the more things change the more craps stays the same
While one could assume that this would be the jumping off point for a long tirade one would be incorrect. It refers to the fact that today I saw Casino Royale for the second time, as I am a sucker for tough guys in nice suits. And while I saw it on the 1st day of a new year, the movie, and the casio happenings (which include craps,) stayed the same as when I had seen it way back in nov. of 2006. heavens to betsy, perhaps all those new years days hangovers were for nothing. though I mean you might as well mark time passing some way, and getting shisty and ordering pizza at 4am is a lot better way to do it than a lot of other things I can think off.
Like not ordering pizza at 4am. Which is what I did last night due to the fact I went home at 3:30am because there seemed to be a lack of pizza ordering happening at my friends house and I was hungry, tired, and drunk. So that trifecta of argh caused me to catch a ride home and heat up some left over chicken pot pie. Which was delicious. I heard that after I left pizza was ordered, so I am sad to have missed out on that, and I guess hanging out with my friends for another couple hours would have been allright too. Especially given the fact I could have witnessed derek dropping knowledge about how he was going to inject all kinds of MEN MEN MEN violence into chris's weekly road hockey game. Of course derek is only adept and visiting violence upon himself through stress, so his jokes would have led to hearty guffaws, but I was not there. I was busy getting phone calls at 4am that were either looking for a party, or lamenting the fact that I didn't attend one. I figure one good way to mark time passing would be to catalog your responses to phone calls. For instance last night my response to the phone calls of early new years day was to continue eating my chicken pot pie, in another time, though in the same place (my moms basement), my response to those calls would have been a lot different.
This trip home has been about more than differing responses to people, and their phone calls. It has been great to be around my family, because I miss them all the time, and around my friends, for similar missing scenarios. My time with my family has been great, Leslie visited for the first time in four years and her and my mom have so much fun together it is really great to see. The family news from this visit is that my dad will once again be returning to Pakistan to work. This makes me sad as I like it when my dad is in the same country as I am, but what can you do? Dude needs a job.
My sister's plans seem up in the air. That is one way in which me and my sister are very similar. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I am going to do after I am done my degree. This gives me something in common with a great number of my friends who have no fucking idea what the hell they are going to be doing sometime soon'ish. This is leading to a great deal of frowning, and pondering. I suppose that I will get a job and do it for a while and then go back to school. Is that how it is? I know, based on experience, that I do pretty much everything wrong so I have a hunch that this isn't how the future should be thought off. and if it is it should be called something other than "the future" like "the sigh" or the "while I guess that is what is going to happen, do you pay via direct deposit? cause I can't handle five day holds on month end cheques otherwise my post dated rent cheques will bounce."
This seems to me like a much more honest rendering of the future. At the risk of waxing nostalgic I am going to write the following few sentences, proceed at your own risk. I remember when I was a little kid my disposition was not what one would call sunny. Even given this fact I did feel that I was pretty good a reading books and talking and making jokes and being liked and caring about things and given this combination of skills and character traits I would be able to do something that made me while not necessarily happy, cause I don't think fat kids realy ever bank on happiness, it would at least make me feel interesting. And even as far back as finishing university, way back in April of 2002, I figured, though of course my analysis of my self and location had become more nuanced and blah blah blah, that things would kind of work towards the interesting end of the spectrum.
Nowadays I am not so sure. I guess i am just pretty fucking scared of spending my life doing jobs that pay well enough for me to get buy, go out to eat, every once and a while go somewhere nice to eat, maybe get a nice looking sport coat and a pair of pants, and in between my work, eating, shopping, and working on some kind of cause I care about like, oh you know, internet sites that don't make tieing a tie harder than it has to be, or social justice. And while doing all these things that I kind of like I will not be doing the interesting things that I once though I would do. It isn't like I have ever had some idealized notion of a workplace where everything was glorious and the agenda for every day involved initiating important progressive, or god forbid, revolutionary activities or praxis or something like that into my work, but I did figure I would inject something more than my early morning coffee fixed ass into a desk in the hope that at some point in the day something more interesting than my farside day calendars wacky take on the mess we call life would give me hope to keep on keepin on.
Up until this point I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do and why I wanted to do it. Now i have a good idea of why I want to do stuff, but I am pretty stuck as to options that will allow me to practice what I have preached in the past, and would like to continue to preach, even if it is only during trips to the "water cooler," which is a scenario I hoped to never actually use in conversation about the nuances of my day. I figured for a while I would do union stuff. But the possibillity of being burnt out by the time I am 30 due to working 50 to 70 hours a week isn't what I would call enticing. I guess I should probably not look for a vast array of fulfillment from my work, I could see about how thinking that work is going to make me at least something approaching content could be an issue of white male middle class entitlement, but the flip side of that sense of entitlement strikes me as really depressing.
So I guess perhaps the title that I didn't mean as a jumping off point for a long tirade was the beginning of what I had hoped to avoid. I just hope that the title, and my misguided feelings about the text it was initiating, doesn't share a lot in common with the beginning of my "future" days. I think perhaps a little sucking it up is in order. I mean the thing about work is that people do it, not machines, well at least if it isn't machine work, but if those things start thinking like people my problems will pale in comparison to scenarios that will resemble either terminator, or honey I shurnk the kids, or some mash of of those two cultural artifcats. No matter how shitty my job is It is work that I will be doing so I know that at the very least I will be able to take solice in imagined scenarios of painful demise for either coworkers I dislike, my employer, or scenarios in which both of those individuals are forced through a wind tunnel into each other at increasingly high velocities. See that is a pretty good scenario of painful demise, and I haven't even started my exciting new job. Theres nowhere but up from here, even if that up does have kind of a wind tunnel feel to it.
