Why I Quit on the Job Search

I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.

As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.

Finished

I didn't sit there staring at the final poem or call a friend and tell them i was done. I didn't even post a message on social media. My 100 days of writing project became a private affair and when I finished I kept it to myself, but it was more than that. I had no feeling of relief or accomplishment. I was finished with this large project that I had poured myself into, and yet when I finished I had no feelings about it. I was done and that was it.

I had planned out the final poem for about a month. I had figured out what it would be about and was only waiting for day 100 so that I could write it. Which brings up the question of when is something written. Was this poem really the work of day 100 or was it from day 70? Is a poem written when it is put on paper or when the idea is conceived? I cannot give the answer to that, but if I had to I would say it is the latter. I do most of my writing in my head. Often times the act of putting fingers to keyboard is a final motion. The draft, first revision, and sometimes the second or third revision have already happened in my mind before my index finger makes that first keystroke.

The Best Game I Don't Want to Play

One of the first computer games I ever played was Sid Meier's Pirates, but I never beat the game. I've owned this game on no less than four separate occasions. It was given to me on a floppy disk and then when we owned a computer without a floppy drive I bought it on CD. After that I ended up buying a downloadable version on one of my laptops and finally I bought the iOS version for my iPAD. I've never stopped enjoying the game, but to me the game wasn't about finding the lost sister. It was about being a pirate and taking over the Caribbean for whatever country I was representing.

Now, 26 years after Pirates was first released there is a new pirate game and my feelings about it are much the same. I am talking about Assassin's Creed IV. I've played the game for a bit now and I should be deeper into it than the fifth chapter, but I don't want to play the actual game. I want to roam the Caribbean causing mischief and mayhem. I want to take down ships, improve my ship, and then take down bigger ships. I find the game extremely fun, but the main quest feels like a side adventure in the life of a pirate, and as of right now I've left it far behind me and have spent much more time pillaging and raiding the Spanish Main.

The hallmark of a truly great open world game is that it gives you the freedom to create your own game. All the times I've played Pirate my game was to take over the world. I turned it into a game of Risk with pirates and as of right now I am playing Assassin's Creed IV in much the same way. I don't know what will happen when I have the ship fully upgraded. I am sure I will finish the main quest. It hasn't gotten that intriguing but I am generally curious to see where it goes, and you have to play the main quest to unlock some of the better equipment in the game.

Some of my feeling about the main quest line might be that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed III immensely and the best innovation in that game was the combat. That is gone in IV and Edward Kenway plays much weaker than Conner. Conner flowed through combat and taking down large groups of enemies wasn't much of a challenge. There were more than a few times that my entire play session involved me running through the wilderness reenacting scenes from The Patriot.

I found the combat to be the best part of that game, and that is what I find lacking in IV. With all that being said I think I am going to enjoy IV more as a game. The navel battles and the joy of being a pirate are what make it fun. The Assassin's Creed part of the game feels like it is almost an afterthought, and I am ok with that, because like Sid Meier's Pirates years ago I don't need to even play the game to have fun playing the game.      

The Government Shutdown and the Dystopian Future

The current state of American politics is like something out of a science fiction novel, and not a particularly good one at that. I can almost see a down on his luck writer sitting in the SciFi Network offices pitching this story about how one day the United States government collapsed because they just couldn't get along anymore. The entire point of politics became too much about figuring out which side was more to blame than getting anything done and then nothing got done and before you knew it mountain lions were roaming the streets of Washington DC. In real life there is allegedly a mountain lion roaming the streets of DC.

This is a great symbol for the current state of things as the biggest aspect of the government shutdown so far is that national parks are closed. That means the government has deemed the Grand Canyon closed. Think about for a second. The Grand Canyon is closed. Bull fucking shit it is. The Grand Canyon is huge. private helicopters can still fly over it so people can see it and I am sure hikers could get past whatever flimsy barriers the government has put up. If they really wanted to close national parks they would fill in the Grand Canyon with concrete. Maybe put a strip mall on top of it. Tarp over the waterfall in Yosemite and put a cork in Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Now that is a real shutdown.

Braving Whole Foods

Whole Foods wasn't always the hip trendy hell hole that it is now. It once was called Fresh Fields and it sold all the organic foods and that type of thing but without being overpriced and pretentious. My mother used to like to shop at the Fresh Fields in Springfield for produce because you could find things there that you couldn't get anywhere else. They had star fruit and kiwis and mangos before they became vastly popular and could be found everywhere. They also had a wide variety of melons and other exotic fruits and vegetables. They were basically nothing like they are now. It was mostly the worlds largest produce section. They didn't have much else and definitely didn't have all the growler filling stations of food preparation stands. They were a small operation grocery store offering specialized food that was hard to find at other stores.

Then other gourmet stares started to pop up and they offered all of the produce plus other things. I remember the first time I went into a Harris Teeter I thought it was magical and then I went to a Ukrop's and eventually a Wegman's. Each experience was better than the last, and each store was offering more and more and going to them was more like an event than grocery shopping, and then Whole Foods took it to another level. Fresh Fields was re-branded and was now going to be the organic super store of everything wholesome that would make you and the world healthy, and people bought in. Saying something is organic is a quick an easy way to double the price of anything. Going to other gourmet grocery stores may feel like an event for the shoppers but Whole Foods actually tries to make it an event.

The Obligation

Sometimes I feel an obligation to write. Part of that is I enjoy writing and I have fallen out of the habit before. Even if you enjoy something it is easy to stop doing it. You just start doing other things and then sooner or later you find yourself only doing other things, and so I have to force myself to write at times in order to make sure I set apart a little bit of time each day to do something I truly enjoy. The other part of it is that I am working on something I've named, "100 day of writing," and now that I am over the halfway point I can say that I've run out of ideas. The poem I wrote today was actually about being out of ideas. As of right now it feels like I am trying to squeeze juice from the pulp and rind that is left over after a citrus fruit has been juiced.

The real thing I need is to do something. When I first started out with the 100 days of writing it was because my mind was full of ideas. Now I have emptied out those ideas, refilled it, and emptied it again. I also did a good amount of hiking and other activities early on, but after 50 days I've allowed myself to fall back into the routine of daily life. I get up, eat my Coco Puffs, go to work, eat lunch, sit around wasting time, eat dinner, and go to sleep. There is plenty to do around here and the main inspiration for this project was discontent at how this area rejects history and nature. How Norther Virginia is nothing but a bedroom community. That there is no here here.

Dark Fantasies and GTAV

Have you ever expressed to someone who is a close friend a thought you have? A momentary desire formed in anger or frustration from the dark recesses of your mind, and their reaction is to say that isn't normal or it is weird. First let's start with a little story so you know what my dark, evil thoughts look like.

It is a common thing in this area for parents to wait for their children to get home from school. They also do this in the morning but the arrival is more scattered so not as bad, because the morning largely depends on children getting ready. The parents that have been at home all day or are coming home in time to pick up their children aren't on any time crunch and therefor gather early and in mass. The worst part of this is because they are waiting for their children they believe laws don't apply to them and will park their cars at a stop sign. This is especially bad on roads where there isn't normally street parking and because these roads aren't made for street parking more of the road is taken up.