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Personal Values by Rene Magritte

“Congratulations!!” read one post on a friend’s Facebook wall, the day after she landed an office job in her field.

“So amazing!” read another.

“Are you ready for your big-girl job?” asked a third well-wisher, accompanied by a GIF of Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope.

“I can’t believe I finally have a real job” was the text she sent me a few days later, from the comfort of her desk, where she had been hired to do operations work for an organization she had once, a few years prior, interned for. It was a weirdly solemn text, I assume a combination of nervousness about her first real day on the job, and a mild sense of relief that she had finally made her way out of the post-grad maze and into a job that society considered impressive. Finally, her degree wasn’t for nothing, and she was securely in a “real job.”

The truth is, nearly everyone experiences this anxiety in their 20s. The more the clock ticks away on your “no-longer-a-student” life, the more acute the feeling gets that you need to find your next big step. It’s a kind of musical chairs of the professional world, where there are only so many spots to be taken, and there are way more qualified young people trying to get into them. It can feel incredibly tense, like one wrong move in an internship or one stained sweater at an interview can be the deciding factor between you getting a “real job” and you staying in post-grad limbo. And so when you finally do cross that threshold and find yourself with a steady salary, benefits, and a little desk to call your own, all you feel is relief. You made it.

And that’s bullshit.

The thing about many “real jobs” is that they aren’t particularly fun or rewarding in the way we imagine them to be, they just have social prestige. And even when it comes to money, many people working “real” jobs could be making a much higher monthly income with a specific skilled job that they trained for at a technical school instead of university. There is no guarantee that having a desk job means a good living, comprehensive time off, work/life balance, personal fulfillment, or even the opportunity to meaningfully advance. There are many office-based jobs that provide none of those things, and leave people, in a few short years of “landing” it, wanting to quit overnight and escape it all.

And showering people with praise when they get an office job — praise that centers around it finally being something impressive and meaningful — only reinforces this. It creates a pressure to get one of these precious jobs not only because you might want it, but because you know that you will be heavily socially rewarded for it. Your family will feel relieved in their choice to help you finance school, your friends will be impressed, your professional network will finally recognize you as “one of their own.” You will move, very clearly, into a new stage of your life in people’s eyes, even if you were already a mature, thoughtful, hardworking person. It’s a line in the sand for many people, between “figuring it out” and “having it figured out.”

Even though these sentiments might be well-meaning, referring to this phase of your life as “real” or a “big girl job” (yikes) doesn’t do anyone any good. You know who is probably reading that? The person who is still working through an internship, or going back to school, or even — gasp! — not interested in working a “professional” job. And those people don’t deserve to be denigrated, or made to feel that what they are doing isn’t meaningful when compared to someone who took a more traditional route. When you are lifting up the traditional career path, you have to be pushing something down in comparison, and that “something” is every person who isn’t fitting neatly into the box that society wants them to. And it’s putting increased pressure on everyone who hasn’t “made it” yet to rush into that lifestyle, because they know that the world won’t take them seriously until they’re carrying around business cards and have a professional email.

A job is “real” when you work it, when you try your hardest and draw value from it, even if that value is “knowing what you don’t want to do in the future.” A job is “real” when you put in an honest day’s work and don’t look down your nose at anyone else’s work, because you know that the meaning of effort and dedication can be found anywhere from a coffee shop to a corporate office. Most of us have worked jobs that would be considered, by some of the more judgmental among us, to be “not real,” but if we told that to the version of ourselves putting in long hours at those jobs, they’d laugh in our faces. Of course they were “real.” Sweeping floors is real, dealing with angry customers is real, getting coffee for superiors is real, and learning about yourself in the process is real. Sitting at a desk may be more comfortable and respected, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it any more or are getting more out of it. In fact, some of us (myself included) can think of more important lessons we learned doing work that was less valued by society.

Some people might never want to make that switch, and might never define their careers by what looks best on a resume. And that is more than okay, because the world is comprised, if nothing else, by diversity and varied skills. People can find meaning in an endless array of jobs, and it’s not up to any of us to define what is and isn’t real, nor to put undue pressure on someone the second they turn 22 to join the Ranks of the Working. Everyone deserves to find themselves and their professional happiness in their own time, and no one should feel more inclined to take a job because of how it would look than how it would feel. No one should be forced to spend their 20s — and beyond — in a job they hate because it’s what they thought they were supposed to have. No one should abandon the many incredible career paths that don’t involve an office because they are worried they might disappoint someone. No amount of prestige is worth your happiness.

(Be sure to change the post type from link to text post when you reblog, if that’s what you want to do)

This method is best suited for textbook or article notes, and is a version of revised notes. It is also well suited for books you plan on returning to the bookstore or books you have rented, as it does not involve writing directly in the book itself.

First, you’ll need to find a notebook, and the pens you like the best. My favorite notebooks to work with for note-taking, especially for my “revised” notes, are the Moleskine, hard or soft cover, in size extra large. For this specific class (Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies), I decided that lined pages would suit my needs better. For my math, engineering, and science classes, I usually opt for squared paper, as I draw in lots of diagrams and graphs.

My favorite pens ever are Staedtler Triplus Fineliners, so even though they show through the pages a little bit, I still choose to use them. I just love the way they write. I usually write out my notes themselves with a Pilot G2 05 with black ink, as it writes with a finer line and doesn’t bleed through quite as much.

I usually try to set up my notebooks about a week or so before class starts, that way it’s ready to go on my first day of class.

