July 9, 2026

Hi everyone I am so tired

My mother had a bit of a health scare last night (she's ok!) & I resultingly got terrible sleep last night & had my first-ever sleep paralysis this morning, in which i hallucinated my cat lying on top of me and also a stranger in my apartment. Might go take a nap before my shift but also I just put chickpeas in the oven so maybe not.

I made a list of things to talk about in June, so let's get into it:

1. Disappointment & the Job Market

I recently had an unintentional hit tweet about how my job was inundated with applicants to one (1) part-time posting. We all know the job market super mega sucks right now. I have a master's degree and have been unable to find full-time work in my field in the last, oh, 14 months. I love my job at the library, but I'm not really making a living there & my degree isn't in library sciences! I know I'm not the only person flailing in this sinking boat, but that doesn't make it suck any less.

In the end, the part-time job my library posted received 625 applications, which is simply mind-boggling. Our HR application system is not streamlined -- no one-click apply, no auto-fill with resume, none of that. To my knowledge, this was not posted on LinkedIn, though I think it did make Indeed. I'm sure a non-zero number of applicants are bots, but I fully believe most of them are real people. These days, I'm finding MLIS students and people who just want to work at the library around every corner. I love my job. I get it.

When we screen out applications from people who just want summer work, don't live locally, or whose applications are incomplete (remember, bad HR system), maybe it's a little more manageable. But then my managers spent three days interviewing candidates that they could only pick 2 of (one of my coworkers left after the application first opened).

I take a perverse comfort in knowing the number of applicants, because I'm sure a lot of the positions I've been applying for look similar behind-the-scenes. I appreciate having the evidence to cognitively reframe the job hunt as playing the lottery: I am gambling that someday I will get full-time work. Someday I might get lucky, but I'm more certain that I will always lose.

The optimism necessary for gambling has always depressed me.

On the Passing of my Grandfather

The circle of life comes for us all, right? He was 96 years old and we knew it was coming, he most of all. I spent the days following his passing reading a book he gave me -- Dave Barry's "Class Clown," which has magnificent sentences but I thought was overall just okay. At some point I intend to revisit Marianne Boruch's "The Figure Going Imaginary" -- the only book that has ever squidged me out (for its descriptions of cadaver dissections in a mortuary school) but prompts great reflection on the body and all it holds in its charged form.

My grandmother will be celebrating her 98th this weekend. As always, she has no intention of slowing down.

I'm so often thinking about the dynamics and ritual of maintaining family connections. I'm not quite sure what this arm of my family will look like when we're all left to each other.

Fruitcake Reading

I also read poems for nat raum's Fruitcake quarterly queer reading series. It was cool and fun. Everything I read was published by someone in Baltimore.

On the drive home from readings I usually talk to my partner about the readers and their pieces & am invigorated by the spirit of writing or whatever -- like I can really do it! As if I haven't been really doing it! this whole time. In the event other people have those feelings too, it just seems right to plug local. Shoutout BRUISER, fifth wheel press, Mason Jar Press, and Artists from Maryland, and shoutout the ppl there that told me about their own launching mags too.

Chickpeas are out of the oven now and I have to go rest or else. Maybe we'll chat media next time. Ask again later