Music Player Upgrade?, Job worries

Currently considering if I should leap into the age of digital music and get an Ipod. This does have a lot of attractions, in that it gets rid of the need to keep carrying a load of CD’s around with me, when I want to hear music on the train. Also it means I could have all of my music in one place and download podcasts as well.

It isn’t as if I can’t afford it. But I get these conflicting feelings that I could just get a CD player that plays MP3’s, as it would be cheaper. Also the question, once I had an Ipod, what else would I use it for? I’ll decide this weekend.

I think I’m feeling tense because the date for my interview is a few days before I go to the convention. So it feels as if the two are right on top of each other.

Also, when you are made redundant, there is a thought pattern that you get into. That once you have lost your job, the next time you have an interview, it’s you’re only shot at paid work again. If you lose this one, you’ve blown you’re only chance. And as it goes on, you will have to set your sights lower and lower, until you wind up at minimum wage, doing stuff where you are the oldest person working there.

Maybe there is a way I can pick up more skills, the thing is how do you pick them up, beyond sitting behind a till? The difficulty is that I find it hard to believe that you can pick up computer skills in a day workshop. Learning to use software, is a slow process I think. All these programmes come with so many little display bits, in the toolbars and the menus. And if you don’t have opportunities to experiment and play about, how can you fully know what the programme can do?

Feeling down again

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I helped my father clean out a garden pond. Notable for the lack of fish turning up as the water drained. Since the tradition of building ponds in the garden started, the heron population must have exploded.

Feeling low again today. It started when I woke up too late in the morning. Then a form I was waiting for did not arrive. Tried to fill in the rough of an application form, but just got into a downer. It’s the realisation that in six years of work, because you couldn’t move out of the department, you are at a disadvantage before you start. Because I couldn’t be allowed in contact with the till counters, no matter how well I did with the customers, if they asked me questions. Maybe they were right and I couldn’t have managed it. But all I wanted was just one chance to show it. They knew that I was loyal and willing to work hard, could they at least have tried it with me?

It’s not just the lack of progress in my last job that’s the problem, it’s also that there was a yearlong gap between jobs, which doesn’t help.

It just feels like after nearly nine years of working, I haven’t managed to get anything approaching a career and it is now too late to find one.

This is why I keep thinking that I should find a way to work for myself, as I am too unskilled to get anywhere. But I can’t see anything that I can do. I did think last night, “why don’t I design T-shirts and sell them on the internet?” Then I realised, I can’t do designs, where would I get the materials and who would give the start of funds and would I really make that much money anyway?

I am returning to the pattern of hoping that everything can get sorted out after an appointment this week, so that on Monday, I can establish some sort of routine and that thing can feel normal. But then there is the fear of what if it isn’t? What if I still can’t make myself wake up early?

I know this kind of downward spiral thinking doesn’t help. I want to be able to stop doing it. But it’s just become such a deep part of my mind that when it takes over all I can do is wait for myself to rise out of it again.