Like not ordering pizza at 4am. Which is what I did last night due to the fact I went home at 3:30am because there seemed to be a lack of pizza ordering happening at my friends house and I was hungry, tired, and drunk. So that trifecta of argh caused me to catch a ride home and heat up some left over chicken pot pie. Which was delicious. I heard that after I left pizza was ordered, so I am sad to have missed out on that, and I guess hanging out with my friends for another couple hours would have been allright too. Especially given the fact I could have witnessed derek dropping knowledge about how he was going to inject all kinds of MEN MEN MEN violence into chris's weekly road hockey game. Of course derek is only adept and visiting violence upon himself through stress, so his jokes would have led to hearty guffaws, but I was not there. I was busy getting phone calls at 4am that were either looking for a party, or lamenting the fact that I didn't attend one. I figure one good way to mark time passing would be to catalog your responses to phone calls. For instance last night my response to the phone calls of early new years day was to continue eating my chicken pot pie, in another time, though in the same place (my moms basement), my response to those calls would have been a lot different.
This trip home has been about more than differing responses to people, and their phone calls. It has been great to be around my family, because I miss them all the time, and around my friends, for similar missing scenarios. My time with my family has been great, Leslie visited for the first time in four years and her and my mom have so much fun together it is really great to see. The family news from this visit is that my dad will once again be returning to Pakistan to work. This makes me sad as I like it when my dad is in the same country as I am, but what can you do? Dude needs a job.
My sister's plans seem up in the air. That is one way in which me and my sister are very similar. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I am going to do after I am done my degree. This gives me something in common with a great number of my friends who have no fucking idea what the hell they are going to be doing sometime soon'ish. This is leading to a great deal of frowning, and pondering. I suppose that I will get a job and do it for a while and then go back to school. Is that how it is? I know, based on experience, that I do pretty much everything wrong so I have a hunch that this isn't how the future should be thought off. and if it is it should be called something other than "the future" like "the sigh" or the "while I guess that is what is going to happen, do you pay via direct deposit? cause I can't handle five day holds on month end cheques otherwise my post dated rent cheques will bounce."
This seems to me like a much more honest rendering of the future. At the risk of waxing nostalgic I am going to write the following few sentences, proceed at your own risk. I remember when I was a little kid my disposition was not what one would call sunny. Even given this fact I did feel that I was pretty good a reading books and talking and making jokes and being liked and caring about things and given this combination of skills and character traits I would be able to do something that made me while not necessarily happy, cause I don't think fat kids realy ever bank on happiness, it would at least make me feel interesting. And even as far back as finishing university, way back in April of 2002, I figured, though of course my analysis of my self and location had become more nuanced and blah blah blah, that things would kind of work towards the interesting end of the spectrum.
Nowadays I am not so sure. I guess i am just pretty fucking scared of spending my life doing jobs that pay well enough for me to get buy, go out to eat, every once and a while go somewhere nice to eat, maybe get a nice looking sport coat and a pair of pants, and in between my work, eating, shopping, and working on some kind of cause I care about like, oh you know, internet sites that don't make tieing a tie harder than it has to be, or social justice. And while doing all these things that I kind of like I will not be doing the interesting things that I once though I would do. It isn't like I have ever had some idealized notion of a workplace where everything was glorious and the agenda for every day involved initiating important progressive, or god forbid, revolutionary activities or praxis or something like that into my work, but I did figure I would inject something more than my early morning coffee fixed ass into a desk in the hope that at some point in the day something more interesting than my farside day calendars wacky take on the mess we call life would give me hope to keep on keepin on.
Up until this point I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do and why I wanted to do it. Now i have a good idea of why I want to do stuff, but I am pretty stuck as to options that will allow me to practice what I have preached in the past, and would like to continue to preach, even if it is only during trips to the "water cooler," which is a scenario I hoped to never actually use in conversation about the nuances of my day. I figured for a while I would do union stuff. But the possibillity of being burnt out by the time I am 30 due to working 50 to 70 hours a week isn't what I would call enticing. I guess I should probably not look for a vast array of fulfillment from my work, I could see about how thinking that work is going to make me at least something approaching content could be an issue of white male middle class entitlement, but the flip side of that sense of entitlement strikes me as really depressing.
So I guess perhaps the title that I didn't mean as a jumping off point for a long tirade was the beginning of what I had hoped to avoid. I just hope that the title, and my misguided feelings about the text it was initiating, doesn't share a lot in common with the beginning of my "future" days. I think perhaps a little sucking it up is in order. I mean the thing about work is that people do it, not machines, well at least if it isn't machine work, but if those things start thinking like people my problems will pale in comparison to scenarios that will resemble either terminator, or honey I shurnk the kids, or some mash of of those two cultural artifcats. No matter how shitty my job is It is work that I will be doing so I know that at the very least I will be able to take solice in imagined scenarios of painful demise for either coworkers I dislike, my employer, or scenarios in which both of those individuals are forced through a wind tunnel into each other at increasingly high velocities. See that is a pretty good scenario of painful demise, and I haven't even started my exciting new job. Theres nowhere but up from here, even if that up does have kind of a wind tunnel feel to it.