joblessgrad

“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.” -George Orwell 

I realize that I haven’t posted in a little over 20 days now. The reasoning for that was either I had been busy or I hadn’t really had anything to say. I wanted to be able to return with excitement, hope, joy, and/or humor; instead, I have a story that deals with a former posting I had up titled “The Tool.” In that entry I discussed a how my manager was being a massive tool and I also mentioned an odd happening where a coworker of mine wanted me to have sex with his wife. I told a few coworkers about it and let it be. I have been over it since it happened over a month ago. This past Saturday, one of my coworkers told one of the various managers at the hotel about it who, in turn, told my manager about it and I was told to fill out a report about it. I was kind of pissed off about the coworker telling them because it had all been said and done so there wasn’t much need for a report anymore. The crazy guy, Al, and I haven’t talked  since then.

Today I am supposed to work in a few hours, which is why I was surprised when I was called to come in at 10 am. I got to work around 11 and was asked to have a chat with my manager, the general manager, and the human resources woman. The entire concept of the meeting was to clarify the typed up recount of the incident. When asking me about it her questions were pointed and her voice was peaked, giving off the impression that I was the one at fault for everything that had happened. Nobody likes having bad things happen to them, but they sure as hell don’t like to be blamed for the same situation. Anyway I was forbidden to talk to anyone about it while at work or go anywhere near the laundry room. Also I was instructed to inform my manager if anyone asked me about the situation. So, naturally, I decided to write about it on here since every time something crazy at work happens it ends up on here to document the further issues I have there and my ever growing desire to quit.

So now I think I want to quit moreso than ever, which is odd because I only get this sensation the day or two before I get my hotel paycheck; however, I got my hotel paycheck this past Friday (the day before all this shit started). This week isn’t looking too promising for me. Until later, ciao.

“What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step toward something better.” -Wendell Phillips 

A week ago I went to a theme park with a few pals and it was an interesting time. I discovered that I am not the best with roller coasters, but at the same time I do enjoy carnival rides. The rides just don’t do it for me I guess. All the same, it was an amazing time and it got me to be adventurous. I enjoyed the people I was with, but for some reason all the people at the park had put me off. There were actors at the park trying to scare us and I made fun of them. One guy in a nazi uniform got in my face and tried scaring me so I claimed that he was coming on to me, which pissed him off something fierce. It was pretty damn funny.

 Halloween is a fantastic holiday. Someone once said to me that it is definitely a time for the sexually repressed and those that need an escape. I personally believe that everyone needs an escape, thus the need for Halloween. There was a time when I thought that people dressed as what they wanted to be, but now I find that many people don’t try as much and dress sexually. It’s not so bad, but it gets repetitive. This year I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to be. I kept switching costumes because I wasn’t satisfied. I almost didn’t leave the house. For some reason I feel as though that my time here has made me a bit of a hermit, too afraid to leave the house sometimes. A lot of days I don’t feel like leaving, but the other night the sky caught my eye. The moon was bright and the sky was full of clouds. The clouds, ideal, like the kind you see on wall paper depicting the daytime sky, only the shadows would show with the outline of light. They looked cold and upsetting, but it was ok. Another interesting thing is that  I have been rediscovering Pearl Jam as a band. It would seem that I enjoy them more than I originally thought.

“There is no such thing as inner peace, there is only nervousness and death.” -Fran Lebowitz 

I got a call a few days ago asking me to sub this upcoming Friday. I had no issue with it and was excited for it. Then, Sunday evening, was called to sub today. I accepted. I went today and had a fantastic time. I did the job and feel as if I accomplished all that was needed. Being in charge feels so natural for me. The people around enjoyed me and complimented me a lot. The only sad part was when I left the building to go to my other job at the hotel. In a half hour’s time I had gone from being my own boss to serving people caramel apples for tips, which I only made $2 worth of tips. It seems people would rather get damn wasted on free booze in a hotel than have some caramel apples. Before I even got to the hotel, my manager from the hotel called me to tell me that I am working tomorrow morning. He didn’t ask, he told me even though tomorrow is my day off. I couldn’t really say that I was busy because that would obviously be a lie. So I agreed to it. I had been on my feet all day, having hardly ate anything.

