again about a month ago and the person who had agreed to come in from NYS decided at the last minute that he wouldn't be joining the team after all and my friend and I finally (after talking about it between ourselves for a few months and having mentioned the workload issue in our annual reviews) set up a tentatively timed meeting with our division manager (who is in charge of the interview and hiring for the position) to talk about the need for another person on the team that will FOCUS on the commercial side in addition to or instead of another revolving door person that focuses on helping out on the branch side. I've got around 15-20 more loans in my portfolio than I did at the beginning of 2011 and between the normal upkeep on those loans and all the new and/or action requests for those loans that are streaming in... In the volatile economic environment agricultural businesses find themselves in (which isn't bad per se if it is managed correctly, a lot of my portfolio is thriving in it - however, it just seems to be exponentially increasing the workload for ME and my friend)... We need a third. Cue the entrance of Ender to come in and help out, eh?

3. While working those last seven hours I pounded down three cans of Mountain Dew and ate two Snicker's candy bars b/c I had no food and couldn't take the time to make the foray out to Chipolte's for food b/c I knew that soon I would be the only one left in the office and... in retrospect it doesn't make sense, I could've gotten food. But I still would've drank at least one of the MTDs to caffeinated myself to stay awake/alert/energized enough to plow through the TWENTY reports I had to write. I went in at 10:20am specifically b/c I knew that the end-of-quarter hold position (basically a list of all the commitments and balances on the loans, which I need to have before I can even start the reports) was going to be delivered much later than usual - we had it the Monday after quarter end last time and had a whole week and a half to get the reports done; which was good b/c I had to write-up a bunch of action requests and such that week so I ended up doing the board reports during an eight hour stretch at home that following weekend). The beginning of those seven hours was when I finally received the needed report; a report which is an essential component of my reports. My twenty reports. And the reports are on loans that are in my (I think I may be up to 76 loans total now) portfolio with a net hold/commitment of greater than or equal to $14.0 million.

When I got home (was it only last night?!) I was still so pumped up on caffeine that it had given me a headache and a feeling like I was engorged with too much energy which was exerting pressure on my head in the manner of a pending explosion. I made the drive home just peachy-keen, thanks. And getting home at 11pm in order to make a double strong sleepy tea, down a couple of valerian pills an benadryl, followed by a hot lavender scented shower and then drinking of the steeped tea while starting to read a steampunk novel in order to give the pills/tea time to kick in... When I finally laid back and shut off the light to sleep, and just as I started to MAYBE drift off - the DH starts lightly snoring. And, although the meds were working for the most part, I was enough still on the edge to be waaay oversensitive to any disturbance in the force. I am the Princess that cannot sleep because of the Pea that is irritating me through fifty mattresses, etc. And in the state I was in at the time there was no way in hell I was going to be able to get to sleep at that point. So I got up and went to the guest room. And after the dream woke me up, I climbed back into bed with the DH to think about the dream, and try to go back to sleep by letting my mind wander.

After analyzing the dream, I tried to drift off by letting my thoughts wander... I start wondering if I am where I want to be in life. And I started going into the whole "what-if I could go back in time and start over at some point in my life with a perfect memory of all I know now so I can end up in a much better position/place/etc." creating a waking-dream imagination scenario-building exercise. I may have fallen asleep as the scenes of the moments in time that I would step in to change were very vivid. I also thought about whether my DH would be better off without me, not in a if I never existed type of manner (like in It's A Wonderful Life) but more in the manner of if our paths had never crossed.

I discovered that, although I might - if it were possible - go back to different points in my life and make changes for the better to eliminate some of the rougher horrors and my student debt (meaning I would've gone to college earlier than I did in such a way that I would've taken longer but while working nights at a certain well paying blue collar job I had in the past, etcetera and so forth to reduce if not eliminate the student loan debt burden I hold today)... and a number of other small things here and there. The essential "where" that I am now existing in would've been the goal to which I would've guided myself to - even if the road to getting here would've been different (and maybe I'd have more years on the job or in the profession and getting a bigger paycheck) but I would still want to be working at the same company, and I would still have sought out my DH to get married to... Like a whole lifetime of scenes from my own personal version of the movie Sliding Doors.

I also decided, perhaps selfishly but mostly out of a loving and prideful opinion, that I didn't know if I would trust that there was anyone in the world (aside from Kate Bush if circumstances had been just right) would care for and take care of my DH in the manner in which he deserves. Rather, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't give up my relationship with him b/c I love him so much - even if I drive him up the wall with some of my habits occasionally, and vice versa. Those annoyances aren't big enough to drive out the need for the wholeness I feel being a part of our relationship.

At that moment of clarity I realized I definitely wouldn't be getting back to sleep. After maybe +/- four hours of REM and dreams and another hour of pondering... I had to write it all down and share.

Apparently, the older LO found me worthy of passing on an "industry expert on one of our vital account industries" torch. It is for an industry synopsis paper that is prepared for, discussed and approved by our C-classes, then used to shape our policies in dealing with our accounts for that industry.

Yeah. I'm going to reference this in my next review. Now , if it would slow down enough to get to work on it...

I think I'll be putting in some extra hours this week.

Please read the following short essay and let me know what you think of it. I have to write two short essays (limit of 4150 characters each) for my Alternate Route to Certification (for teaching) application. The first answers the question "Why do you want to become a teacher at this point in your life?" The second is "What strengths and skills will you bring to teaching?" and boy am I having trouble with this one as it is one of my weaknesses in not being able to talk about my strengths and skills.

What I am asking is for you to read the short essay that I wrote in answer of the first question. Here goes:

( Read more... )Thank you in advance for taking the time to go over it and making comments. Hopefully I can get through the next question as well.

First night for the new show on SciFi... Tin Man. Hopefully it will be pretty good. I'm supposing that the success of not only Wicked, the book, and Wicked, the theater production, along with the growing popularity for alternative fairy tales spurred them into finding another take on a popular classic tales of Oz.

I decided to start adding new friends to my f-list last night; hello all those folks who may come over to take a peek at the stranger who popped up on their radar. It is time to expand the circle a little bit.

I've been incommunicado a bit lately - lots of work and I've gotten a bad cold a couple of times over the last few weeks.

Another thing I am looking forward to for the end of the week that has just begun... The Golden Compass starts this Friday! W00T!

In recording milestones: Nana, last time is was your birthday... I wish I had known it was going to be your last birthday. I miss you.