Till one cloud-scattered night March 5, 2012

In terms of a personal update, I will say that I’ve been mired in some sort of crisis—existential, quarter-life, or otherwise.  I had always been the kind of person who believed that everything happened for a reason and that some greater force was guiding me through life, taking me wherever I was meant to be; but I recently realized that for whatever reason, I’d just stopped buying it.  That has a lot of implications.  For one, the “go with the flow” approach that I take toward my life doesn’t really cut it, if my fate is solely my responsibility.  I have to figure out what I need to do to live the life I want and work to make it happen.  For another, I keep finding myself sinking into these brooding fits where I obsess about wasting my life.  (I’m already twenty-five, and what the hell have I accomplished?  I don’t even feel like I’ve progressed much as a person.)  I’ve been trying to evaluate the expectations I have for myself and my life to see what’s actually attainable, because I’ve reached the point where I have to face the fact that some things are just not going to happen.  For example, it occurred to me that I’ve always wanted to be an extravert.  Guess what?  Not happening.  So I guess what that means is that I have to find some sort of meaning in my life and a way to feel fulfilled without achieving extraversion.  (I am also probably never going to be a pirate rock star.)

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that I’m having a hard time with my current work assignment—I start wondering whether it’s getting to be time to jump ship job-wise, then I wonder whether I could even get hired to do anything else, then I wonder whether I will ever find a job I truly like (many people don’t, and I could well be one of those people), then I wonder whether I’m even good at anything I could be paid to do, and I wonder what the point of all this is anyway, working to make money to keep myself alive for what, exactly?  Where do people find meaning in their lives?  I would genuinely like an answer to that question.

I also have a hard time articulating why I’m not satisfied with my life.  I’ve been told by certain people that I can’t complain because I have (1) a job, (2) a boyfriend, and (3) an apartment.  While it’s true that I would probably bitch about it if I didn’t have those things, those three conditions in themselves do not a meaningful life make.  I tend to put things in terms of not having enough friends at the moment, but that isn’t quite it—it’s not that I need a lot of friends, but more that I lack meaningful connections with people.  The introversion thing is not helping there.  I am also seriously lacking adventures.  If my idea of an exciting weekend is vacuuming and rearranging my apartment, that’s a problem.  Lacking adventures can also be traced back to lacking friends—I can go on adventures by myself and have been doing that regularly for the past six months or so, but it gets lonely after a while.

Eh, I hate posting depressing things, but what’re you gonna do.  Anyway, here’s a cool song:

Random Thoughts of the Day February 18, 2011

1. It’s been a while since I had one of those moments where I realize I don’t know someone nearly as well as I think I do.  The biggest instance of this that I remember is when I got an AIM account the summer I graduated from high school and discovered my classmates’ LiveJournals.  It was strange to read all of these thoughts and feelings I’d been unaware of in those around me, and it made me feel like I’d been walking around in my own little bubble the whole time.  I think I’m still in a bubble.

2. Have you ever met someone who is so amazing that the knowledge that such a person exists makes you excited to be human again?

3. I am really, really bad at writing emails.  I type it up, then reread it and tear it apart, second-guess everything I say, rephrase it all, decide it’s hopelessly inadequate, and send it anyway, hoping the person will understand what I was trying to convey.  Sometimes I can be weirdly neurotic.

4. I just re-watched Amélie and realized that I can relate to the way she gets caught up in daydreams about meeting her mystery man but is afraid to actually introduce herself, going to ridiculous levels to keep him interested but not too close.  The moment when you actually have to face the viability of your dreams is very scary.  Nothing ever goes as I envision it, but sometimes it turns out okay anyway.

5. We’re having funding problems at work, and there’s some risk of me losing my job after April.  I’m not sure how much risk, but my coworkers have been applying other places.  I’m not seriously worried because things will work out one way or another, but I’ve been entertaining myself by coming up with contingency plans:

• Go back to the call center… actually, I’d rather be broke… actually, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye.  So scratch that.
• Live off a combination of unemployment, random tutoring, crafting, and buying things at thrift stores and selling them on eBay as collectibles.
• Write my first novel.
• Go back to school for something like library science.
• Join a band.
• Become a groupie for some band or other and follow them around the country… not like I have any in mind… ahem.
• Write a letter to the News offering my services as a copy editor for their online articles, because they really need another one.
• Look into other volunteer programs.
• Open a tea shop/used book store/cafe.
• Go on a CouchSurfing tour of the country and possibly write a book about it.
• Become an amateur private investigator like the guy in Bored to Death.

