Hope

Distant hope is encouraging and inspiring. Hope so nearly realized is tortuous and maddening.

Radio Silence

After six months of hearing nothing -- literally nothing but automated email responses -- back from potential employers, I finally have landed a job interview! I'm excited by the opportunity and confident that I'm qualified for the job, but I don't want to presume that I'll actually get the job. I don't want to raise my expectations only to have them squashed.

Actually, in the past couple weeks, I've gotten a few other promising inquiries:

• A small, Chicago-based web company contacted me to write some online help for their site. This is turning into a story unto itself, and there will probably more to tell later
• A headhunter in Kansas City must have found one of my old resumes and has asked if she could submit it to a few companies back in Missouri. I gave her the go-ahead because the jobs sounded kind of interesting
• The state of Illinois has asked me to come in for a competency test to see if I'm qualified for a position that I applied for a month ago. I'm waiting on my college transcript to arrive
• Even a regular customer at worked asked me if I would be interested in helping her walk dogs. I gave her my number

I'm not sure if this is the end of the radio silence of the past half-year or just a momentary reprieve. Either way, I'm grateful for the much needed morale boost.

Skinny

When people ask me whether or not I'm one of those skinny people that can eat a ton and never get fat, I say, "Yes." And while this is sort of true, it's not the entire story.

I can pack away large amounts of grub, and I have been known to snack all day. While I do have a high metabolism, the real reason I'm so skinny is because on the whole I don't eat very much at all.

I'm not really a grazer. If there's unlimited food sitting in front of me, I'll eventually get full and stop eating. I'm not a forager, either. I won't go looking for the perfect food to sate my hunger. I'm more of a scavenger. I'll wait until food presents itself and then I'll swoop in and gorge myself. I'm an opportunistic eater.

So, while I can eat quite a bit in one sitting or devour a constant stream of snacks for a while, I will usually go for long stretches of time where I eat nothing at all. Take, for instance, a few days ago. Without realizing it, I went nearly 48 hours only eating a bowl of cereal.

It's not that I don't get hungry. I do -- especially in the case of the previous example -- but that's usually only when I'm nearly starved. When I'm only slightly hungry, I usually don't notice until I think about it. And if my stomach doesn't rumble (which it usually doesn't) then I don't think about it. Basically, and this sounds pretty stupid, but I forget to eat until it's way past time to do so.

Recently I've begun to recognize something about myself and my body. When I've gone a while without eating, I tend to get even more surly than normal. (I know, it doesn't sound possible.) I believe this is because my blood-sugar is so low and I'm experiencing something similar to what diabetics feel if they haven't taken their insulin. So, I'm trying to recognize when I feel inordinately cranky, and take that as my cue to eat something. It's just sad that it's taken me 25 years to recognize this.

Talent

Despite whatever talents I have, think I have, forget I have, or wish I had, one talent I know I have is a talent for picking friends. They are quick to point out when I am selling myself short (no pun intended), and they have seemingly never-ending patience for showing me the positive when all I see is the negative.

Thanks to all my friends, far and near, who call me out on my bullshit, don't let me wallow in my own self-pity, and otherwise encourage me to be a better me than I am willing to settle being.

That said, there's no accounting for why I have good family. I'm just lucky, I guess.