I'm Back!

Please forgive me for the llleeennngggttthhhyyy absence. In case you are wondering, I am still following the pillars. It's just they've been at a standstill for a good while. But they are beginning to move again and I thought now would be a good time to resume blogging. So you can share in the exciting journey.

I'll see if I can bring everybody up to speed in an interesting way without skipping anything. It may take a couple of posts so bear with me.

Let's see... The last entry was in Sept 2009 right about the time I started working at JCPenney on a contract basis. It did finally get busier and I had consistent income and 40-hr weeks until the end of the year. It was not an awful place to work. (Can you tell I've been working on having a glass-is-half-full approach to life in my time away?) But it was incredibly "corporate" compared to where I had come from (an ad agency), and it was not particularly creative or challenging work. Though the position was billed as a "creative advertising writer," if you could Control C for copy and Control P for paste, you were in. I picked up a lot of catalog copy from past catalogs and plugged it into new ones. It paid well. That was about all it had going for it.

Call it the power of suggestion or possibly a suggestion from a higher power, but one day a billboard I passed regularly on the Tollway driving home from JCP, reading "Be a Peacemaker. Get a Masters in Dispute Resolution at SMU," leaped out at me. It sounded like the Beatitude "Blessed are the peacemakers." I hate to see people at odds with each other and am always playing devil's advocate when there's some kind of personal dispute. I like to get someone to see something from another's POV when they can't see past their own, and help bring about reconciliation. I could work for a corporation handling employee/employer or employee/employee disputes before they headed to court, or marital/familial disputes through churches. Getting folks of all kinds to kiss and make up seemed like a noble pursuit to me.

So I began to wonder if the billboard wasn't a sign from God - literally. I went to an informational class in late Sept. The whole concept was in keeping with my passions and talents - which I fully believe we are to take into account when determining if the pillars are actually beginning to move in a certain direction or if it's just us getting restless and bored during a season of waiting.

The info meeting and the application deadline were about 2 weeks apart, but I rounded up three willing references, sent off for and received my transcripts (which I hadn't laid eyes on in almost 2 decades) and filled out the lengthy application, just barely submitting everything on time. And then like a good little pillar-follower, I waited.

Within about a month, I received a letter saying (essentially) my final sorry-ass GPA from A&M (in the ballpark of 2.0 overall, and 2.7 for my major) didn't give them the warm fuzzies about my odds of successfully completing grad school. Though I had 22 years of continuous employment (at only 3 employers which is darn near unheard of these days), had been a positively contributing member of society and had made a nice career for myself, they apparently got all hung up on the F's I got freshman year in Algebra and 400-level Spanish and a few other slip-ups I attribute to the siren song called Fraternity Mixer. (Never mind I had placed out of my major's required 14 hours of language with my AP Spanish in HS and was taking the Spanish for "fun"!) They wanted me to take an entrance exam and some prerequisite classes before they would let me in.

Well, phooey.

At this point, I began to question if the pillar was moving or just me. The thought of studying for the entrance exam did not appeal to me in the slightest. Nor did I know where the $28k tuition they would demand for 18 months of classes would come from.

So I concluded I was the one moving and stopped.

And speaking of stopped, this seems like a good place to end this post for now. So I'll pick this back up in the next day or two. I know - pins and needles, pins and needles! But it gets good, so please come back.