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!

Random Thoughts (I'm Not Tired Yet)

I should be asleep at this time, but I am not tired.  Working a full-time job on the summers is murder on your sleep schedule when you are in college, at least 75% of the year is spent in a situation where I would be able to consider midnight an early bedtime and 10am a typical waking time.  The last couple weeks since I've started working I have had to be in at work between 7am and 7:30am, this means waking up around 6:30ish and to get enough sleep to be functional on the next day I'll have to get to bed well before midnight and even 11pm seems like a late bedtime.  That brings us on back to our current time of 10:21pm, and my bedtime rapidly approaching.  The only problem is as you all can see is that it is Sunday night and I still live the college schedule on weekends.  This isn't a new problem as I have already stated it has been several weeks since I have been working this job, but the difference that makes me write about it tonight is the simple fact that Netflix is not working for me at this particular moment so I stumbled back upon this blog and realized it has been a really long time since I have contributed anything to it.

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To continue the monologue until I get tired enough to attempt to sleep I figure it would be nice to think back on my previous job at the local grocery store and see what I was able to take out of that.  I was a bagger or a sacker depending on what you wanted to call me on any given day, and I worked there for a solid 4 years at least, so let us examine how much different every year was for me.  The first year was by far the worst of it, I was a newbie (no0b) and I also couldn't drive so not only did I not work a lot of hours because of that, but I also had to get a ride to and from the store every time I did have to work a menial 3 hour shift.  To make matters more interesting that year was the only one that I worked with my brother, who had already worked there about a year and a half and he basically set my intentions at work as keeping to myself and doing my time.  This was terrible advice as I didn't really make any friends in the store and time goes by a lot slower when you are just alone with your own thoughts.  That first year really was unnecessary and only helped to accentuate what was at that time an awkward stage of my life.

Paper or Plastic  Mother Trucker?

Six months in found me a Senior in high school, and I was able to drive and my brother was gone from the picture.  This is around the time that I met my first good friend from the store, but not through the store itself, but rather from a mix of mutual friends and a shared journalism class in which I feel we became really good friends and still are to this day.  At this point things started to change for the better in my world, as not only did I now have a good friend to kill time with in the store but also through him and my overall change of attitude I became more outgoing and made the right friends to help me get by at work.  I started to have friendships with most of the people I would have to deal with on a regular shift, but I also found myself befriending the Assistant Managers and from that I was given some of the easier jobs and overall just made my life easier (Note: I did not make friends with them to make my life easier, it was just a side effect from them being good people).  Towards the end of my high school career I was good friends with a good portion of the people I worked with and even had a girl really flirting hard with me but I was eventually repelled by a friend of mine telling the story of she and one of his friends having "relations" by simply asking me if I have ever seen The Descent, when I eventually realized what he was getting at things changed and mostly stayed similar for the rest of year 2.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Break to a full year of college under my belt (nothing notable happened in that month I came back during the winter) and I returned as an elder in the store.  As an elder I pretty much had the right to abuse my friendships with the Assistants and I have always thought, girls are attracted to older men, so I felt I was a little bit of a novelty as the college student to the high school juniors and seniors (more on this later?).  So things became slightly different not only because of this but also because things always change over the course of a year, I was broke and needed money so I worked a considerable amount of hours more than I did when I was in high school, and I had friends who I hadn't seen in months so there was a lot of catching up and storytelling to do, and there were also a whole new wave of new employees I had yet to meet.  One of which was more or less my replacement as far as my in-store clique went, and I don't disagree at all, when I finally met him it turned out that we were very much alike, mostly that he was who I wanted to be when I was his age.  We went on to become friends and he was the man I had previously mentioned in a Project Yancey story (for the record I have more or less scrapped the idea of finishing Project Yancey :( ).  It was also a shame that my great friend who helped me open up in the store had since moved into the deli so I rarely saw him while working, but we would have times when we would have our breaks together, most notably the one where we ate an entire package of Hoodsie Ice Creams in 15 minutes.  This summer followed along in a similar vein as what I have already said, and included a night where I couldn't sleep and wrote about the summer in a J.D. Salinger-esque form, but I don't think that will be posted any time soon.  Since I figured I was going to be halfway through college by the time the next summer came along I wished all my friends the best wishes going forward as I would likely not see them much in the future.

I just learned Hoodsies are a regional thing

Fast-forward to the next summer and I was wrong.  After a little original ribbing from a few friends about how I wasn't supposed to be there anymore things went mostly back to normal.  This summer was once again quite different from my other spells at the store, and I worked a lot more morning shifts which is a completely different crowd as it is the adult workers rather than the teenage wasteland the store usually is at nights.  It was also different when I would work the nights because instead of going out of my way to become friendly with almost everyone in the store I tried to ignore the younger kids, although I would still take my time to make friends with all the attractive ladies in the store.  I was coming off a situation with my personal life which didn't pan out for one reason or another, so I was actually quite eager to throw myself back into the mix and that became the most of my interest.  As the older kids ended up banding together into a posse, we had our fun when we could even though I don't believe that I hung out with anybody outside the store save for a "retirement party" at a local Chinese restaurant/bar, when I noticed something that I still need to follow up on (and should soon).  I went all out to make sure that this time it would be my last hurrah, and even went as far as asking if I could get pictures from the security cameras as I walked out on my last day doing my traditional punch-out derobing (unbutton that shirt and put the tie hanging halfway out of your pocket).

Sorry, not clever enough

The next winter I had enough money to take an entire month off and manage to get through my spring semester, and I also grew a beard as another excuse to stay away (rules say no facial hair).  Even though it was not easy and I thought I would have to go back I ended up having my current job fall on me and I am very happy about it.  In retrospect, as much as the work was monotonous and I disliked it, I liked the people I met and I still make appearances to go in and catch up with those who remain at the store (there aren't many).  I also realized one other thing, I spent those last two summers almost exclusively flirting with girls, and unfortunately due to the fact I am in my own way a very shy guy, I didn't jump on opportunities that I am very sure were there and maybe this should be a lesson to me.  I have now killed over 40 minutes reminiscing over 4 years at a grocery store, and I am beginning to get tired enough to try to sleep.  I hope someone learned something of benefits in some way from my stories (maybe one day I will get more in depth with specific stories and moments and make a comedic screenplay or something... Not likely).  Goodnight folks.  

Sums it up!