ANNOUNCEMENT: New Blog Address.

After two years at kgeeee.wordpress.com, it’s time to move on to greener and more professional pastures. When I studied abroad in South Africa two summers ago, our program blog was through WordPress, and because my bestie Mia always called me KG, I chose that as my super-simple and kind of cutesy username to be able to write on the group blog. It stuck when I branched out into my own blog and it has served me well, but much like when I stopped wearing outfits that gave the appearance I got dressed in the dark and when I dyed my hair from platinum to a more human-looking shade of blonde, it’s time to grow up. No one calls me KG anymore, and I feel kind of silly typing my blog address on my resume.

So, in an attempt to be taken a little more seriously (by others and by myself), I am embarking on a new blog address, which henceforth will be kendallgoodwin.wordpress.com. Easy enough, right? A little more straightforward and professional, and, I’m hoping, will be a smooth transition when I (hopefully) make my blog a dot com someday. I’m going to leave this blog up for about another week or so, just to make sure that my five faithful readers get the memo, and continuing to post on this and the other, and then I will be deleting this address. Follow me, earthlings, to a new uncharted territory that I will attempt to conquer with relative ease and aplomb!

Sew Cool.

Yesterday Josh and I went and visited my Auntie Jae, who lives out in the middle of nowhere in Skamokawa, Washington. In addition to being hilarious and having oodles of great stories to tell, my Auntie Jae is an insanely talented quilter. She’s only been quilting for a couple years, but she makes these really ornate and beautiful quilts that get displayed at quilting shows and expos and that are appraised at several thousands of dollars. And she’s so sweet because she makes really personal quilts for all the people in her family: she made a music-themed quilt for one of my uncles who is a musician, and she made one for me for my college graduation that has tons of yellow in it because she knows that yellow is my favorite color. They are amazing.

When I went to visit her last summer, she ended up giving me her 1959 Singer sewing machine because I had expressed an interest in learning to sew and she already had two other, newer sewing machines anyway. I’ve made several attempts at teaching myself to sew, some of which have been successful (I made my mom a very rudimentary apron for Christmas last year) while others have been flops (trying to draft a pattern for a Mad Men-style dress and totally failing).

While I was at Auntie Jae’s house yesterday, she told me she wanted to teach me how to make what she calls a “crazy quilt,” which is a quilt whose blocks are made up of fabric scraps sewn together in no particular pattern. We had so much fun sewing together and chatting, and I even made a finished crazy quilt block!

I feel really pleased with this block that I made, and am excited to keep piecing together this little quilt; and Auntie Jae sent me home with so many fabric scraps and tools that I feel totally equipped to finish it. AND, working on this with Auntie Jae and having her be so supportive and encouraging has given me the gumption to sign up for FreckledNest’s Home Ec! It’s a go-at-your-own-pace online class that teaches how to make 26 different projects and a great big handful of nifty sewing techniques. I’ve been on the brink of signing up for the past couple of weeks, and now I’m finally registered for the class and am so excited to learn so much. Look at all of these bitchin’ projects I get to make:

[via]

I’ve been looking over the list of projects and have already started picking out which ones I’m going to make for my boyfriend, my family members, and my friends. I seriously have not been this excited about something in a long time. I can’t wait to learn and become a sewing pro!

Pity Party Deluxe.

I was in Seattle this weekend, and despite our best laid plans, somehow most of Friday evening turned into a pity party in which Josh and I were the pathetic guests of honor. We just laid on his bed and lamented over our joblessness for a few hours, how having degrees has done nothing for us and how we don’t even have enough experience to get a job at a damn restaurant.

I’m sure everyone (all five of you) is getting tired of hearing me complain about not having a job, but it is just too rough not to talk about. I did my four years of college, and now I want to move on from youthful college student to working adult but without a job I can’t do that. So I’m stuck in this limbo between youth and adulthood, just floating with no way to move forward, and this limbo looks an awful lot like hell.