I really need more sleep.

Changes, Part II August 31, 2010

Seeing as I have been really lax about blogging (because I’ve had lots of other things to do, which isn’t a bad thing by any means), I see fit to present you with a new list of changes.

Change #1 – New job.  I’ve been working at a legal non-profit in Buffalo for two months now, doing intakes with clients at risk of losing their housing or utilities and analyzing their financial situations in order to figure out which benefits they’re eligible to apply for.  As far as jobs go, I’m really enjoying it—it’s a wonderful feeling, never to dread going to work.  Coming from the call center situation, I really appreciate the little things, like a flexible 9-5 schedule, my own office, and being able to eat at my desk, use my cell phone, and use the bathroom whenever I want.  It’s nice to be doing something that actually makes use of my degree and my previous experience, and something that allows me to feel like what I’m doing is genuinely useful to other people.  My coworkers seem pretty cool although I haven’t gotten to know them very well yet, and my boss is an awesome lady who actually baked me cookies on my birthday(!)  The job itself is a nice mix of interacting with clients and doing analytical writing, which I also enjoy.  And it goes without saying that having a salary and benefits is pretty fantastic.  Sometimes I find myself comparing it to the non-profit I worked for in San Francisco during JVC, which is hard to do because they’re pretty different.  The organization in Buffalo basically does all direct services, while the organization in San Francisco focused more on high-impact litigation, with the notable exceptions of the two projects that had JVs.  The organization in San Francisco was composed of about 20 people, while the organization in Buffalo has about 50.  The offices in San Francisco were a lot fancier as well.  The one thing I really miss about the San Francisco non-profit is the people—there was a great atmosphere there when I first started working, and most of my coworkers would even meet up after work for happy hours on Fridays.  Everyone was very different but amazing in their own ways, and they all seemed to be friends in addition to coworkers.  I can’t speak for how it is now, with 75% of the original people laid off since then.  I imagine it’s a lot harder to foster that level of community here with 50 people than it was in San Francisco with 20, and it’s definitely an aspect I miss.

Change #2 – New apartment.  I’ve been living in the new place for a little over a month now, and on the whole I really really like it.  I’m in the attic this time instead of the basement, about 4 blocks from where I was living before, and I have a new roommate who just moved in last week.  I love that there’s a lot more light here, and I feel like I have more space as well.  We even have a fire escape I can call my balcony, and a backyard for me to plant with beautiful vegetables and flowers (once I manage to hack down all the weeds and find a rototiller).  I’ve been spending a lot of time fixing the place up.  I’m still in the process of making curtains and finding patio furniture.  Check out this spiffy floor plan I made in Google Docs!

Change #3 – I turned 24 on the 24th!  It’s nice to be an even-numbered age again.  Here is a picture of the first cookie cake I have ever baked:

Change #4 – New musical obsession!  This band is awesome and best of all, local.  Here is a terrible-quality video I took a couple weeks ago.  See if you can guess what song they’re covering before she starts singing:

And here is their website.

And, oh, so much else has happened, but there isn’t time to tell all of it tonight.  Now that I’ve taken the first step by posting the major things, maybe I’ll be less daunted by the prospect of writing posts in the future.  One can hope, anyway.  (I’m trying to focus more on my paper journal right now, but that might eventually transfer over here as well.)

