From April 7-9, Naja Tau's Dream Diary: Back to School, the second dream diary, will be available to download for FREE for Amazon's Kindle!
And it's available for purchase right now for $2.99!
This eBook is a collection of blog posts that came right after the first diary ended in about 2013. The posts go until mid to late 2016.
I did a marathon read through this collection of posts, and I think this dream diary is finally ready to go. I've been editing this thing off and on for 6 years. I don't know when I'll be ready to put this out on paperback, but I feel comfortable releasing it as an eBook that I can go in and change whenever I feel like.
If you decide to read it, just be forewarned: it's a strange eBook. It was a very interesting time in my life. I had a lot of wild takes. My psychosis had just started to come and go, and I wasn't diagnosed with anything yet let alone properly medicated back then.
I feel some sadness and some grief when I go back over these written memories from my 20s. I wish that I had continued my journey with physics.
I may have a master's degree now, but it's not in physics, and to say that I'm unhappy with my major and with the university I got it from is a gross understatement.
I ask myself how I got where I am now. I think I got impatient. I was too scared to go back to California after my illness worsened then improved, and I felt insecure about my intelligence, so I went for the easier path.
Now I'm looking for work in adjacent fields that don't require my master's degree, so it's probably not even that useful in my current job hunt. Certainly, no one is knocking on my door to see if I'm available because of it.
I recently took a class for something to do between jobs at my local community college, which is an amazing school, and one of the guys in the class said, "You shouldn't have a problem finding a job with a master's degree!" Unfortunately, I am having a problem. I am having quite a problem. But I've applied to less than 100 companies, and I see YouTube videos of people in this job market saying they've applied to 500, so there's that.
In a way, I'm kind of glad my degree isn't helping me, because I'd kind of like to see specialized, expensive, time-consuming degrees like mine... die. And I'd like to see people without degrees get good jobs just because they're decent, hard-working people who can figure things out. I'm just as capable or incapable of learning and doing a job now as I was when I was eighteen and didn't have all this education.
I went down a stupid, stupid road--both me as an individual making personal choices and me as a member of my society having to go down certain paths. The system I was in was ridiculous. I wasted so much time and money trying to get an education. It was fun sometimes, and it was my life, so I treasure it and am thankful for it, but I don't recommend doing what I did to anyone else.
What's going to happen to us as a nation if our young people can't afford to get an education while all the other nations offer it for free (and offer healthcare for free, so you don't have to marry a job, but can be free to innovate and get entrepreneurial)? We're going to fall behind everyone else if we don't educate our population--heck, not even just our young people. Our old people need to continually update their educations too. If there's anything I learned from this class, it's that ageism is really silly and I shouldn't indulge it in my mental life.
Then again, every time I go to the grocery store, there's this kid who can't be more than 20 who either shames me for the food I purchase or orders me around.
I bought two cans of ravioli, and they went down the conveyor belt and this kid picked them up to bag them and was like, "Tsk... Chef Boyardee..."
Hah!
Chef Boyardee... how immature... only babies eat Chef Boyardee...
But anyway--I do hope you'll add this eBook to your Kindle collection. Some of the dreams are quite fun!
