Conditional Love

I've been thinking about this the past two days. The notions of conditional versus unconditional love are complicated, when you think about it. The only unconditional love that is absolute is God's love for us. Sure we can say that we love someone unconditionally, but how true to form is that? Will we really be around when the going gets tough, I mean, reaaaaaaallly tough.

To expand on that, I guess I feel like people sometimes walk on the opposite side of the fence and, to a certain extent, tell it how it is. What ends up happening is that people put too many conditions on love. We ask questions like, "Would you still love me if I laughed like Fran Drescher?" "Nope!" Now, is that necessarily true? No, but on a slightly more serious note, what happens when the question becomes, "Would you still love me if I got in a horrible car accident and lost both of my legs and my ability to speak?" Well... would you? That's a tough question, Ryan had a point when he said that you probably couldn't accurately answer that question until it happened, but what about if you know that the answer is no? Can you still profess your love for that person knowing it's not unconditional? I suppose it's hard to answer the bigger question when you're going off of examples, but my point is that sometimes we get so caught up in asking, "Will you love me if..." That our relationship becomes more of a shell, with nothing inside. We create a set of conditions that make us comfortable and anything outside of that is mutually unsavory... we don't like it, we don't want it, we won't have it. We leave no room for the unexpected. Where's the chaos and the dirt? The bumps and bruises create dimension, add a little flare.

What are we so scared of?

New Year in February

Sooooo I haven't posted anything new because I haven't written anything new. Tragic, I know. With all of the resolutions people have been blogging about I realize I never blogged about mine, though I just like to call them goals, I feel like if I call them resolutions I won't keep them. Among the obvious and surefire goals (graduate from college, for example), I've also decided that I need to write more. I don't expect to be the next Maya Angelou, but before I die I want to publish SOMETHING and the only way to do that is to write until I've written something publishable.

I could probably even write a bit here and there at work, but alas I spend my days on monster.com, college job sites, and searching for publishing companies (to work for)... and reading all of the blogs I subscribe to, but let's not get into THAT obsession. I've come to the hard realization that I can't afford to go straight back to school. This creates a lot of new directions for me because if my path takes me down the road to becoming a professor, then there aren't really "entry level" positions I can take on in the meantime. You're either a professor or you're not. Jumping into any job in the educational field would certainly help, but that's not necessarily the only road I can go down.

I've been looking into publishing jobs hoping that I can jump into a company and do copy editing or another form of entry level editorial work and become a corporate worker bee. The more I read the more I find mistakes, or disconnects, or ways that, if tweaked, a story could be that much better. I think that if I can cultivate that, I'd like it even more than being the writer. I'd be able to work with people and read all day! Okay, so it's not THAT simple, and perhaps I won't always be reading something of interest, or even something with merit, but I'll be reading and reading and reading and that's exactly what I love.

The problem is that I was born on the wrong coast for book publishing (magazines and newspapers are, of course, a different story since there are locals and regionals everywhere). The best place for book publishing, especially for powerhouses like Penguin and Random House (which basically house almost all other, smaller and slightly less well known publishers), is New York, followed by Boston. That's quite a move. If I'm lucky I can get in with a smaller book publisher around here or get a job with any number of magazines. The economic state of this country has me a bit discouraged though, what a crap time to graduate college when there are no jobs. I'm going to Chapman's career office tomorrow to spruce up my resume and see if they can help me with a job search so fingers crossed!