Your life is what your mind makes.

So I don't get any comments here. I don't know if I have any readers, either. Yet I write anyway. It's good for me to write, as it's continued practice. In my former life I tried to write interesting and informative blogs for my company. Now I try to write interesting and informative blogs for me and maybe a few other people. I was reading that maybe by 2,500 I might get a subscription.

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time being rejected. It was as if all the people who were wandering around with the decisions all called each other and said something to the effect of, "Let's go after that American girl and decline her application ALL AT ONCE!" It was a humbling experience. One declined me an hour after I put my application in. I tried unpacking boxes, cleaning dishes, and poorly constructing, taking apart, and reconstructing an Ikea bookshelf. Finally, I gave up and took the dog out.

It was then that the phone rang. Both phones, actually. In my irritation I decided not to drag along the mobile as it hadn't rung in days. I come back to blinking messages, neither of which I can fully understand save for, "We'd like to invite you to interview!" After attempting to dial the number three different ways I reached the person who called, and ended my day scheduling an interview (pending any offers of course) for next week.

It's at this point that I wonder why, even though I should be happy that I've short listed again, I'm so mad about the rejections still. I have good Twitter friends, which is odd but there is society for you, who drop all sorts of wonderful advice now and again. One told me, indirectly, a Buddist quote, "Your like is what your mind makes."

I had heard that quote before, actually read it, a long time ago when I worked in a book store. The joy of a post-college, post-move job is that you don't go for the spectacular ones, and I'd always wanted to work in a book store. So I lied saying I was staying for months upon months, and before I knew it I had an apron and all the books I could sneak to the back to read.

There were two managers - a lady and a guy. The lady was a long time employee who really enjoyed her work, the guy a cast off of some wealthy middle eastern man who decided to go back to his country and abandon his family. Every day there was a new story about how he had to sell his things so his mother and sister could eat, to which I wanted to reply, "Why, then, don't you apply to better paying jobs?" But I never did. He was in mourning for his old life and he had to go through it. All I did was listen.

At the time I was going through my religions phase. I had been raised Catholic, but my major was all about the Pagans (something about the Romans not really converting to Christianity straight away), and I had never taken the time with Eastern religions. So I grabbed "The Complete Idiots Guide to Buddhism" and went to the back with my sandwich at lunch time. One of the sections started off with the quote, "Your life is what your mind makes," to which I attempted for the rest of the half hour to make the back store room into a beach. This all was destroyed, of course, when the guy manager came bursting in letting me know my break ended 15 minutes ago and he had to sell his car stereo because his mom was dying of cancer.

I never finished the book, as I moved before then, but it's funny how things come back to you. In the middle of all this lost control I get a tweet reminding me that how I see the world is how the world will see me. My life is what my mind makes. If I embrace the rejection then it opens me more to rejection, rather than the acceptance that those jobs were not the right jobs for me. So I'm working on it. Yes, there will be days I get smacked around a bit, but then it's not the right time nor place for me within those worlds. All I need to do is say thanks and move on. There is a place for me, and that place is a positive one.