I get incredibly depressed looking at Craigslist postings, which is like a daily self-beating, because all the jobs that look interesting or that I think I might be qualified for, want anywhere from two to five years of experience in said position. How could I have that much experience when I’ve been in college for the past four years? It’s like these people are intentionally excluding college graduates from potential employment. And even retail jobs or restaurant jobs require previous experience. And with entry level positions, it’s like my degree is too intimidating to even allow me a chance at an interview, or the hiring people see that I’m a college graduate and expect that this would be an in-between job (which it obviously is, but still) and don’t even give my application/resume a second glance. I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

This is probably the worst possible time I could have graduated, but it’s not like I had a choice. If I had known the job market would be so hopeless, I would have gone straight to graduate school and stayed there until further notice. I’ve barely even had any serious prospects in the past four months, and I’m just burning through my savings trying to stay afloat and avoid having to move in with my parents in Georgia. And even that is starting to look like a distinct possibility, as I suspect I’m beginning to wear out my welcome in my rent-free living situation. All I want is to have a job so that I can support myself, pay my own rent and not have to rely on my parents anymore. And maybe have a little extra cash to go out and do things so that Josh and I don’t have to stay cooped up in our houses for lack of funds when we see each other. There are only so many episodes of tv shows we can watch on our computers before we need something more.

The other day Josh was talking about how this is the only time in our lives that we could go anywhere or do anything for an extended period of time without having to answer to a boss, but we can’t do anything because we don’t have any money. Ironic, eh? And so it goes.

There She Blows! Or, A Trek to Mt. St. Helens.

On Sunday afternoon, Josh and I drove up to Mt. St. Helens to check out Lava Canyon and have a little picnic on top of a big rock. I haven’t seen the mountain up close in years, and when I looked at it, it just didn’t even look real; it was like some kind of CGI creation, a special effect. It never ceases to amaze me how nature can just form giant masses of earth into things like mountains, and how much power this particular mountain has in its depths, even though it looks so normal and docile on the outside. It was such a beautiful area, so green and full of life.

An Exercise in Not Being A Hag.

Today I went to pick up my second and final check from my former employer. After being laid off on Tuesday with no warning, I’ve had the past two days to let my negative feelings fester and grow into a vengeful beast of horrifying size. I had fantasies of extorting money or sabotaging the business somehow, and I carefully planned out what I was going to say to the boss when he handed me my check: that he had handled laying me off incredibly poorly and unprofessionally, that I was glad to no longer be associated with such a sketchy business, that I was going to tell everyone I knew about his company had treated me.

But when the time came, all I did was take my check, say thank you and walk out the door. Sometimes I wish I had the cajones to say all of the things that I want to say to people who have wronged me, but most of the time I’m grateful that I have enough self-control to be discerning in situations like that. There was really little good that could have come from me letting my angry words spew like venom onto the man that deprived me of my livelihood (meager as it may have been) that spent three months trying to get. Would he have been scared by my threats to bad-mouth his business? Probably not. Would he have handled things differently the next time he had to lay someone off? It’s unlikely. And saying all of that wouldn’t have made me feel any better about not having a job either. I feel satisfied for having taken the moral high ground.

As Romeo Montague would say, I am fortune’s fool. I did everything I was told to do at that job, and I worked hard to learn quickly and do well. The boss realized, after he had already hired me, that he wanted someone with more sales experience, so what else could I have done? I can’t go back in time and change my job history. It’s unfortunate that this was the job I fell into, and subsequently was pushed out of, but I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. It wasn’t a job that I adored or could see myself doing for more than a year, but it was money. Now, I’m back to square one, trying to stay optimistic and laughing to keep from crying. I almost feel like I’m running on pure animal survival instinct now, wild-eyed, hoarding my food because I don’t know when I’ll eat again. Okay, it’s not that desperate of a situation, but it feels like it sometimes.

So now I’m back to scouring Craigslist every day for jobs, checking my inbox to see if any potential employers have responded to my emails, and feeling like a worthless human for not working and contributing to society like everyone else. As the Beatles would say, “HELP!”

