The Unemployment Chronicles: Part 1 of Hopefully 1

My last blog post was just over a month ago now, back when my time after graduation was no different from a typical college student's winter break.  During that time I didn't really have much to complain about, my friends were around, I was giving myself an intentional reprieve from doing anything constructive, and as far as I was concerned I was succeeding in what I wanted to do.  We found ourselves having some good times, a lot of video games were played, a few football games and there was even a trip to the city to have some drinks with a friend who has moved away!  There are minimal complaints about my pretend vacation, but the thing about vacations is that unless it involves the Titanic, they don't last forever.  And thus a great portion of my friends moved back to their schools and I was left basically home alone to start my new life as a grown-up.

I'm sorry, once you became the 2nd highest grossing movie ever.  You lost the right for any joke to be "too soon."

 Being a grown-up is almost exactly like being a 12 year old again in my situation.  You have no money, you can't go out and hang out with your friends all the time (I don't have a car), you spend most of your days watching TV and playing video games and the only thing you are really looking forward to is baseball season.  I quickly realized that this was going to get old quickly and started shipping my resume around to places that seemed they would be interesting in hiring someone with an extraordinary academic record leading up to receiving their B.S. in Mathematics, which is a smaller subset of companies than you would be led to believe.  For the record, receiving the physical copy of my diploma has probably been one of the most underwhelming moments of my life, my first thought was to make a paper airplane from it, but it eventually found its place in a frame on my wall like everyone else's.  All frustrated hostility aside, my resume started to make its rounds at places all over the country.  In the half-month or so I have received calls, e-mails or some form of interest from places in Massachusetts, Florida and North Carolina, one of which was an on site interview in which at the time it seemed like there was a genuine interest in myself.  So, there is reason to believe I have a nice and desirable education, but I have not quite found an opportunity to take the next step.

Mine never even got to wear a hat!

Meanwhile, to kill time all day I have found myself getting enthralled in such productive endeavors as Batman: Arkham City, FIFA 12, Netflix and playing with my dogs in addition to searching for new and exciting ways to keep in touch with my friends.  Now please excuse me for a minute while I attempt to think of something interesting and new to say about any one of these things.

Despite such a great motivating speech from Special Agent Dale Cooper from the show Twin Peaks, I still am searching for something interesting...

Almost onto something here...

That's it!  I can talk about my new found love for B-movies.  I am pretty sure everyone on earth who sees that clip from John Carpenter's They Live will agree that it is completely awesome, and I would also recommend anybody to watch From Dusk Till Dawn as I found that to be one of the most entertaining movies I have ever seen, and Toninho strongly agrees with my tastes in both movies.  But now lets move on back to slightly more important matters in my life.

I spent last week back at my school apartment (by way of train for all you smart asses who were remembering my admission to not having a car) because Wednesday was the school's career fair.  I think the career fair went well but to tell you the truth it was really nothing worth discussing at this point.  The rest of the week was nice though, after weeks of barely seeing anybody outside of my family it was a very good thing to be around people my age again and maintain my social skills.  Over the course of the week I spent a lot of downtime with my housemates playing video games and watching TV, being a normal college student again (without the classwork of course).  My visit also happened to correspond to my graduating class's "100 Days Party" so not only was I able to find the opportunity to see a lot of the friends I spent a lot of time with over the course of college, I was also able to run into many people I probably would not have seen otherwise.  The party itself was pretty good, but not spectacular.  People drank, people danced, my friend claimed to have found the perfect girl for me but couldn't introduce us because we "both have ADD" and couldn't find the both of us simultaneously, I woke up hung over with half of the house a complete mess.  Typical Friday night.

Pretty much

So now I am back at home after this week trying to kick this job search thing into second gear.  I'll try to write more often about things happening in my life so I don't keep bringing these ridiculously long periodic catch ups, and also because another hobby wouldn't hurt.  I'll see you then, but I guess I also need to give the prerequisite Happy Valentines Day to the blogosphere given the time.

I could have not conjured a more silly image.

Oh yeah, and if you would like to hire me, comment below and we can talk. (Don't pretend shameless self-promotion can't ever work)

My Current State of Affairs

Hello all!  It has been a while since I have last written about almost anything, so I guess now is as good a time as ever to just write about what is going on in my life.  The calendar just turned over to November, and it's becoming that very special time in the college student's life where they start to not care as much about their classes as they probably should.  I can only speculate as to the reasons why I feel like this, one of the reasons is probably the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday (which I have already weighed in my opinions on before), but it can also be due to the fact that most students have been at school for around 10 weeks already this semester, and that is a fair amount of time to be burnt out.  In my case this year, it may be due to the dangerous ailment known as senioritis.