Working Woes April 13, 2010

I need to get a new job.  This one keeps getting stuck in my head outside of work, and that just will not do.  I lie in bed at the end of every work week watching the same phrases wind their way through my tired brain:  “Thank you for calling ____.  My name is [Wildflowerfever] and I’ll be assisting you today.  May I please have your first and last name and your zip code?  Thank you very much.  And how can I assist you today, Mr./Ms. ____?  What type of meter are you using?  If you turn that meter over for me, there should be a small sticker toward the bottom with a serial number on it.  Could you please read that to me?  Thank you.  Was that X as in X-ray, H as in Henry, Z as in Zebra, 9830, B as in Boy, Y as in Yellow?  Thank you.  And were you at home in the United States when you had this problem with your meter?  Do you have your test strips with you as well?  On the black plastic vial that they come in, there should be a lot number to the right of the code number that begins with a 2 or 3.  Could you read that to me please?  And do those have a code of 25?  And an expiration date of 05/2011?  And a control solution range of 104.0 – 136.0 mg/dL?”  I have to repeat these phrases at work dozens of times a day.  And now that I’m taking calls in Spanish as well, I get all of this stuck in my head in Spanish. It’s annoying as hell and makes it rather difficult to sleep.

I am, in fact, aware that all jobs involve some degree of bullshit, but you will just have to trust me when I say that this particular job is so brimming with bullshit that it’s streaming out of every orifice.  I don’t even feel like going into the details, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to read them, either.  Just for one example, they have me scheduled as the ONLY person handling the Spanish language line for the entire country two nights a week.  One person.  For the whole country.  And I am probably the lowest-level Spanish speaker they have, since it is my second language and not my first.  This is extremely frustrating and stressful, not to mention unnecessary and ill-advised.  The worst part about it for me right now is the hours.  I work 1:45 – 10:00 p.m. Saturday through Wednesday.  Essentially, I work the exact opposite hours of all my friends, who work 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.  And since the main reason I moved back to Buffalo was essentially to spend more time with my friends, I see this as a major drawback to the job.

So the trouble is that I am making $12 an hour here and working just under 40 hours a week.  It’s going to be hard to find another job that can match that, which is not also a call center or equally terrible, and it’s hard for me to justify switching to a job that pays less, even if it improves my quality of life otherwise.  I’ve applied to a couple of cafés as well as Barnes and Noble, but I don’t really see any of those going anywhere right now.  So where does that leave me?  I’m not sure.  I have an appointment with the Canisius career center for next Thursday, and I’m hoping that they will be able to help me a) find a better short-term job, and b) figure out what direction I should go in career-wise in the long run.  I will let you know how it goes.

So far, my favorite career options are:  Librarian, Organic Farmer, Café Owner, and Historic Preservationist.  Believe it or not, I was trying to pick things at the intersection of “Things I Could Feasibly Do” and “Things That Are Appealing.”  I rated these options as more feasible than careers such as Photographer, Writer, Graphic Designer, Prophet, Pirate, and Indiana Jones.

And now perhaps I should say something regarding the apparent Plight of My Generation.  It seems that many of us go off to college after high school because getting a four-year degree is more or less demanded of us these days if we expect to get any sort of decent job.  So many of us pick majors we enjoy, having been taught to follow our passion, and hope to be able to utilize these degrees post-graduation—at which point we slowly come to the unpleasant realization that a bachelor’s degree does not amount to much in today’s economy.  This, of course, does depend somewhat on the specific type of degree.  You can still find a job with business and computer science degrees as well as education degrees and BS-es in general—those that are more “practical” because they feed into a specific profession.  True, it might take you a year or two to land a decent full-time position, but it’s possible.  Those of us with bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts are left floundering with regards to careers and usually end up working at jobs that don’t utilize our degrees, unless we head off to grad school, generally taking out more loans and investing even more money in an education that will hopefully land us a good job in the end so that we can spend the next 10+ years slaving away to The Man to pay back all of those loans.  The problem seems to be that so many people have bachelor’s degrees these days that they are becoming less and less valuable in terms of the types of jobs available, and we need to pursue even further education to make ourselves attractive to employers.  We’ve been raised to believe that we can become anything we want to be, only to find out that there are not enough jobs for everyone to have the job they want.  So what is the solution to all of this?  Do we need to lower our expectations?  It seems so, unless we are going to have a complete overhaul of society, which I have to admit is unlikely to happen any time soon.  So that’s just depressing.