When I get home, with my meager $2 worth of tips, I find that the dinner I was promised wasn’t made. My dinner ended up being a minutes worth of grabbing chips and soda. There is this fascinating thing I find about people. Whenever you want to relax is when they need you the most. Another interesting fact is that whenever you know how to do something on a computer everyone assumes you are a computer wizard. Now I have taken courses that taught me photo editing, video editing, sound editing, web page design, web page creation, and web publishing. This means I know how to make material for the internet; however, it doesn’t mean I know how to fix a printer or figure out why two devices aren’t communicating with each other. Whenever I get home from work, whether I’ve been out for two hours or for 12 hours, as soon as I take that first bite of my dinner someone calls upon me for advice. More often than not I just want to be left alone to relax. Every now and again I want to go out, but not right after work. The strange part is that everyone gets upset if I tell them to let me be while I eat dinner. It’s like going against the ten commandments.

A strange irony seems to arise around me when concerning affairs of personal relationships. I’ve decided today that I wish to grow a little more detatched. I don’t mean this to be a depressive or cruel decision. Think of it as a sort of vacation from the burdens of a social life contain. I think I will sit at home, put my feet up, and watch some old silent movies. If not that, then after my next pay check I will go buy a camera or flip cam and drive until my gas tank is empty. When I get there I will be free. When I return is purely my decision. That sounds fun.

 “Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.” -Mies van der Rohe

Yesterday was kind of an interesting. I had the day off and realized that I hadn’t done much traveling around in my life and there are a few things that I want to see. There is this strange religious site north of where I live. It’s this cathedral on a hill that looks like a castle. Apparently they have a climbable 192 foot tall cathedral spire, that is based 30 feet above the highest point of the hill. Now the first two or three levels are carpeted, dry-walled, and windowed. That part is narrow, but easy. The next level is yellow brick, hard wood floors, and windows, which is still nice, but the stair well becomes a free hanging metal stairway. The level above that is all solid brick and there aren’t glass windows, but more of steel grates covering 30-foot-high, glasses windows. On the main floor of that are there are steal grates, but when above those, there are no more grates to cover the open air-way. The stairwell here is narrow and free hanging, it leads to a spiral staircase which leads to the top. The site was beautiful. I find an amazing thing about being high up. Getting up there is difficult, but the view is always amazing. It’s also amazing to get back on ground again and not be able to feel your legs. I’m not extremely religious, I just like church architecture. It always looks interesting.

I also found out yesterday that I am on a substitute list to teach, which means I can get called whenever to work. Today I was called during work and as it turns out I get a chance to substitute teach next week. I’m really excited and very nervous. The hardest part of it is that I will be subbing for Biology, which is not my favorite science-based subject, but I will survive.

 “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.” -William Shakespeare

So in the past days I’ve been lost in the dark, got paid, gave a few gifts, visited family, been potentially hit on, and got a few new things to entertain me. A few entries ago I wrote about a crazy coworker that asked me to bone his wife while he is out of town. Because of that guy, I have been avoiding the laundry area of the hotel like the plague. I had to keep going to the laundry area all week, and I thought I was fine, until Thursday when  I ran into him. He gets to talking to me. Now I don’t mind getting complimented from time to time, but sometimes there are compliments that are more awkward than anything. For example, anyone can tell you how nice your shirt looks and it’s fine, but it is more awkward for a dude to compliment you on your pants than it is for a girl to. This crazy guy tells me he likes me shirt and I tell him thanks. Then he tells me he likes my smile and I’m like alright. I got creeped out though when he told me he liked my face with this crazy, joker-like smile on his face. Needless to say I was a little put off.

Later that night I got to drive out an hour to hang out with a new gal pal of mine and we went to a karaoke bar. It was great. I made everyone at the bar laugh because I sang the song “What the Hell Happened to Me?” by Adam Sandler almost exactly like the original recording. The following day I went to go see my brother and managed to pick up a soundtrack to one of my favorite videogames ever, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, while also picking up a bunch of comic books for my niece’s birthday. An interesting story was that when I was buying the CD and comics, the cashier told me that he had figurines from the video game as well and I told him, “That’s cool, but I have to draw the line somewhere if I ever want to get laid.” Also during the past five days I have been getting into this show called Baccano! on Hulu so today I went out and bought the entire series on DVD. So now I have three quarters of the series and the other should arrive in the mail in a few days.

“A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I find the interesting thing with the bosses I have had is that all of them, excluding my current boss, have been kind as well as done the task of training me. My current boss is different than all the rest in several ways. For starters, he is the same age as me, which doesn’t make me respect his experience. He also is half a foot shorter than me and, if a line is drawn on his head, bears a striking resemblance to a phallus. Before training, he had me sign a sheet of paper that claims that he trained me. In actuality, he had five of my peers train me, which is ironic considering how all of them told me the same things and left out a lot of the same things. The only thing is I can’t say much to him about how little I respect him because I need the paycheck.