I still love Hand Turkeys!

My senioritis is lying itself on especially thick because this is my last semester of college, in a little more than a month I will be a college graduate, and just like every other grown-up out there.  It is actually a little scary in general, I enjoy being a child and I don't feel like a lot of the things I do on a daily basis work very well with the working adult schedule.  But instead of just regurgitating what has been said before, I will just link to my buddy Toninho's article where he basically covers all that needs to be said.  More importantly than my whiny little tangent there is that I have yet to know what I am going to do once I become a so-called adult.  I have never really had a lot of ambitions growing up, and I've rarely had an answer when people asked me what
I wanted to be when I grew up.  In general, I made math my college major because I felt that I wasn't old enough to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and since I was talented at math I would just do that and it is an open enough subject that I would probably be able to jump into anything with it.  Well, four years later I nearly have my math degree, and I was mistaken when I thought that companies would be excited to find someone with a math background, they mostly think that I know how to program.  Having said that I have found myself stumbling upon what seems to be a very exciting path in life, at the career fair at school I happened to talk to a consulting firm that was very interested in hiring math majors and other problem solvers!  It was very exciting and I even had an interview with them last week!  Hopefully I will hear back from them soon and it will be a positive response, but if not I think I'll manage to come out okay.

Aww shit!  I could have just learned math from this picture!

While waiting to hear back about the job I've found that I have come across two new addictions (well, one is just a renewed addiction.)  The first is that I have found myself watching a lot of Spongebob Squarepants again, I love cartoons and some cartoons just transcend age and continue to be funny and entertaining no matter how old you are, among the ranks of these cartoons are Spongebob, Doug (obviously on those two), Hey Arnold, and Rocko's Modern Life, while the middle two are still good because they spread positive messages in fairly well-told stories to children, the latter two are the finest examples I have ever seen of a show for all ages.  Both shows are capable of hiding little pieces of adult humor seamlessly into their episodes and you wouldn't even know the difference as a child.  Take for example, the episode "Karate Choppers" from the first season of Spongebob.  When I watched it a month or two ago I remembered it as being exactly what it seems to be at face value, a story about Spongebob and Sandy doing karate with each other.  But now that I am more mature, I watched the episode and was surprised to find that the entire episode is a slightly veiled euphemism for sex, I won't go into how it is, you can watch the episode yourself.  But for now you can help yourself to seeing how much subtlety Rocko's Modern Life lacked.

As for my other new addiction, it comes to me directly from Toninho.  For a long while he has been urging me to play Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I have never found the time or a copy to play with, but recently I was able to borrow it from another friend of mine, and it is almost life changing.  Up until this point as far as comic book characters go, I have primarily been a Spider-man fan, and have had a moderate respect for the Batman, particularly from his movies (especially the one from the 60s!).  But I have found that not only is Batman: Arkham Asylum (and it's sequel Batman: Arkham City) a great game, but it also does a great job of giving in-depth descriptions of nearly all of Batman's most powerful villains.  I think that is my favorite part of the game, finding all of the information on the villains of Gotham City and being able to learn about the true story of the Batman.  Playing through the game, I have found that although the Joker is the most popular villain and probably is the most interesting, my favorite one is the Scarecrow.  It is likely that my taste for him comes from the parts he is featured in in Arkham
 


Another big thing that has happened in my life was that my second oldest brother (I have two older brothers) just recently bought a house with his girlfriend and they moved in and bought a puppy!  I am very happy for him, but it does do something to point out a lot how much I am different from my brothers.  They have both stayed around the area where we grew up, for school, for work, and now for living, but as I was getting to earlier, I have no idea where in the world I am going to be in a couple months, it is really weird.  They have also both been in long term relationships (one is married) and then you look at me, its not that I am unbearable to look at (on the other hand, maybe it is) but I haven't had a whole lot of luck with women in recent days.  It is probably been for lack of trying, it has been some time since I have really shown an interest in anybody in particular, and I don't know if its my problem or that of everyone else, so I'm gonna go ahead and blame it on everybody else.  All I have to do is continue to be the great catch that I am and someone will come fishing for it.  Well, I figure that is about enough to talk about for today, hopefully I will be able to blog again more often and maybe even come up with some more good ideas.  So I'll catch you all later.

Get off my property you damn kids!