There are some days that lend themselves well to good cries. I get very caught up in the trivial and find myself completely freaked out about the meaning of it all. What am I doing all of this for? Do I have what it takes to be a grown-ass adult with real-life responsibilities. I am starting to understand how people get caught up in customer service jobs they hate. It is scary to think about having real responsibility. It is scary to try. What if I fail? What if I go into debt and never find a job? I spend so much time putting myself out there, allowing myself to fail that sometimes, the failure really starts to sting. It is scary to quit customer service, as much as I hate it. I am severing a tie with a part of my life that has been instrumental in my survival and growth that I never want to be involved with again. It is like a bad break up. The goal in quitting the bank is that I never have to work in customer service again. The never part is exciting and terrifying.
With my newfound time I have some really exciting opportunities. First, I have an internship with a local bike advocacy non-profit. My responsibility is to develop an entire program dedicated to recognizing and promoting bike friendly business in order to incentivize bike friendly business. Once I'm finished with my research and recommendations I am to start reassessing how to promote business and corporate membership; which if done well could really do a lot to promote bike culture and fund my advocacy group so that they can do more to invigorate the community spirit around the ideas we are working towards. THIS is the meaningful work that I'm taking the chances I am to be a part of. If only it were paid experience.
I have one more paper to write in the next two weeks. This paper is going to be the paper that helps my program advisor decide if he is going to allow me an independent study to work on a thesis on the topic. On the topic of multimodal transportation in the great Denver area, I could do some incredibly meaningful research and work, integrating BikeDenver's work that could facilitate some great opportunities for Grad school and employment. Everything I do these days is calculated and planned. I do not write a paper on a topic that is unrelated to what I want to do. It is meaningless for me to write about an arbitrary topic like the history of the polio vaccine when I could be using my research time to look into topics that coincide with my Graduate studies and eventually career. But there is a bit of experience in learning new and random things that I miss out on with my cold calculated approach.
I will be okay but after feeling as on edge and stressed as I have been this week, going out tonight would have been a fiasco for me. Though not having a car can be very freeing most of the time, trying to get home from SOBO at night can be stressful and that kind of stress seemed over the top with everything else I'm dealing with tonight.
On a totally random note, if you look at the second story of the Tattered Cover on 16th and Wynkoop you will see an elaborate entrance on the second story. This was because there used to be a streetcar viaduct that went over the river and into the highlands and so the second floor was a one time the main entrance. Looking at photos of the viaduct makes me think of the Seattle highway 99 viaduct. Though there are not any building entrances that would be affected by the Seattle viaduct coming down, the area underneath the Denver viaduct looks like it was just as sketchy as the Seattle viaduct currently is.
On a totally other random note, the Union station market idea was a much bette idea than the Union Station hotel idea; however, this is because the market was suppose to look a lot like Pike Place and Pike Place is possibly my favorite place in the whole world. How it would have translated in a repurposed Denver train station is another story. My 2014 birthday wish is to stay in the Union Station Hotel.
Denver is an incredibly exciting place to be right now. I feel like I have so much emotion and advocacy wrapped up here that it would be a shame to start over somewhere else. But the idea of us buying a place here scares the hell out me. I have an unresolved wanderlust that seems to be calming a bit with age but has not gone away. And what if I settle somewhere when there are so many other places to consider settling. I have choice paralysis when it comes to choosing a place. But I have a love for this place that runs very deep. It would be easy to stay here and maybe that is what scares me the most.
Only time and many more run on sentences will tell.
