7 posts from September 2009

I remember back in the day “about three years ago” when digital storage was expensive and hard to come by. Now it seems like everyone offers as much storage as you want. That’s cool and all but this morning I opened my Google account and half way through reading my e-mail I noticed that I had 1300 messages in my inbox! Holy crap I don’t even know 1300 people? Heh, I remember the old days when your incoming massages were kicked back because your inbox was full. Unlimited storage seems to have made me real lazy. Now if you will excuse me I need to get back to deleing “stuff”.

Great! I spend three hours in the li-berry each morning going over everything that needs to be turned in that day. Yesterday, I noticed a guy who looked sick enough to be placed in quarantine sitting in one of the cubes. He hacked and wheezed for a few hours then left. Today, just as I was about to sign off guess who drags in here and sits in the same spot. That’s right, Mr. Wheezy. I love it when people feel they HAVE to be somewhere when they are sick instead of being home getting better. I’m not talking about a little cough or the sniffles. I am talking about full blown flesh eating virus sick. Maybe that’s how people kick nasty colds? They just go to work/school and infect everyone around them with the plague and eventually there are more bugs on everyone else so they start feeling better. Nice! I think I’ll stop off at Safeway on the way home and buy a few packages of Lysol wipes. Does Lysol make a disposable hasmat suit?    

I am a people watcher. I see everything. My attention span is about 11 seconds so if you are sitting next to me and you are a loud talker, I will eventually tune in on your conversation. I don’t do it intentionally but most of the time I can’t help it because they are practically talking right next to my head. That being said, I think this campus is a whole different level of crazy compared to De Anza. I was sitting in a common area and a girl I tend to see a lot was talking to a friend about how she likes being a pirate and if she could be a pirate all the time it would be really cool but hard to find a job. She then goes in to gritty detail about how and why she broke up with her boyfriend even though the sex was “amazing”. Hmm. She seemed to have blurted this out all in the span of about three sentences and only one breath. The guy she was talking to just had an argument with his “partner” the night before which resulted in him getting punched in the eye. WOW, seems like someone needs to move. He went on to say that the rent was cheap and the “partner” was talked to by the police so it was all good. Later I hear pirate girl talking to an instructor she knows and the loudest thing that comes out of her mouth is “If you think I’m crazy in class you should see me in real life!” Watching her is almost better than watching an old COPS rerun. Yesterday I was waiting for a class to start and some girl sitting about 30 feet away got a call from a friend who apparently needed to know her complete sexual history. So this girl proceeds to blab off a list of about 40 guys she had recently been with and what she did with each of them and their short comings “no pun intended”. I couldn’t believe my ears. The only word that came to mind during that 10 minute conversation was WHORE. I’m no prude but this girl couldn’t have been more than 19 years old and had already outclassed any sailor I have ever known. Hearing that conversation made me want to do two things, wash my hands 20 times and go tell her to NEVER have kids. When she hung up, she then put on some IPod ear buds in and started listening to hip hop that was so loud I could hear perfectly clear from where I was sitting which was about 30 feet away. This girl is a walking double whammy, deaf and slutty. I try not to listen to them but they make it so hard not to. I know it’s a free country and we are allowed to do what we want but some times people should keep their inner crazy inside. I had the same problem at De Anza but I don’t recall any people talking about such colorful things as sex and piracy. OK, maybe piracy but in California that word means something completely different.   

Here starts another week at Clark. Last week was OK I guess. I kinda had a bit of a bumpy start but I think I am starting to get the hang of my new space. Outside of school, my Jeep decided to start giving me problems. I either need to fix it myself of suck it up and have someone fix it for me. Automotive repairs are NOT in the budget so I may just do it myself. I had the water pump replaced before I came up here because it was squeaking like one of the bearings was failing. Up until last week it had been running fine but now the new pump is making the same noise. It’s not really bad right now but it can only go down hill from here. Once a bearing decides to be lazy and not work it will eventually give out. The fix shouldn’t be very expensive other than the fact that the one in there is less than six months old. Jeff’s shop would have replaced it in a second but I don’t live in the Bay Area any more and his shop isn’t big enough to handle warranty type work out of state. I guess I can’t complain because he only charged me half the normal price on all the work I had done there because I was a faithful customer and on a student budget. I was thinking I could just buy a $300.00 car and drive it in to the ground but the new water pump would only cost $50.00 to buy. I guess I’ll hold off on buying a hoopty until something major goes out.