This past Friday I was working on a luncheon/class that was full of accountants. Apparently, whenever we have a luncheon/class we are supposed to put out their food along with a few pitchers of ice tea and milk. A customer asked me about if they were getting soda at all and I looked at their chart to figure out if they were supposed to get soda. The only training I got from my boss was specifically on reading these and it was a sentence long: “You’re gonna want to read this fuckin’ sheet very carefully to see what everyone need.” I had read their chart, there was no mention of drinks. On the phone today, he yelled at me for not giving the drinks and that I should read the chart more carefully; yet, on the same call he tells me that the drinks are complimentary, which means they weren’t on the chart. It seems that where I work, nobody is concerned with doing a job properly, but more concerned with making money. They are hardly even concerned with happy customers, unless of course it means they want their money back. I wouldn’t be so angry if he just said not to do it again and what not, but he made it very apparent that he was angry that he had to pay the people back for whatever I didn’t give them, which makes him a tool.

On the good side of the day, I finally got a call back from one of the districts I applied to. They gave me a tutoring position at a middle school. I am really excited and nervous about it, but that is all overshadowed by the fact of how angry  I am at my other boss. The tutoring position doesn’t have quite as many hours as I would like, but it gets me experience I want. I just wish that I had a way out of this damn hotel job. It would seem that I have a new project for me. I am going to work on how to find an inner peace after dealing with people from work. I want to try perhaps some form of Zen or meditation, but I don’t know exactly. I suppose video games and working out could suffice as well. We shall see. It’s all in theory right now.

“The crow, when traveling abroad, came back just as black.” -English Proverb 

I used to have this hope that when I lay my head down to sleep, I was actually waking in my real life, ending the easier to control dream that we all live in. Of course that was only a young boy’s hope. Sometimes dreams have this strange ability of seeming real and, eventually, becoming real in the waking world. This occurrence has happened to me before. Another strange phenomenon is with dreams is that the length of time spent sleeping doesn’t denote the length of time the dream will take. One could sleep all night and not have a dream while another could sleep for a half hour and have a dream that feels like a lifetime. Last night I managed to have a dream that dealt in both of those realms.

I got to bed sometime around four in the morning, knowing that today I will make a trip somewhere I haven’t been before. As soon as my eyes shut, I felt myself wake up to this morning, get in my car and drive. It seemed as though I drove all day, over all types of terrain, until the sun had started setting and I ended up in Chicago. I ended up in a part of the city that had a park nearby, with a hospital next to it and an apartment building across the street, kitty corner from the park. I got parked my car in the parking lot near the hospital and managed to get into an argument with a guy in the parking lot. I think he was trying to break into cars. After dealing with him for sometime he finally managed to get out of my hair and I got to looking for someone important to me. I walked into the hospital, or some sort of bakery that was inside or near the hospital entrance. In there I found this girl I used to know. A friend and crush from my past. Except we were several years older than we are today. We spent time together happily and talking over tea and coffee before leaving the shop/hospital into the night air. We were enjoying a nice nighttime stroll as the first flakes of snow dropped. There was happiness and then I woke up to realize it wasn’t real, despite how real it had felt. As it turns out I only slept four hours, but feel as fresh as a daisy.

Now I’m not sure what to do today. I have no work to do, no chores, nothing to really concern myself with. The impulsive side of me wants to drive all the way to Chicago just to see if this dream would come true, but I don’t even know where that place is and I don’t want to drive all the way to Chicago just because of a dream. We shall see what happens, but that would have been a good trip had it been real.

“Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.” -Phyllis McGinley 

After work, I went to the YMCA today. I did a few laps in the pool and then hung out in the hot tub. The people in there looked pretty friendly so I got to chatting with them. I was talking to a few of the older gentlemen there when this group of college swim team girls that had been practicing in the pool came into the tub. A lot of them were really nice to talk to, but as they came in a sudden inability to speak washed over everyone, creating an awkward air, especially when they started stretching. After the girls left, another beautiful woman came in. She and I got to talking and as it turned out she had been the lady I had spoken to about a month ago, applying to work at her building. It was a little awkward because I normally don’t expect to see anyone from work, or a place I hope to work, in less than a t-shirt and jeans.