You’ll want to start off by setting up your notebook. On my first page, I put my course code for my university, as well as the course title.

Next, and this is perfectly optional (I just like the way it makes the book look, especially at the end of the semester), I include some sort of related quote to the course. For my engineering courses (which are related to my major), I put a different quote at the beginning of each section. But as this is a two-month long course during the summer, I opted for one quote by Mohadesa Najumi at the beginning of my book.

Next I set up my table of contents and include a page with basic course information. As this course is all online, my course information just included the start and end dates of the course, what time content is posted and on what day, and the name of my professor. For my usual courses, I will include the days of the week the class meets on and where, TA names and contact info, as well as posted office hours for my professors and TAs and tutoring hours either in the library or in the College of Engineering.

Next is one of the things I’m most proud of.

While I religiously use my Erin Condren planner to map out my days, weeks, and months, I have found throughout my college experience that including monthly views for the months my class ranges has been helpful. This way, there’s no sifting through the multiple colors I have in my planner, and everything related to that class is in the same notebook.

On this calendar I include start dates of the class, the end date, the dates of exams or quizzes, assignment deadlines, office hours, etc.

For this course, as I just started a few days ago, I don’t have a lot of dates or information, so my calendars are still very empty.

Next up I go to my weekly overview. At the beginning of each week, I set up a weekly layout, and I include a list of assignments, tests, quizzes, tasks, projects, etc that need my attention throughout the week, and I place the days I plan on doing them or the days they need turned in onto the weekly layout.

Now you’re finally ready to get into taking the notes.

Gather your book, some sticky notes, and your favorite pen or pencil.

I color code my stickies so that the “revision” process later goes a bit smoother. In this case, I’m using blue to denote something interesting, intriguing, or thought provoking, greenish-yellow to represent the facts or important concepts, and pink for important vocabulary words and their definitions.

Read the selection once.

As you read along the second time, write notes on your stickies, and place them in a place of relevance directly on the page in the book. Just make sure you don’t cover up anything you need to keep reading.

Now, once you’ve read all the material in questions (you can choose to break it up however you want, but since Chapter 1 was assigned for the week, I’ve elected to break it into chapters), carefully remove your stickies one by one and lay them out on a flat surface. This is when having a separate color for vocab can be helpful, as I sometimes put all of my vocab at the beginning or end of a section, especially if the section of reading was particularly large.

Organize your stickies in an order that makes sense to you, and use this order as your basis for transferring those notes into your notebook. The order you choose can just be lumping them under similar headings. Some classes even lend themselves to a nice chronological order. Whatever you choose, just make sure it’s something that will make sense to you when you come back to it in the end.

Okay so up there I wasn’t following my own advice, I just thought I would include the picture because my handwriting looks nice…

Now organize the stickies!

Now you just start writing everything from the stickies into your notebook. I like to take each category or subgroup and put them in the book on the facing page, then put them back in my textbook as I finish with each post it.

Moving on to the next category.

Before you know it, you’ve written all of your stickies into your notebooks.

Now you’re revved up and ready to go. You can either keep going and make a note summary page (which I’ll show you next week), or you can leave it. These will also be helpful when reviewing for tests and quizzes. You can highlight or underline, or use even more stickies (which is what I usually do) as you review.

Well, that’s all I have for you right now. Happy studying!

All of a sudden two decades have passed and you still have not kissed anyone with tongue, or kissed anyone at all for that matter, or had a 3 AM conversation with someone who would rather look into your eyes for ten minutes straight than talk. You have never worn a lover’s sweater or “forgotten” it at home in your bedroom just so you would have an excuse to see them again. You have never even stood face-to-face with someone who makes your hands shake so hard it feels like they’re both having a separate anxiety attack.

This causes you much guilt and self-blame and sadness but above all, an overwhelming curiosity. Are you really that ugly, that unwanted, that uninteresting, that boring, that no one, absolutely no one, has ever looked at you like the only thing on earth?

The answer is no. The better answer is that someone out there, somewhere in the world, is “wondering what it’s like to meet someone like you,” and they have two decades worth of love stored in their veins like a shoot-‘em-up drug, and they’re just about ready to inject it into someone else’s bloodstream. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves and wait for it to happen.

At times you felt so lonely you could stand at the edge of a cliff with nothing beneath you but air and grass and a long, long way down, and you’d still feel emptier than that canyon itself. Maybe you even danced with yourself alone in your room a few times, arms outstretched around a ghost, pretending someone else’s hands were on your waist, someone else’s eyes boring into yours.

Or maybe you fell temporarily in love with strangers on public transportation, fell in love with anybody who so much as accidentally brushed your hand on the way past. For you, falling in love with dozens of people a day was a coping mechanism for not having anyone to love you in return. But people are not eggs and falling in love with a dozen of them does not mean your shell will remain uncracked. One day you’re going to hit the point where you’re so desperate for human contact that you’re going to snap in half and all your love will bleed out like egg yolk.

But someone out there is eating a bowl of Ramen noodles right now, or putting on slippers, or settling into bed. They are doing all the normal things that you’ve done in your own life. They are just like you. They have cellulite and extra fat in all the wrong places and goals and fears and doubts and bad handwriting.

The truth is that they are just like you, and being just like you, they’re looking for a lover too. They’re what you might call a soulmate.

They think they’re all alone in feeling the way they do, but you’re really both two halves of a whole.

ART HISTORY MEME; 8 artists: Claude Monet [1/8]