Ideally, I think what I’d like to do is go back to some sort of apprentice system.  I enjoyed getting a bachelor’s degree, so I would still want to have that option, but when it comes to getting started in a career, I would really just like to start working for someone who has the career I want so that they can teach me all they know about it.  I would get paid only what I need to get by, and eventually when my mentor retired, I could take over their position or business seamlessly.  And, to tell you the complete honest truth, at times I have found myself thinking back to reading the Little House on the Prairie books when I was younger, and the division of labor that they relied on then, where the whole family farmed for a living, then men did the heavy labor and the women did the cooking and cleaning and caring for the children, and at times I’ve thought, well, would that really have been so bad?  I mean, I actually enjoy cooking and cleaning (strangely enough), and I do think I’d like to raise children someday.  I feel as though if I lived in that context, I could be content with that sort of life.  I know that I say this at the risk of sounding very un-feminist-like.  But feminism means allowing women choice in how they live their lives, and if women choose to stay at home long enough to raise a family, that certainly does not preclude them from being feminists.  You know?  I wouldn’t want to be forced to marry and have children because that’s the only option available to me as a woman, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to choose to do those things, nor that there is anything inherently wrong with that lifestyle.

Please forgive any gross generalizations I have made here, but feel free to comment and correct them as well.

February Post February 28, 2010

So you may have noticed that I haven’t updated in a while.  Apparently, new job = no posting.  This is not really surprising, since new job also equals 40 less hours of free time a week, which results both in less time to write and less time to do things worth writing about.  But at least I have money… right?

Because I’m sure you’re so interested:

This is my fifth week of training at a call center about 20 minutes from my apartment, which does tech support and product replacements for glucose monitors for people with diabetes.  It isn’t the greatest job in the world, but it pays $11 an hour and I found it right away.  So far during training, we’ve had about an hour’s worth of work to do per day.  I’ve killed the other seven hours talking with my coworkers, doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles, re-reading the seventh Harry Potter book, drawing, doodling, crocheting arm warmers, and learning to play rummy.  It’s a pretty sweet deal for now, aside from the hours, which are 2:00 – 10:00 p.m.  Working second shift is making it really hard for me to get things done—like updating, for instance.

My brain is too tired to write any more right now, so instead I’ll give you a peak at some of the things I’ve been doing to pass the time at work.  Click on the pictures to see them bigger!

Doodle for a henna design, based on http://connect.in.com/henna-mehndi-design/photos-foot-henna-design-558638d7778c249a.html .

Arm warmers I crocheted from the rest of my purple yarn.

Paisley designs.

“Starfish Flower” doodle.

Five-point flower for future henna.

Sketch of an imagined scene from HP7 with Tonks, Lupin, and Teddy.

Logo my coworker asked me to design for his pierogi business.

Phoenix in Flight: black ink, marker, and gold paint pen.

Post-Christmas List December 31, 2009

Days left in 2009:  1
Grades from first semester of grad school:  A, A, A-, B+, B+
Weeks of break, total:  3
Friends in Buffalo seen over break:  16
Friends in Buffalo not seen over break:  2
Snowmen built:  1.5
Paper snowflakes made:  40+
Cookies decorated:  ~30
Days worked:  1
Retirement plans secured:  1
Times snowbrushed car:  5
TV series finished:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Books read:  The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Christmas movies watched:

Love Actually
Elf
A Muppet Family Christmas
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
Rent
A Muppet Christmas Carol
A Charlie Brown Christmas
The Star Wars Holiday Special

Days spent with family:  5
Houseplants driven from Buffalo to Webster and back:  7
Times ice-skated:  3
Card games played:  about 5
Past presents from Santa, more or less in order:

a plastic clock toy with removable gears
Baby Tender Touch (doll that drinks her bottle and wets her diaper)
a (stuffed) dalmatian puppy and a rubber snake
a doll with long hair in a ponytail that you could “cut” by cranking her arm to wind it back into her head
a battery-operated pottery wheel
the Leash-Control Spaniel
Littlest Pet Shop Beethoven, Missy, and puppies
Rolling Stones Rock Tumbler
Barbie pet grooming center
American Girl husky dog
a Beanie Baby
American Girl clothes
American Girl “Kit” books
Midsummer’s Eve poster

Days left til student teaching:  4
How much I am ready for this:  Hahaha.  Ha.

