Learning to Love: a dog and a garden

I accept that I may come off as crazy or a loser to a lot of people, especially in this town, when I talk about my life. I notice a pattern coming out of my mouth when people ask me about "what I do." I use to say that I am a recent graduate who is applying to jobs, and I still say that. But now I talk about how I am learning the banjo, and keeping and cooking from a garden with over ten different types of veggies in it, and how I am learning to love animals by hanging out with a dog everyday. How I am going to be a camp counselor, band coach, and instructor for the History of Women in Rock for Girls Rock DC. I should not be surprised that people's first response to the latter is, "so, is it paid?" To many people, everything I just mentioned is inconsequential, non-productive, waste of time that allows me to avoid "becoming a grown-up" that goes to work everyday.

To the world I am trying to become a part of, what I am doing now just makes me a bum.

I use to feel ashamed, now I just feel pity. for them. It is a shame that we feel we have to base our value and existence on where we go to work each day, where we most likely hate what we do. That our work becomes our identity, and by these logic, I have none, and therefore do not register on the radar screen. I acknowledge my privilege to be able to not work for as long as I have been (p.s. I was offered a job today), but that it has also been a time of frustration, introspection, and growth, and only recently have I come to terms with this period of limbo and been able to have fun with it. I realize now that these painful feelings are caused by the expectation pressed by my alma mater, social-economic background, my circle of peers, and culture at large to "be someone." This measure of success does not have room to quantify the achievements of learning a new instrument, cultivating life, or savoring a cool drink on the front porch on a summer day with a friend. Screw that.

What it comes down to is this: I don't want to spend time with or become the type of person who is too caught up in their own personal career advancement and "work" and forgets the value of everything else that makes up this world and life worth living. There are beautiful flowers that seem to be from another planet two houses down from me. I have seen plants grow from seed to being ripe for feasting, and I am beginning to understand the give and take of a relationship with a dog. Yeah, big deal, so what? Just because I have nothing else better to do, right?

How terribly wrong that is.

I use to think that my life would be begin as soon as I got a salary. When I had a value attached to my personhood. When I talk about my newfound love for a dog or a garden, I get a look that reads, "get a life," and the subject is forcibly changed to matters of jobs, or the conversation dies completely. I fear now that I may lose my life as soon as I get a job. Who really wants to talk about work when you are not at work, when there is so much more to talk about? Who needs to get a life, now?
(a cucumber and friends)