All This Beauty

Where have I been since my last post? Volunteering at the SPCA? Going for runs? Interviewing for jobs?

Nope. I’ve been sitting on my butt.

But I’ve come back to my sad little abandoned blog to dust it off and make it something!

I like to do work in Starbucks, or any coffee shop. And I’m certainly not the only one, seeing as all of my fellow Starbucks-goers are on their laptops right now. I’m nearly finished my Americano, but I plan on hanging out here for a few more hours. I came here to do some job searching, but I ended up reading two chapters of my book (Catching Fire, pt. 2 of The Hunger Games trilogy) when I sat down. Whoops. 

Anyway, I’d like to talk about motivation today. On May 13, it will be an entire year since I graduated from Villanova with my English degree. And where am I? Working as a part-time manager at the Gap. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t like my job or that I totally lack motivation. I get up to go to work five days a week, and I do good work there. I like interacting with customers, despite those few people that make me want to rip out every last strand of hair on my head. I have a job, and I need to keep reminding myself that that’s more than a lot of other people in the world right now. BUT, we ALL need to find something, anything, that will give us that extra boost of motivation to fight for what we want. I, clearly, am fighting for a full-time job right now. Why do I want to find a job? Well, here you go:

• $130,000 of student loans (there, I said it) that Sallie Mae has the courtesy to remind me of every month. That’s a mortgage. 

• Speaking of mortgages, some day, I would like to own a house. So that’s another thing that gets me moving.

• My boyfriend and I will celebrate our 7-year anniversary next month, and I don’t think we can afford to even pay a florist, let alone pay for an entire wedding.

• I have a beautiful 10-month-old nephew who is probably the love of my life (sorry, Mark). He reminds me of the fact that one day, I’d like to have a baby. Though, I think Benjamin will keep me happy on the baby-front for a long, long time. So my own babies can wait. They tend to be kind of expensive, right?

• Financial independence. My parents are the most generous and caring people I have met, and I don’t want to cost them any more money than I already have. They genuinely want my brothers and me to succeed, and I want to show them I can, so that they can retire happily and sans worry.

There are probably a billion other reasons, but those are at the core of my desire to find a job. So I leave you now to go search the web for jobs and write about 8934792837 cover letters. But first comes my free refill and a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Starting fresh is something I do well. You know, making a to-do list, brewing a steamy cup of coffee, blow-drying my hair into a voluminous mass of brown threads.

Keeping fresh is something on which I need to improve. You know, crossing things off the list, drinking the coffee before it is merely lukewarm, combing my stringy mess of brown knots.

I have a lot of goals for myself. One of which is keeping a blog and making it into more than just a regular log of the mundane happenings in the life of Colleen. But, I can’t set the bar too high. I can’t try to make it some intellectual diary of articles that I find fascinating or short stories I’ve written in my free time. 

This is a blog for anyone who is searching for something. Personally, I am searching for a livelihood, a consistent way to live my life. I am looking for a full-time job, of course, but I am also aspiring to be a volunteer, a scholar, a musician, an artist, an athlete (ha!), a writer, and a cook. Some say that college is the time to discover yourself. I say, it’s just the beginning.