WOW, every day the thought of actually getting through school is looking more and more like a pipe dream. I feel SO stupid right now. I have only been going to this class for three days and I already got my ass kicked by my own language. Here I thought I was bad at math. Heh, math is easy. I should probably just put a stop to this aggravation and go back to hating my job and paying the bills. Thank god I blew out my savings to figure this out.  

                                   What's your favorite Beatles song? Bonus points if you share it with us.

 

               "Black Bird" It was the favorite of a friend of mine who passed away. When ever I hear it, I think of her. 

Blackbird

What’s the hardest part about looking for a new job?
Sponsored by Monster.

 

The worst part about looking for a new job is the interviews. I feel like I’m 8 years old and telling a stranger “Look at me, I’m this many. I can dance. I like the color green. I can breathe under water. I don’t like pickles” etcetera, etcetera. It’s almost like a puppet show. I like the old days when all I had to say was

1) I am never late to work.

2) I can learn just about anything the first time and if I can’t I will have taken notes to help me learn the first time.

3) I am never sick.

4) I like to earn my pay so there is no such thing as idle time, there is always something to do.

Usually those four points would leave an employer partially stunned and me with a job. Now a days you can’t get a job as a fry cook unless you first have a complete phone screening, complete back ground and credit check followed by a 36 hour interview by a minimum of 9 interviewers all of which are not allowed to ask any thing they really want to ask you due to legal reasons.

 

Sheesh, all I want to do is work.   

These past few days have been on and off. Saturday I went to the “beach” with my brother and his family. We live a few hours from the real beach but since the Columbia River has tons of little coves covered with sand, the locals call it the beach. I kinda didn’t want to go because it was supposed to be in the 90’s and I really didn’t feel like standing/sitting in the direct sun all day but I went any way. It wasn’t as hot as they predicted and the water wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be so I ended up having a pretty fun day. It was interesting watching a combination of speed boats and huge barges go up and down the river and it was also pretty fun playing with Hayden and Carson. They are still kind of sketchy when it comes to playing in water that’s over their knees but we still had a good time.

Sunday was a completely wasted day and I got noting done. I’ve seem to have gotten back in to the habit of not sleeping well at night which is bad. I did that for many years and it nearly did me in. School starts Monday and I can’t wait. Things need to get moving and back on track. One of the things that has been keeping me awake at night is the fact that I am 42, living off of my rapidly dwindling savings and starting something REALLY different as well as REALLY hard. I keep stressing about money and the possibility of failing to reach my goal due to a combination of finances, my age and being able to find work after graduating and graduating period. I think getting back in to the swing of classes will get my thoughts strait and give me another direction to point my walnut of a brain. The sooner I get all of this schoolin behind me the sooner I will finally get to see what’s on the other end of this path I am walking on. I need to keep thinking this is like my time in the military. I remember my first days of basic training and at the time it was freakin hot and I was sweating uncontrollably, I was away from home, it was the middle of the night, I didn’t know anyone, I was doing pushups next to my bed with some psycho yelling obscenities at the back of my head and I was about ready to pass outs but I stuck it out and ended up graduating at the top of my class. Looking back at that now I think it’s funny and seemed such a short time in my life. I was able to deal with the hardships and move on. Just like they tell you in the military “when things get bad you suck it up and drive on”. I know there will be a time when I can look back in this and laugh at my insecurities but right now they suck. I know all this but I still regress every once and a while and end up tossing and turning all night instead of telling “the squirrels” to leave my thoughts alone so I can snooze.

On a good note, I am still losing weight. The last two weeks I have only lost a pound total but it’s still a loss. I am currently at 280.4 so hopefully by this coming Monday I will have broken in to the 270’s range for the first time in about 8 years and that sure would be a good thing to start off school with.

I always try to use a spell check before I post anything even though I shouldn’t rely on Windows spell checker to tell me if I wrote something incorrectly or not. Every time I use it I catch Kevin’s Beverly Hillbillies English words like freakin, learnin, woot or whoo hoo and wonder if I should just taint the Windows dictionary and add them or just keep ignoring the popup?