Self-Improvement, Part One

(This will be a series of short posts cataloging my attempts to turn my life around.)

Major Goals:
- Get a job by the end of the year (2009)
BONUS POINTS: Get a job by the time parents arrive in October
- Move in with Tom by the end of next year (2010)
BONUS POINTS: Be moved in (with Tom) and have a job at the new location by the end of next year
- Find the right career for me by the end of next year (2010)
BONUS POINTS: Enroll in classes or training needed for that career by the end of next year (2010)

Right now I have three major problems: not having a job, not living with Tom, not knowing what I want to do with my life.

The first one is fixable immediately. The second is more problematic since Tom does not want to leave Charleston yet and I don't want to live in Charleston. No offense to Charleston residents, but it's a bad job market at the moment and I'd rather live in a bigger city. Also, Tom doesn't want to stay in Charleston. What this means is basically, I need to wait for Tom to either leave or be willing to leave, OR move to Charleston regardless. It is unfortunate to tie one's fortunes so closely to another, but humans like to pair-bond so I just have to live with it.

The third problem is one that I could start working on immediately. It just doesn't seem as urgent to me as the first problem. This is likely that problem of cognition where people devalue the importance of a task just because the deadline is in the future. Humans didn't evolve to do extensive planning because the environment was either stable or unpredictable. It wasn't until humans took extensive control of their surroundings (creating cities and industry) that the future environment became predictable and even changeable. (Caveat: I am neither historian nor evolutionary biologist, so this is all conjecture on my part.) How I get around this problem of cognition will be in another self-improvement post, I suppose.