This should cover some "brief" background

I'm 27, I still live at home with my rents and brother. I have made some pretty poor financial desicions that I am still (literally) paying for to this day. So moving out into an apartment anywhere near Baltimore is impossible. The whole state of MD is grossly inflated. I worked in retail for about ten years before I started the job that I am working now. I do HR work for a temp service. I basically hate the job but it pays well and the steady schedule allows me time to do the volunteer work that I like to do. I currently only have one steady volunteer gig, I help at a teen girl's halfway house. The girls all have or have had some sort of emotional instability. I go in for an hour a week and help do an art project. It is usually more on the crafty side but the girls seem to have fun and they open up when we come in. I am in my last class to finish my BS degree. I take a 4 hour drawing for non-art majors course. I thought I graduated last May. I applied for graduation, was accepted, walked the stage, had an awesome graduation party... then no diploma arrived. After almost 4 months I made a call and they said "syke, you didn't graduate!" So here after I "graduated", got a big girl job, and was happy that I was through with school, I am now taking a 4 hour course. It is pretty much horrible but it is almost done. I am not very good at drawing. I like the artsy stuff I do at the house but an actual drawing class is torture. I do NOT excell at my many attempts at still lifes.

Relationship wise I have only had two boyfriends but they were both long term relationships. This is more or less the only time in my life that I have been single. It has a few good aspects like not having to run what I do by someone. Not asking permission but having to check someone else's schedule before I even plan to watch a movie. Then again I am a pretty affectionate person so not having someone around can be kind of lonely. I was with my first bf for almost 8 years. I was too young and stupid to have had a relationship like that. We were engaged after 9 months, the whole relationship was a rollercoaster of wedding planning, delaying it, saving money, buying things, and all of this without ever setting a wedding date. It is a bullet I am glad I dodged. We were never in passionate love. At least I wasn't. I think it was a matter of comfort and what I mistaked for cold feet was a blatant sign to get out sooner. My 2nd bf was almost immediately after the first relationship ended. It was with my best friend whom I worked with at the time. He was 6 years younger than me but we enjoed so many of the same things in terms of music, movies, and social activities. My first bf acted as though he was 80, he never went out, hated to go to the movies, and never went to concerts bc the albums are always better. In the end the age difference did us in though. As I was getting my "grown up" job and talking about moving out I guess he felt the pressure of me wanting to get married. Which I didn't, not yet at least. I don't want to get married until I am out of debt or at least really close. I would never think of putting my financial burden on someone else. Money troubles can be a huge pressure in a marriage and I don't want to start out like that. So he broke up with me, he also may or may not have been cheating on me towards the end. So I find that I am more upset (or was) over the second relationship ending. I was relieved when the first one ended. It was so easy to move on b/c that had essentially been dead for years.

Hobbies... I love to read, dance, watch and study film, go to concerts, and I do enjoy select TV shows. I am a loyal fan to the end if I do like a show.

Sorry for the novel but I never know what to leave out.

welcome to my ramblings

this is my first post so guess first i would like to say hello and thank you for joining me on what i hope will be a learning experience. i would love to hear any input from anyone who actually reads this.

the reason that i decided to start a blog was because i just turned 27 and my life is nowhere near what i thought it would be at this point. what i thought i could do is basically use this platform to journal my thoughts and experiences and hopefully get some (helpful) feedback.

i have found that being a twenty something female is extremely difficult. i want the career, i want the relationship, i want the great group of friends, i want to have the things i want to have, i want to give back to those that don't have as much as i do, i want a good education, i want to experience life, i want to travel, i want to feel comfortable in my own home. so many of the desires that i have are contradictory. as a woman of the 3rd wave feminist movement i am told that i can have it all. i should be able to be young longer but should be able to enjoy a level of independence that even my own mother didn't have.

i would like to think that i don't have any regrets but in fact some of the mistakes i made in my early twenties are going to haunt me for such a long time. i will get into more about that later but long story short i am in D-E-B-T! i have been trying to juggle an enjoyable existance while slowly but surely trying to keep my credit score from plummetting. i am more or less completely disgusted with my current way of life and want to change almost every aspect. so i will be tackling my debt with full force. For the next year i am vowing to skrimp and save so I can make a considerable dent in this debt.

i would also like to work on dating many many people and not getting so emotionally invested in someone after just one or two dates. i have been in two long term relationships and have never dated around. i am taking this time to meet lots of people and discover what characteristics i want in a man.

one of my other goals is to be a neater, organized person. i am so scatter brained at times that i am not surprised that i have failed in the other areas. this should be the easiest to do as well. i have two bedrooms and they are both a mess. i need to purge all of my unnecessary stuff and either trash it or sell it. i think if i work on being a more organized person in general the other pieces will fall into place. **fingers crossed**

sorry for this lengthy rambling. i will from now on be posting explainations on how i got to this point, my daily goals, my long term goals, and just my other thoughts on life.

~The Divine Miss J