Tweet? Squawk.
Posted: July 28, 2011 Filed under: complaint, grumblings | Tags: Twitter Leave a comment »Twitter confuses me. Who has that much worth saying? Who needs to communicate that frequently? I certainly don’t. It takes the jaws of life mangling an already frayed nerve to pull just one blog post out of me. All those words, so undervalued, so exposed, forced into an 140 character frame. Twitter does not speak to me.
Do former insomniacs dream of neglected sheep?
Posted: June 28, 2011 Filed under: grumblings, sleep | Tags: a, bed, I, need 1 Comment »It’s just past midnight and I’m still at work. This is a first. The exhaustion is beginning to set in. Random spurts of drooping eyelids, slower reactions, a serious could-give-a-shit attitude, the signs are all there. I haven’t felt this variety of tired since grad school. In college I romanticized this sleepless state, at least when I wasn’t using it as a crutch. It’s much easier to suppress your emotions when you can barely focus. I even had my own adopted mantras. “I’ve got the will to drive myself sleepless”, or “must not sleep, must warn others.” The second was just fun to say. It was the first that I tried time and wasted time again to live up to. Did you know many of the great and terrible disasters of the 20th century were at least in part brought on my exhaustion? Chernobyl? Guy fell asleep. Titanic? Slumped over a rudder or something (note: these may or not be true…See the comment above on my present attitude). I didn’t care though. If I could conquer sleep, then whatever else was bothering me would be dulled, forgotten, just before withering away to a bitter stump, nothing more than a benign polyp on a memory. But exhaustion, like any vice, has its own recoil, its own crash. Eventually, I had to sleep, sure, but what’s worse is I eventually had to wake up. To this day, anything that reminds me of the sound of an alarm clock causes an instant rush of fatigue to overtake me. It’s like a lazy nausea, a slow burning grip on everything between my knees and my eyes. It’s now 12:32am. When I wake up in a few hours, I will again know the true bliss of sleep because I’ll feel its absence as I swing my feet to the floor and nearly fall as I stand up. I know my reactions in this instance too well. There will be anger, bargaining, all the phases, but no acceptance, just resignation as I trudge right back to this office chair. I know sleep. I know its power and reach. I give up. Sleep, I love you.
Whooooa OH
Posted: April 13, 2011 Filed under: complaint, I really dislike Bon Jovi Leave a comment »When my radio clicked on at 7:31 this morning, a few tinny bars of Living On Prayer escaped before my hand slammed down to turn off the alarm. “…we’re half way there / WHOOOOA OH / LIVING ON A -” Slam, arm flop, groan. Besides from the instinctual reflex to turn off the alarm, this rude awakening led my first real thought of the day to be a consideration of how much money BJ has made on that song since it was released in 1987. This should be a sign that I have some condition, or am extremely jealousy (or both!).
I got bugs in my room.
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: grumblings, reminiscences Leave a comment »They had legs like spiders and jumped like grasshoppers. They hid in the corners of my Washington, DC bathroom and showed their tiny green faces only to scare the living hell of out of me. I assume no one told them my basement apartment was no longer a vacant storage closet. My only defense was a bit of duct tape on the end of a stick. Scary little fuckers they were. It was only a small indignity, but having to share my residence with such vile little creatures made me think twice before entering the bathroom. When I did take that leap (sadly, it was a daily inevitability), I always turned on the light first and gave the room a once over before actually stepping in. Perhaps it was the rust-tinged water collecting in the plastic tarp I’d taped to my ceiling to stop yellow muck from dripping on me while I sat on my toilet or the strange mold growing around the corners of my shower, but they’d taken a liking to the room and I think they viewed my presence as trespassing. Perhaps I remember it with more disgust than it actually caused me. Time does occasionally crowd out truth for the sake of a good story. All I know is that whenever I see something that even vaguely reminds of them, like the tiny green loop of loose carpet next to my shoe, I shudder.
By the way, I got a job.
Why so serious?
Posted: April 1, 2011 Filed under: eddie vedder's no better, random Leave a comment »A hearty sense of humor is invaluable. It can prevent your perspective from turning sour and brighten your day faster than pharmaceuticals (I’m actually just guessing on that one). I’m naturally inclined towards pessimism, so my sense of humor has strong competition in influencing how I experience the world. Still, as outlooks go, my default perspective tilts towards the bright side, even though there are times when I realize too late I’m being the serious dude in the room.
