Directions
There are so many options in life. I’ve learned, though, that as I get older I have fewer and fewer of them. It’s like… when you’re 18, fresh outta high school, you could do anything you wanted. Go to college… go to work… enlist… live at home and stay unemployed… etc. More and more, though, it’s like once you graduate there this HUGE pressure which states that if you don’t immediately go to college and get a degree, you fucking suck. That’s kinda the boat I’m in, and it kinda sucks. Nobody wants to hire me because I’m lacking in college education. I do get tuition reimbursement from my current job, but there’s two immense problems here:
-The very concept of reimbursement is flawed: I’ve got to have the money before I can spend it for them to pay me back.
-Working a full-time job, I can only take one or two classes per semester. A BS will take me probably 12 years to accomplish. Fucking sweet.
So, I’m in this job with nowhere else to go. I’m begging them to get me some certifications, which should help my situation. At this point, all I can think to do is keep collecting certifications from this job until someone else will hire me.
There is, of course, another alternative…
… I could always enlist. If I were to do it, I’d join the Navy. I took a practice ASVAB yesterday… that’s a basic entrance/aptitude test you’ve got to take before enlisting in any branch of the military… and I scored amazingly well on it. My mechanical skills and higher mathematics could use some work, but aside from that I did very well. There are a lot of perks and benefits to joining, which I’m not going to delve into here for fear of sounding like a recruiter, and they’re numerous enough for it to be truly tempting. Probably the biggest benefit is that it’ll get me outta here, and into something new. I think I’m a creature of change, I need new and different shit to keep me entertained/challenged. The downside, of course, is that it’s going to take me away from her.
I realize it’s not healthy to peg so much on one person’s existence, and that’s not only what this is. Part of it is that I am really starting to feel things coming together. I’m getting my financial shit handled, I’m not broke anymore, ever. As a happy result, I can afford to live somewhere other than my friend/co-worker’s spare bedroom. My beloved will be moving up here with me in a few months, into a house we hope to rent. I can finally look just a few months down the road, and feel truly happy about what I see. And I think if I enlisted now, it’d throw all of that into disarray. We’d figure something else out, sure. Assuming she’d stay with me, she’d (hopefully) move to wherever I get stationed, we’d have a place to live, money for food, blah blah blah… everything we need. Aside from the climate change, things would mostly stay the same save for one huge difference: I’d be gone. A lot. I don’t know that I could do that to her, to us. Once again, it’s got me feeling stuck.
Part of me thinks I should just forget about it. I mean, Navy careers can really work for some people. I see my brother, sisters, their spouses having had great careers in and as a result of the Navy… but, they’ve all been there for years. There’s a lot of bullshit between basic and where they are now. I think if I was single, had no friends, had no job, I might just do it. Thankfully, none of these things are factors. And that’s not me saying the the military is a last resort, meant only for losers. Not by a long-shot. I’m saying that I have someone who I really, truly care about here that I really don’t want to put through the lifestyle of being a military girlfriend/spouse/wife/whatever… it’s not fair. If she had known, going into this, that the Navy was something I wanted and still chose to get involved with me it might make a little more sense, but as that’s not the case, no dice.
Blah… too many thoughts at once.
In a few months, I’m gonna be in a house with someone I love very much. It’s gonna be tits, and I am choosing to just shut the hell up and be happy about it.
