Nonna's house looks like crap. It makes me feel like crap. That and the fact I have such a hard time communicating with some of our tennants makes it feel even worse. I scrapped all the paint off in order to paint it, and then I could not afford to paint it. I am embarassed.

This is the kind of journal entry I promised myself I would not have after last June.

So those of you that know me, know that I am almost never depressed. At least I had never been unitl last spring. I thought I would get over it but it seems to be getting worse the more money I owe. I know what it is about, but I don't know how to change anything. I just want a full-time job with health benefits doing something I paid all that money to go to school for and am good at. I also want it to be in Buffalo, instead of California. Maybe it is too much to ask for.

I know I am developing some really horrible depression because I am shutting everyone out and inventing all this extra work for myself that is increasingly more complicated to complete in order to prove to myself that I am in fact capabable of doing everything. The tasks get increasingly more time consuming and complicated the more depressed I get. It takes my mind off the fact that I feel like a total failure. Maybe I should just drink beer like everyone else.

Because I didn't get that job at Canisius, I am in such a bad place in Buffalo. I am reminded of it everyday. Worst of all I let down my best buddies. I need to just give up my dream of being a full-time professor in my home town. I am faced with the decision of giving up my career goals and moving on or giving up my hometown. I am not willing to wait until I am 45 to start a full-time job. I am sure I am not ever going to get a full time teaching position job at UB as I graduated from there and they seem to be moving more toward film anyways. Canisius probably won't have another job for a long time, and they didn't want me anyway.

My hopes were so destroyed followed the events of last spring. I still have no idea what made me the wrong canidiate for the position. It made it so bad that most of the people in charge of making the decisions could not even understand what it is I do. I felt I had proven myself with years of dedicated work but that amounted to nothing. I didn't have a history in industry but what does that really amount to. Especially in digital media arts, I think my teaching history combined with my work and stellar academic record made up for it. Moreover, industry experience certainly doesn't necessarily make someone a qualified teacher. I have witnessed that first hand.

The sitution made me hate school at UB because I saw it as such a huge burden of time and money with no return. That's the real reason I haven't completed my thesis. Had I got the job, everything would have been in on time, but I hated to look at it. It represented everything that defeated me.

Everytime I look at it, it reminds me of the crushing feeling of owing $80,000 and having no real hope of ever getting out of debt with becomming the person I never wanted to be. I have two useless degrees. One in German language and this new Master in Fine Arts. The second one I only chose because it fit my career goal and I was prompted by my employer. It was supposed to be the useful degree that wasn't just about learning for the sake of learning.

After the situation someone at work told me that in the future I should be more friendly with the other faculty. I was never very unfriendly though. It kind of made me feel weird. Like was it that I didn't go to their Christmas parties and invite them to my house. I should have just gone and brought terry or matthew. I was jist afraid that would ruin my career. How much worse could it have gotten.

So what triggered this now. Today I learned the new professor does not do game development. It Probably does't seem so significant but it makes me feel really weird about the whole process. Could the job description have been any more explicit about their interest in game and real-time 3d. For a while I thought maybe I didn't have enough experience with real-time modeling (I have lots of experince with real-time modeling and texturing) and that some of my work was too "rendered." Guess that wasn't the case.

I also I got an email that they are thinking of starting a masters program. To bad I just spent $50,000 on one in order to try and get the job that never panned out. Now there is talk of some other full time lab director job. I just can't tell if it is for real or if it is that same memo I got almost every semester since I started there back in 2001 telling me that soon there would be full-time work and many even benefits. I just want a full-time job with beneifts doing something I don't feel morally opposed to. Sometimes I think they make it up to get me to stick around.

If it doesn't work out I am going to try something totally new without computers. Maybe I will go back to basics and just get some meaningless unskilled job until I die.

I am so glad I saved this message form that day [inlink]paul,3328[/inlink]. I love my parents even if I don't see them enough. I know they were so dissapointed.