I was recently invited onto a friend’s music discussion e-mail list; new albums, revisiting old bands, concert listing shares – a why-I-love-the-xylophone sort of list. Today started out with a discussion of Pearl Jam, a band I was once a mega-fan of. After a few jabs in the their direction, I sheepishly offered some defense. A bit later in the thread, someone suggested bands should be judged by their legacy, a position I totally disagree with, so I said as much. My response wasn’t exactly a polemic, but it was at least a little pedantic. I could almost hear the awkward silence before the follow-up e-mails began having fun with the idea (like blaming Miles Davis for Kenny G). It reminded me of something Eddie Vedder said in Hype! about how everyone in Seattle had a great sense humor…so he obviously wasn’t from there. At some point in the e-mail thread, there was either a cue to take the legacy comment as a joke and it whizzed right by me, or everyone knew not to bother taking it seriously to begin with. Either way, I felt like as much of an outsider as that San Diego surfer who made it rich singing in Seattle. Nothing I can do but pay closer attention. Maybe one of these days I’ll get the joke the first time around.
Salary.
Posted: March 30, 2011 Filed under: hallmark wisdom Leave a comment »After college I lived in Washington, DC for about six months. Three of those months included a moderately intense work schedule. Two days at one part-time job, two more at another, and three days at an internship (corollary: there was a negative correlation relative to my clothes – the fancier I dressed, the less I was paid). I made very little money, but I made it work. Of the many smaller lessons I learned over these months about what it means to fend for yourself, the most notable is how I began to describe being “well-off”. It was a personal adage that, while not enlightened, provided perspective. It was this: Being comfortable financially means never having to worry about the price of food.
This came to mind after reading the origin of the word salary on Meriam-Webster’s site.
In ancient times, because salt wasn’t always easy to come by (and because it was a leading way to improve flavor even back then), Roman soldiers were given a sum of money – a salarium – with which to purchase salt.
Over time, salarium (from the Latin salarius, ‘of salt’) came to refer simply to money paid the soldiers, and then to monies paid to any official of the Roman Empire, and eventually to wages in general.
I can image Roman soldiers holding up ‘Will fight for flavor’ signs.
The little things.
Posted: March 29, 2011 Filed under: hallmark wisdom, odd jobs Leave a comment »It’s 30 minutes till my first temping shift in 4 months is up and I’ve done approximately 2 hours of work today. Even unemployment has some tangential benefits. In this case, I get to book the occasional overpaid temping shift that requires little more from me than the patience to sit quietly at a computer, listen to my music, and surf the web until 6pm. This is one of those too-good-to-be-true jobs. The vending machine has free drinks, they often buy us lunch, and I’m paid more for my time than I’ve ever made at any other job, all because I have some baseline level of HTML knowledge, none of which I am asked to employ. Fantastic!
The relative downsides are the shifts only come up quarterly and I am generally only assigned about a week of work. This is the third year I’ve worked for this company – not to be confused with three years of working for the company. Adding up all the time I’ve spent here and you might reach a month, maybe a month and a half. With these inflated paychecks arriving so infrequently, I’ve come to treat the job like an unexpected life bonus, as if I found a paycheck on the street with my name on it and a note instructing me to spend at least a quarter of the amount on something I’ve been lusting over; perhaps a new guitar pedal or my weight in pizza.
The job also acts as a personal reminder that pay does not always positively correlate with effort. It’s a quarterly prompt to not become discouraged when I finally get my non-profit or government job and my bi-weekly paychecks feel a little limp. For all that I earn sitting here, doing little more than keeping this chair from rolling away, I feel no sense of fulfillment. By ‘making a living’ we should mean what we do to keep feeling alive. Idealistic, absolutely, but I can live with that.
6pm. Time to go.
3/31/2011 UPDATE: Two days later I’m back at the same job and working all day. Serves me right for tempting fate.
A short note on energy.
Posted: March 20, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Comments OffIt’s just past noon. So far today, I’ve done some dishes, eaten a bowl of cereal, spoken to my parents on the phone, and finished watching the latest episode of Fringe. I plan on taking a shower, doing my laundry, perhaps recording some guitar tracks for this band, and then having dinner with a very, very, very pretty and talented artist. As a sum of its parts, it will be a moderately full day if judged on how much energy I’ll expend. When I fall asleep in 12 or so hours, the day will have made me about as tired as any normal day.