Departure May 14, 2009

On the Thursday afternoon we got back from silent retreat, Julie and I were standing in the checkout line at Rainbow Grocery when she got a call from her supervisor.  I stood idly examining things on the shelves until Julie kicked me and mouthed “Sarah just got laid off.”  She went outside to talk on the phone and I finished buying the groceries before going out to find out what the heck had happened.  She told me that six of our coworkers had been laid off on Wednesday—Sarah the only attorney, along with our receptionist, office manager, communications coordinator, development director, and asylum paralegal.  I called my supervisor when we got back to the apartment, and she took us out to dinner that night to talk things over with us.  We were basically in shock and couldn’t understand how anything could function with a third of the office gone.  (I still don’t have an answer for that.)

The whole experience distinctly reminded me of when my dad got laid off from Kodak in November 2001.  The aftermath of layoffs had lost its immediacy after all these years, and I’d forgotten just how much they suck.  It was hard going into work on Friday and seeing a couple of the people who’d lost their jobs, and knowing that I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to so many.  I’m starting to think that closure is a myth of modern life.  I don’t think the extent of the whole “economic downturn” thing had quite hit home for me until Thursday, either.  It reminds me that nothing is stable, that security is an illusion, that people’s worlds can change without a moment’s notice… that everything ends and that endings often come before we’re prepared for them.  The ideal, I think, is to spend my whole life saying goodbye—to spend it appreciating everything to the fullest extent possible and recognizing that each moment is totally inimitable and will never be lived again: to live in a constant state of arrival and departure.

“Tell me this is paradise, and not some place I fell.” January 23, 2009

Answer (to the previous post):

I am scared to death that I am wasting my life.

I’ve been over and over this, too. I can’t be wasting my life as long as I’m living every moment, appreciating every experience, and enjoying being alive as thoroughly as I can. The trouble is that sometimes that’s freaking hard to do. This week was a very long week, even though it was only a four-day work week. I was pestering lawyers to get back to me with statistics and scrambling to put them all together for one of our grants, and it was really, really tedious. I had a couple nights where I was up insanely late for no particular reason, and I was turning this “grad school vs. job” thing over and over and over in my head until I was just so sick of thinking about it, all I wanted was to turn off my brain. Tired of working, tired of thinking, tired of existing. I need something new.

“I want to feel the car crash
I want to feel it capsize
I want to feel the bomb drop, the earth stop ‘til I’m satisfied.

I want to feel the car crash
‘cause I’m dying on the inside
I want to let go and know that I’ll be alright, alright.

Just push me ‘til I have to fly
I’ve shed my skin, my scars
take me deep out past the lights
where nothing dims these stars,
nothing dims these stars,
stars…”

(Matt Nathanson)

The song was playing while I was typing and it just seemed to fit…everything. This year is a lot of me learning to cope with the tedium and monotony of the adult world, of 9-5 work days and paying the bills and not having all your friends within a mile of you, and I’m so, so scared of disappearing into the boredom. I don’t want to be bored with life. Still, I’m having to face the fact that we’re never genuinely free to do and be what we want. So much of what I want from life is beyond my control, and it’s really frustrating. There’s got to be a way to make life worthwhile, to find exhilaration in every single day and keep the numbness at bay. It has to be out there, and I’m going to find it, because the alternative isn’t something I’m willing to consider.

My First Chain Letter Post?* December 19, 2008

*(What do you call these things, anyway? I was under the impression they were called “memes,” but I looked it up and the definitions didn’t seem to match. Whatever. This is one of those things where people post their answers to some kind of survey or question and tag other people to do the same. Except that WordPress doesn’t have a people-tagging feature as far as I know, so I’m opting out of that part.)

I was tagged by my brother on Facebook, and since I don’t have any better ideas for posts right now, here you go.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 17 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 17 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I’m an information packrat.  I save EVERYTHING.

2. The four things I fear the most are being alone, failure, the unknown, and death, in that order.

3. I consider myself a feminist but sometimes I hate being female.

4. I do a halfway decent duck impression.

5. I am the most metatextually aware thinker that Zac knows, which I would argue is a fancy way of saying that I think too much, although that’s not really what he means by it.

6. I get motion sick really, really easily, which is unfortunate in a city as hilly as San Francisco.

7. I have kept a journal in various notebooks since the summer I turned 14, and I have not stopped writing on a regular basis (at least once a week) for seven years now. This adds up to a lot of paper.

