Please Help Amanda Find A Job

It's been a weird, kind of stressful week so far. I'm sort of frantically trying to finish my thesis, which is going... ok. I ran about a million tests on my data last week, and had written up all my results and everything, and then one of my committee members was like, "So, you should have just run these two tests and included these three tables," so I'm working on re-doing a lot of it right now. Unfortunately, I've got over 30 variables, so my inter-correlation matrix has close to 1000 boxes, all of which contain three numbers, and that's not so easy to turn into a Word document, to put it mildly. After I'd been working on this thing for over five hours, I looked at Emmanuel and said, "I'm going to kill someone," and he laughed at me and told me to go home and have a glass of wine. So that's what I did. Long story short, I won't be sending off a draft to my committee this week, but Monday or Tuesday, it's going to be out the door, if it kills me. On top of this, I'm legitimately upset about Zayn leaving One Direction (kind of a weird story*), which isn't helping my stress level. Anyway, that's a very brief update on my life at the moment.

Unfortunately, the stress I am experiencing right now is not confined to the current time period. In fact, I regularly feel anxious about, not only the present and future, but also about the past, the near-, medium-, and long-term futures. There are a few bright spots (actually, right now, pretty much just Niko and Bryan's wedding), but otherwise, yeah, lots of stress. Obviously graduation is a priority right now, but I've also got to find a job, and then I have to decide if I want to get another degree, and then I have to, you know, start a career. Here's what I've narrowed the field down to: law school, law school AND a PhD, a PhD in something either water or hazards related, a PhD in risk management and insurance, the FBI, taking religious orders (haven't decided how I'd do that exactly), writing crime fiction (Niko's proposal), and starting a commune in Detroit. I'm most seriously considering law school, which the people I know in law school or have gone to law school seem ambivalent about. At the same time, at a certain point I think you just have to pull the trigger. It's taken me a really long time to come around to the idea that there might not be a career that I find truly fulfilling, and the best use of my time might instead be to do something that helps people that I don't hate and can get paid for. I don't care so much the amount I get paid -- I don't plan on having kids, and I probably won't buy a house, so as long as I'm reasonably comfortable my salary isn't a big deal. I was really into this insurance idea, but the paper I'm writing now has made me much less optimistic about whether insurance has any practical value in making the world a better place (that may seem like an obvious conclusion to many of you, but insurance has some theoretical qualities that I had high hopes for).

Anyhow, so law school, or law school plus a PhD (I'd prefer to be in school for the rest of my life) is looking like the plan right now. And because of my specific interests, I'm thinking University of Colorado. My actual plan right now, to the extent that I have one, is to either get a job in Colorado for the next year or two, or get a job in Fargo or nearby, preferably in water management, preferably preferably something that incorporates both water and the law (so if any of you Coloradans, or Fargoans for that matter, hear about anything that sounds like it would fit the bill, please let me know! This whole blog post is a surreptitious way of soliciting my readers to find me a job).

*Ok, ok I'll tell you about it, and it's not actually that weird, sorry for the false advertising. So, as many of you know, since last summer I have been spending a lot of time on Tumblr, which is easily one of the best decisions I have ever made. The blogs I follow are specifically Sherlock blogs (well, specifically they're Johnlock blogs), but the hiatus is long, and there are only so many gifsets to create and fics to recommend. As a result, a lot of the blogs I follow have become One Direction blogs instead (specifically Larry blogs, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to learn about that). I was very resistant to this at first, for hopefully obvious reasons, but all those teenagers really wore me down, and now, even though I wouldn't call myself a fan, I did listen to their music for five hours straight today.