So why does a day sitting on my behind job searching (I call those days Tuesday and Thursday!) make me more tired than when I’ve done chores, taken the subway around town, and made some very loud, sloppy recordings? I’m sure I could find an actual reason for this in a physiology article somewhere, but instead I’ll go the reductive route (somewhere in there is a chemistry pun about ATP & energy, but it’s been too long for me to really remember how those redox reactions work).
The mental toll of applying for jobs is far weightier than the combined tasks of a normal day because you’re not just sitting on your butt filling in cover letters and mining job sites; you’re actively avoiding the thought that your efforts are futile. It’s the worst game of darts ever. Toss a ton of pointed letters out there and see what sticks. I think we’re far less capable of dealing with mental exhaustion than physical fatigue. Going into why would be even more reductive. This is an area I know nothing about. So I’ll stop there because the internet needs more people admitting that they don’t have the answers.
Names, faces, underage substance abuse.
Posted: March 20, 2011 Filed under: odd jobs Comments OffI spoke to approximately 1,000 people tonight. This may be a high estimate, but it’s certainly in the realm of possibility. The conversations, if I can call them that, more interactions, generally lasted about 15 seconds or so.
They all began with “Under 21?” or “IDs, please.” The show-goer responds by either handing me their ID or identifying as under 21. A great deal of ‘no meaning yes’ moments happen at this point, requiring general assumptions to be made. Hmm, baby face, ‘I <3 boobies’ t-shirt…yeah, under 21. Stubble or properly applied make-up with no hint that it came from Ricky’s, probably of legal drinking age. Over 21, you get a wristband. Under, an X on either hand. “Thank you, enjoy the show.” Repeat.
On my train ride home I began to recognize people from the show, only I was really just spotting like characteristics. Is that the woman with the Rogue streak of gray in her hair? Is that the dude with the cool jacket? I think her name was Marie…and so on. Each potential recognition diminished the mass of people I’d interacted with that night into an even hazier blur of names, faces, and potential underage substance abusers. Bluetip, one of my favorite bands, has a lyric that goes something like ‘I think there are only 50 people in the world who get repeated.” Tonight, and every other night I work the door at a concert, reinforces that idea in my mind. While it makes the larger mass of people out there even less interesting to me, it has an odd way of strengthening the bonds I hold with the people I know. Out of the many, these few are the unique ones who stand out, for whatever reason. Hear, hear to that.
Bellow, moan, and wheeze: the underemployed falls asleep on the keyboard. Types blog post in their sleep.
Posted: March 19, 2011 Filed under: BLS, grumblings Comments OffI have a fair amount of time on my hands. I say fair in the literal sense (definition 3 for Oxford Dictionary users) as in considerable though not outstanding. I spend a good deal of time writing cover letters, though never as much as I should. Being unemployed means every second I spend not writing cover letters is one moment closer to having no money. I say “no money” in the hyperbolic sense because I, like many baby boomer children, have gracious, generous, and, perhaps most importantly, prudent parents who would not leave me to go hungry or homeless. Indeed, consider another time in history when an unemployed 28 year old could winnow away their days of marginal liquidity by drinking beer and eating Herr’s Potato chips, while waiting for a positive response to any of the many cover letters they’ve sent out into the ether over the past days and weeks to come back with a truly positive response. Please consider it and then reconsider it, because I can’t think of any other time when a middle class, late bloomer such as myself could enjoy such luxury. Maybe I’m wrong; feasible, even likely!
But I’m not proud, far from it. I plan on paying back every penny I’ve borrowed and doubling down on my savings once I have a serious income. The national unemployment rate may be down from its 2009 high, but it’s still hovering around 9%, not including discouraged workers or the underemployed. My master’s degree? Fat lot of good that’s done besides get me more chances to be turned down.
The key is to stay positive. Remain focused. One day (some day), I will have a job. I will have financial security. I will have a reason to not find the lowest price tags in the super market. These will be good days, because if this round of unemployment has taught me anything, it’s to never disparage job security. In a capitalist society, money may not buy you happiness, but it certainly buys lunch. Right now, that sounds delectable.
