Ramblings: Ramblings of a Now Employed (But Still Kinda Lazy) Dude

My last update was July 8. I got hired by my current employer on July 10. That shit definitely isn't a coincidence.

About a year and a half ago I wrote a meandering, directionless little piece called Ramblings of an Unemployed Lazy Dude. The opus, if you will, contained a hodge-podge of verbs and nouns that I cobbled together by repeatedly mashing my palms into my keyboard. Verbs and nouns only. I went back to read it and I'm pretty sure the whole thing is made up of just verbs and nouns. It's been a while since I've been in school so I can't be 100% sure there. Parts of speech? Pfffft. It's all just there to trick you anyway, right?

I remember writing it and feeling dumb because everyone I knew had real goals and real ambitions. And even after 89 years of college I still had no plans. I thankfully got dragged into someone else's plans. That makes it sound bad but it really isn't. Here, I'll talk about it:

Let's start at the end! Chronology is for losers. I've been working at my current job as an associate metallurgical engineer for three months now. Now believe me when I say this, that is three straight months of an anxiety attack taking its sweet fucking time to calm itself down. Every day it gets a little better, and right now I'm pretty comfortable at my job, but I'll be damned if I don't still wake up in the mornings wondering how the hell I ended up working at a testing laboratory in Illinois. It's still weird to me. But my anxiety is the subject of a future blog entry, perhaps one entitled "Ramblings of an Oh God Help I Can't Handle It Anymore *Grits Teeth* The Walls Are Closing In On Me *Hyperventilates* I Lost All The Feeling In My Limbs, Everything Is Meaningless and God Isn't Real and Damnit I Just DID The Dishes."

So let's go back the end of college, May 2011. Erika gets accepted into a teaching internship in Chicago, which is great. We were likely going to live together wherever she ended up for her internship, but the other choices were Lansing, Detroit, or Grand Rapids. Blech on all accounts. Chicago it is. My life path from at least the beginning of September to the end of the next May was already officially decided. That makes it easier! I'll just go back to my menial deli job for the summer to make some more money and then start searching for engineering jobs in the Chicago area until I get one. Piece of cake!

The next part of my life constitutes the DARK AGES. Does this mean I burned all my blasphemous science books? MAYBE! But Ray Bradbury taught us the temperature at which books burn and that's too fucking hot, so no thanks to that. Here the DARK AGES (which is stupid so I'll stop calling it that) refer to the months upon months of applying to non-materials-related engineering jobs that I barely qualified for, applying to mindless office jobs I was overqualified for, applying to non-paying volunteer positions that would at least get me out of the house on a regular basis, and overall just spending the majority of my life not getting dressed and clicking around on my laptop until I went to bed again. If I were making money this is obviously the life I would love to pursue, but I wasn't making money so it was instead, in fact, bullshit.

I'm already boring myself writing about this. To make a long story short, a recruiter found me. Yeah, that's right, I stumbled my way into employment blindly. Through no skill or effort of my own I was able to hoist myself out of 14 months of joblessness. If there's anything in this life that I truly failed at it was learning to be a productive unemployed person.

So I have a job now, but I am still lazy. And that is why I haven't updated in three months. Hopefully that will change, but now that I'm nearly as busy as I was when I was a student I'm going to have to try a lot harder to park myself in front of a computer and write regularly. You can help by giving my positive encouragement. Or even negative encouragement. Attention of any kind, really.

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