After she left this nice couple, that was a little older than me, came in and we all got to talking. They made me feel better about my life situation. They are roughly three or four years older than myself, have been dating for several years, live in separate apartments, and have no intention of marrying any time soon, despite their great love for eachother. We all chatted about art, music, movies, and how everyone seems to be getting married. As we chatted it dawned on me how useless this “unified dream” everyone has of having the 2.3 children in white-picket-fence suburbia. It allows everyone to aspire to one concept, but it is a concept that allows one to feel old and boring. It isn’t for me, at least not yet. I want to live a little more still. With that in mind I have taken up a new project: I plan to finish reading all of Shakespeare’s works, starting with his poetry. I have already begun with “Venus and Adonis,” which seems to be pretty funny so far.

“ Oh Jesus Christ!” -Father John

One of my friends said that she believes that we are all endowed with some sort of super power. While it isn’t as interesting, or powerful, as those in comic books, we still have these abilities. They aren’t powers like being able to shoot lasers or anything like that, but stuff like able to with stand cold temperatures or what not. It would seem that my ability is that I attract crazy people to me. At work there is this guy I met in the laundry services section that I call Al. He doesn’t really speak English well, but tries to so I understand him and I try to speak Spanish so he understands me. Through it all we manage to get a good understanding of each other. When we first met he had the idea to try to set me up with one of the gals in the housekeeping department, which I pretended to be fine with because I figured it would never happen. He was trying to get me a girlfriend for some reason, but I ignored it. Now I normally don’t give out my number because I am afraid of people calling for no damn good reason, but since Al seemed like a good guy I let him have my number so we could watch a baseball game sometime.

I usually wake up two hours before work because it takes about a half hour drive and an hour for me to ease into the day. It may sound selfish, but if anything bothers me within that first hour of being awake I will be kind of bothered for the rest of the day. This morning was ideal: my shower was fantastic, I woke up feeling refreshed, my clothes were ready, and I read a book while I ate my breakfast. The weather outside was blowing the leaves quietly and then my phone rang. It wasn’t a number I had programmed into my phone. Turns out that it was Al from work telling me he found me a girl, which was kind of a funny morning phone call. He tells me all about this girl Debbie who sounds gorgeous. Mind you Al is speaking predominantly in Spanish, which takes all of my concentration to half understand, but my focus is on the book and not spilling my breakfast. While he is jabbering on I could have sworn he said that Debbie is his wife and that she wants a well endowed guy to bang her. Al told me that I should bang his wife while he was out of town and he is cool with it. I’m completely dumbfounded by this and before I can respond he asks me if I have a big you-know-what, which was the second time I had been asked that question this week. All this was said and done nine minutes before my morning hour was done. Crap

“Even if we can’t be happy, we must always be cheerful.” -Irving Kristol 

In the past four days life has gotten pretty interesting as well as somewhat fun. At work this past Saturday, a wedding occurred and I got to tell off that red headed guy  at work that keeps calling me Dawg. While working the wedding a little kid ran out in front of me as I turned to get food for the table she was at, which lead to her head butting me in the stomach. Most people I know, when contact is made with that region, normally wince and scrunch backward a little. Somehow the surprise of something being there, combined with my already quick paced, forward motion somehow allowed me to get hit and proceed onward, falling over the girl and onto my face. Even though the floor was carpeted, everyone managed to hear me fall and the room was silent. After work I noticed that this nice gal I work with was also leaving at the same time so I asked her to go get some ice cream with me. All I know is that she has one hell of a personality shift at work than in public because she kept talking about being a sexaholic. It was almost comical if it wasn’t so awkward.

The following day I had off and I used it to go to a nearby district to see if they had any openings. I am currently filling out their paper work in order to get some temp work for them. On top of that I visited my brother and his kids, something that I was long overdue for accomplishing. I had missed my nephew’s birthday last week and I wanted to make it up to him. Getting gifts for someone is a hard task, especially for me. New toys are always coming out and kids tend to buy into the fads, which doesn’t help because I figure that people don’t like the gifts I give them. In the end I got him a pair of walkie-talkies because I always wanted some and never had any. It turns out he really liked the gift, which made me very happy.

Today I worked and didn’t have too much trouble. There was a bit of trouble because a manager I had never met asked me for help and I wasn’t sure if I should help her because the hotel manual seems to give off the message work, make the customer happy, and if you question anything you will be fired. I also found out today that my friend Pat met a girl from class and she makes him happy, which is good. On the way home I stopped at the bank and got hit on by the teller that I usually talk to. That is always interesting. Tomorrow I should be traveling all over the lower portion of the state, getting information, applying to places, and meeting up with various friends. I hope it all goes well. Ciao.