Gripe, Gripe, Gripe.

I’m sure my five faithful readers remember all too well when I was complaining about being unemployed a few weeks back, but now that I’ve been employed for three weeks, allow me to gripe for a moment about having a job.

So I’m currently working in a print shop, manning the front desk and helping to keep the office organized and the internal processes flowing smoothly. There are a lot of things that I really enjoy about this job, namely the mostly chill environment and co-workers and meeting lots of really interesting people that have us print things for them. A lot of my job is answering the phone, which if anyone knows me well, they know that I don’t enjoy talking on the phone in my personal life let alone my professional life, and that I definitely struggle to represent myself accurately on the phone. In other words, when I talk to strangers on the phone, I feel that I sound a lot dumber and less competent than I actually am. But surprisingly, I’ve fallen into the groove of things, and now I don’t feel nearly so anxiety-riddled to call someone up and tell them that their print job is done and ready to be picked up. As much as I hate talking on the phone, it’s challenging me in a good way to broaden my comfort zone and improve a skill that can serve me well in other jobs in the future.

Those are the good things. One of the most difficult things about this job is that it requires me, a natural introvert, to be very outgoing and bubbly. Not really my style unless I’m slightly intoxicated, sorry to say. Apparently the girl who had my job before was really friendly and perky, and several of the customers have told me how sad they are that she doesn’t work there anymore. Which makes me feel really great, obviously. I’ve never been a person to act any other way than how I’m feeling or how I am naturally (within the bounds of politeness, of course), and I’ve also never been a person who can roll with anything and be confident and cool when I have no idea what I’m talking about (as I so often do at this job), so I’m having a hard time adopting this Susie-Talks-A-Lot persona that’s expected of me. Is it better to be competent and professional, or friendly and outgoing? I would almost always say the former, but I think that just isn’t the case in customer service-oriented jobs like this one. I welcome any tips on how to dissociate my real personality from my fake work personality, ie. someone please teach me how to be schizophrenic.

The worst thing about this job is the inconsistency of work hours. I was told I would be working about five hours each day, Monday through Friday; some days I work from 9 until 12:30, some days I work until 4:30. My work hours are entirely dependent on the amount of incoming work to be done; if it’s slow, which apparently it is in the summer months, and I run out of things to do, they send me home. If it’s busy, I work a full day. There is zero uniformity. I can’t plan my life around something with so little structure. And, I’m only getting paid $10 an hour, which means my paychecks for each two-week pay period my paycheck is $400 or less. And it would be one thing if I were living at home with my parents, or if it was just a summer job that I was only going to be at for a couple months, but seriously, I have a college degree! And I’ve worn out my welcome in my current rent-free living situation, which means I’m going to have to start paying rent again soon! And I have to start paying on my student loans in September! I’ve got bills and expenses, man. And to paraphrase Notorious B.I.G.: no money, mo’ problems. Kendall need steady hours and steady income. She need it now.

Okay, venting complete. I hate to sound ungrateful for the job I have, because I could certainly still be unemployed, and a lot of people are unemployed and are a lot worse off than I am. But, I guess I’m just now starting to see that having a job doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s a good start, but there’s a lot more puzzle pieces that need to fall into place before I can characterize my feelings about my life as okay and stable. Until then, I just need to persevere and be grateful.

So, This One Time, I Graduated From College. The End.

Summer Reading.

One of my favorite things about having extended breaks while I was in school was that I got to plan a reading list for whatever vacation from school I was heading into. As I am a now a college graduate (thank you, thank you), I won’t have any more winter breaks or spring breaks to necessitate a reading list. However, summer is summer whether you’re in school or not, and since today is the first official day of summer (though the weather in the Couve would suggest otherwise), I have compiled a summer reading list to share with my (four or so) faithful readers.