8. I wish more people read this website, but not badly enough to open it to search engines. (Yet.)

9. I would often prefer to suffer and consequently resent the people around me, than to advocate for myself at the risk of inconveniencing them. I recognize that this is bad.

10. I acknowledge that I am weird, but at the same time I don’t like it when people feel the need to point it out constantly. Why state the obvious?

11. My favorite band for years was Counting Crows. I’m not sure what it is right now.

12. I have never been an extrovert and probably never will be. I am not exactly okay with this.

13. I was on the synchronized swim team in high school. There were no tryouts, so that doesn’t necessarily imply that I was good at it…

14. If I could have three wishes today, I would wish for teleportation, for the ability to fly, and for the ability to relive memories as my present self—both my memories and other people’s. An invention akin to the pensieve would do nicely.

15. The first cd I ever bought was the Newsies soundtrack.

16. I strive to embrace the hilarity of awkward moments, because otherwise I don’t know how I’d get through life.

17. I collect subways: I’ve been on/in ten so far. My favorite is the Rochester subway, purely because it’s abandoned. My second favorite is London.

---

So I’m leaving late Saturday night for good ol’ NYS, and I’m dreading the airplanes. Going home should be nice though. I’m looking forward to getting a haircut and seeing my friends and playing the piano. Work this week has been craaaazy. Oh my god. It felt like finals season all over again. I had to send out 215 non-holiday-specific “Happy holidays” cards to all our volunteers, which involved combing the four Walgreens within walking distance multiple times, culminating in my trip this afternoon to procure the one last card that I needed to send out. Every single card they had left said “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” on it. I was on the verge of wishing an attorney “Mazel Tov on your Bat Mitzvah” when at last I spotted a plain old thank-you card that was blank inside: mission accomplished. But seriously. I also had an article due today for the newsletter, and I had to send out individual emails to each law firm requesting the 2008 Clinic statistics for one of our grants, which I had completely forgotten about, plus I had to get my Americorps paperwork filled out before I left for vacation. But somehow I got it all done, with fifteen minutes to spare for drinks in the ED’s office at the end of the day.

Oh, and here, for your listening pleasure, is my most recent song obsession:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9Q4fsZ1IY

Update from A Laundromat September 7, 2008

…the name of which is, brilliantly, “A Laundromat.” It’s about two blocks from our apartment and costs about $5 to run a load of laundry… It’s not bad but it makes me appreciate living right across from the laundry in Village.

So! I’m getting the hang of my job. I’m making fewer stupid mistakes, and I’ve interviewed a whole bunch of people for debt collection and eviction, plus one vehicle towing case. I run my first clinic this coming Thursday. Tuesday we’re going to an EDC event after work where rumor has it I’ve been volunteered to tend bar(?), and Wednesday we’re holding a mixer for the pro bono attorneys and other people we work with. Looks like it’ll be a busy week.

I’m still getting used to this whole “40-hour work week” bit. People aren’t kidding; it really kills all your free time. I get home and I have to cook, or we have community night or spirituality night, or I have to do paperwork and make phone calls and run errands and do laundry. I barely have time to write anymore, and I’m still having trouble finding time to call people. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually, though—I mean, this is pretty much how my life is going to be until I retire, save grad school.

In other news, I’m finally not sick anymore! So that’s a huge improvement. I’m still looking for a cheap guitar on Craigslist because I decided that would be a fun thing to mess around with this year, and I’m still looking for a piano to play as well. I got a hold of someone from the music department at USF, but she said that they didn’t even have practice rooms for their music students and said I should try to convince the Jesuits to get some. So I’m going to look into other colleges around here. (Teresa and I want to get a piano for the apartment, but we don’t know how to carry it up two flights of stairs…) I’ve also vaguely started looking into grad schools to see about getting my teaching certification/masters. Being out of school is making me realize how much I really enjoy school and wouldn’t mind going back. I really like the idea of being a professor but I don’t know about the “getting my PhD” part of that plan—the thought of writing a dissertation kind of makes me want to stab myself in the eye. So I figured I’d like to get my adolescent ed. certification for English and Spanish, if I can do that at a reasonable cost in a reasonable amount of time. Right now I’m looking at programs at UB and Canisius, but I might expand that if I decide I feel like going somewhere else.