Stuck
Posted by Erin | Filed under General
I haven’t had a lot of time to write recently but I wanted to take some time to get this out of my head before it drives me crazy.
Cutting here for whinyness. Proceed if that doesn’t bother you.
I feel I desperately need to make a change in my life but I can’t figure out how.
I’ve been commuting from Grand Rapids to Lansing 4-5 days per week for over a year. Currently I’m on 4 days a week, 10 hour days to get my hours in. Adding the commute time (60-75 minutes one way) essentially makes it a 12 hour day, plus the time I need to get ready in the morning, and dinner/”wind down” time after I get home. Which leaves me with no time for anything else on these days and I feel like a zombie robot.
And well, don’t get me started on my days off – I can’t stick to my to-do lists because something, inevitably, always gets in the way – fixing my car, doing some kind of errand, or whatever. So if I make a to-do list and don’t stick to it and get all the stuff done I feel like an awful failure which makes me not want to do anything else even if I might have time.
If I have to do anything that needs to occur during normal business hours in Grand Rapids, I feel like I’m either last-minute-ing it on one of my days off or making a huge imposition on my job by taking time off on short notice. Or if I don’t need to be physically present, making an even more huge imposition on Barton to have him do it during his lunch hour or after he gets out of work.
Then there are the work days. I get up at 5am. Showered and ready to leave by 6. Stop for breakfast (and gas if I need it) and on my way to Lansing by 6:45ish. Arrive in Lansing at 8. Work until 6pm. Leave Lansing around 6:10-6:15 and back in Grand Rapids by 7:30pm – usually. Some days I end up staying a little late to finish up something I’m working on so I don’t get home until 8. So, pretty much forget trying to do *anything* either before, or after, work.
5am-8pm 4 days a week. It wouldn’t be bad if I could maintain some kind of routine, and if dinner could be eaten either before I leave Lansing or on my way home, so I could go straight to bed. But usually dinner isn’t accomplished until 9pm or later, and I don’t get to fall into bed until at least 10.
One solution to the commute problem is to find a job in Grand Rapids. However, I’ve been doing that for over a year now, applied for several different positions with various companies, and am either rejected right off the bat because I don’t have a Bachelor’s degree, or the experience I have supposedly doesn’t apply to their situation, even if I technically meet the job position requirements.
I know that it doesn’t really help that the economy sucks right now and tons of people have been laid off. Even when I was in college 5 years ago, a good portion of my classmates then were people in their 30′s and 40′s, going back to school to get retrained in “computers” so they could get a job. I have to wonder where some of those people are now.
Sorry. Going off on a tangent there.
The only other solution to my current problem is to move back to Lansing. This means I either move both Barton and I back, and he commutes again, or I move back by myself. Neither of these are truly feasible.
So, I’m stuck, and I hate it. I want to spend more time at home – the apartment is a mess, things are still “packed” from when we moved, tons of money is wasted because I never have the energy (or just plain TIME) to cook at home so we end up eating out.
I’ve changed my schedule a bunch of times (and I’m changing it again today) to try to make things easier. Though, I don’t know if it matters how I massage start/end times and days around. Because of the commute I’m still wasting 2+ hours a day just driving a car. I guess I’m just stuck with it until I can make something different happen.