Right now I am reading:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

The agenda for the rest of the summer is as follows:
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
A Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
‘Tis by Frank McCourt
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Because I have about as many books on my to-read shelf as I do on my already-read shelf, I’ve made a vow to not buy anymore books until September so that I can focus on just reading the books that I already have. If I make it through my entire list before September though, I may have to cheat and buy The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because I’ve heard such good things about it and am itching to read a good mystery novel.

And heck, my endless summer started in March, so I managed to read eight books in the interim from when I was done with classes and actually participated in my graduation ceremony. There were some really good ones and some really bad ones:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (amazing)
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (average)
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (amazing)
People I Wanted To Be by Gina Ochsner (amazing)
The Help by Kathryn Stockett (slightly above average)
The Island by Victoria Hislop (awful)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (amazing)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood (amazing)

Here’s to a summer of leisurely reading, lovely words and lively storytelling! Hip hip hooray!

Kendall The Sad Sack: The Life of an Unemployed College Graduate.

The lack of posts in the last week and a half can be explained in one small but earth-shattering phrase: graduation weekend.

My parents and youngest brother have been here for the past week and have been shacking up with me, which is both fun and slightly overwhelming. My parents met my boyfriend’s parents for the first time over dinner last Saturday. I donned a cap and gown on the hottest day Seattle has seen in recent months and sat through a three-hour long ceremony that pronounced me a college graduate and saw people that were once my friends, but who I will probably never speak to again, and felt immense peace about it. All of this is supposed to be like the transition period between being a college student and being a working adult and contributing member of society. This is not my life.

My life is disappointment. I’ve been applying to jobs for the past two and half months, jobs that I am insanely overqualified for, and cannot find employment anywhere. I heard on NPR today that having a college degree is not the impressive asset that it used to be, and I think my present condition is the manifestation of that sentiment. My degree does not mean shit to anyone that I’ve interviewed with, because I’m having to compete with people who aren’t college-educated but have way more experience than I do. People keep asking me how it feels to be a college graduate, and keep telling me what a huge accomplishment it is to get my degree, but truthfully, it doesn’t feel like anything to me because having a degree has not done anything good for me thus far.

NPR also said that it is becoming more common for people to get jobs based on networking and connections, rather than through education or experience. Which is just adding insult to injury for me because I don’t have very many connections, and the ones that I do have that I’ve tried to use to my advantage haven’t even been able to be translated into a job.

I just feel hopeless so much of the time. Like, what is the point of emailing my resume in response to a Craigslist ad when I know that 90% of the companies I email will never respond and that 30% of the ads I respond to are scams anyway? I had one position that I interviewed for and made it down to the top two candidates, but what’s the point of interviewing for any position when I know that if it’s between me and one other person, the other person probably has more experience and will be chosen over me? It’s so hard to keep sending resumes and filling out applications and calling to check up on my application status because there has been nothing encouraging that has resulted from it. I just keep getting doors shut in my face and promised phone calls that never come. Sometimes I think I should just go live with my parents in Georgia, for free, for a year and then go to graduate school directly after. At this point, it seems like there’s nothing I can do with what I presently have. I either need more education, or more experience, to get anywhere.

It’s a depressing and frustrating life I’ve become accustomed to. I think this photo accurately sums up my current attitude:

Introducing: Vision Curation.

I’ve been working on a new blog endeavor for the past couple weeks and now is the time to finally reveal it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Vision Curation.

Vision Curation is a photoblog. Not of my photos, but of photos by other photographers that are amazing and mind-blowing to me. There are photos pulled from the pages of Vogue and photos pulled from the humble pages of Flickr. There are photos by legends like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, and photos from relative unknowns. I hope it will be a good way to introduce people to classic photos they have never encountered before, as well as a platform for emerging photographers to get more exposure for their work.

I knew I wanted to start a photoblog of other photographer’s works because there is so much beauty to be found through the lens of a camera. And if I build a collection of beauty in photographic form that I can study and admire and learn from, then I feel I’ll have a better chance of finding and capturing beauty when I’m behind the lens. It is image inspiration that I plan to update daily, if not multiple times a day.

But enough of me explaining it away… go ahead and check it out yourself!