The system is broken
It's been about 3 weeks since my assessments with Vocational Rehab. I haven't heard anything yet, and I'm starting to feel the renewed feelings of hope and purpose waning. I understand that they're going to move at the speed of government, but we need something, now. I tried a few more places and dropped off some more resumes, but my phone is still not ringing. It's starting to bother me, and I know it'll be difficult to get a hold of my case worker. She comes and goes between a few nearby cities so she isn't always in her Versailles office. I would like to know something about the status of anything. It would make me feel better to know that the gears are still turning, that the machinations are still in action. It gets depressing.
My gig with Wired Controller has gone kaput. The site itself has slowed to a crawl, the pieces I have submitted for publication seem to be getting ignored. The only things getting posted on the site now are his own series of “How to watch Starcraft 2” articles which have apparently given the site a massive wave of popularity on Redit. The guy also posted on his FB about a new site he started which is like Wired Controller but isn't restricted just to video games. He was looking for people to work for the site. I'm fairly certain that WiredController.com was the prototype, and now that he's seen the whole thing in action he can run the new one more effectively. This means getting rid of what he felt was dead weight from the first site, and since I didn't get an invitation to come to the new site (since obviously the old one has been left to die) it's clear that I am said dead weight and would prefer it if I didn't try to be on the new site.
I kind of figured this wasn't going to work out. He wanted two pieces a week and implied that the two pieces a week should be more than editorial type pieces even though they didn't have to be reviews. The problem is that he never got specific. I'm the product of the public educational system. I spent the better part of my life writing exactly what I was told to write. He was never very specific though he mentioned on more than one occasion that he was going to assign people to research and then write certain pieces, rough ideas for these pieces included Top 10 video games ever, top 10 villains, heroes, and whatever which would be researched and then voted on by the staff. He never did contact me about any of these specific pieces. I didn't really have too many ideas on my own and I seemed to have piss poor choices in games to review. I always ended up buying and trying to play games with 20+ hour play times which I couldn't bang through and review quickly. I guess that's what I get for trying.
I keep thinking about the fact that I'm not able to tattoo for a living. It gnaws at me like I've got a rat in my brain, driving me crazy. I feel like I let someone else win. I don't know whom, but I know it's someone that I didn't want to win. It really gets under my skin. I feel like I got cheated. I feel like I've been held from something that would have been absolutely perfect for me, somewhere I would have fit. It feels like I had something very good stolen from me before I could appreciate the value of it. It feels like when I was in high school. I was a target for the bullies until sophomore year when Harris and Klebold shot the shit out of Columbine High School. Thanks, guys. You wanted to change the world, and though you fell short, you made an impressive dent. After that year all the kids were afraid to mess with me as often. They used to steal from me all the time before that. I lost at least one CD player and countless pieces of supplies, including a super pricey graphing calculator and my fucking GYM SHOES. I wanted to tattoo more than I could have ever wanted to be a draftsman. My motivation for being a draftsman was largely money. I figured that it being an entry-level specialist post would grant me a foot in the door and I could work my way into a decent position with a company where I would at least be paid well. I could just put “real” me in a box for 40 hours a week, and bring him out on the weekends and during vacations. The real quest there was financial security. I figured if I could achieve that I could ignore having to be a “corporate casual” wearing asshole while I rode my motorcycle around on the weekends...or even to work on occasion. That never came to be and all the time and effort I had invested were for nothing. I radically shifted my personality and was willing to sell out just to have financial independence. I got burned. Not being able to tattoo for a living brings up those feelings all over again, but this time I get the truly bitter sting of disappointment because I feel like I could have been truly happy tattooing.
I wasn't trained by suffering through a pricey apprenticeship. For those of you who don't know, you have to be someone's bitch for roughly 3 years while you do nothing but clean the equipment and set up and tear down stations ad nauseam. And through this process of suffering and slavery you pay them in excess of $3,000. Ever since TLC started making tattooing an accepted part of the mainstream with their “Ink” spin-offs the collective sphincters of the tattoo community have clenched. It got even worse when they unveiled Tattoo School. Now the industry has taken on something akin to a modified Monroe Doctrine: “if it comes in it comes in on our terms”. As such they've carved their terms in stone and are adhering to them with the same fanatical determination. And the most important of these terms is the time-honored tradition of a 3-year apprenticeship in which the apprentice truly suffers for his art. They insist that it's so the aspiring tattooist can learn the all about blood-born pathogens and the proper sanitation procedures for stations and equipment. I can understand wanting a new tattooist to have a good understanding of those things, but three years of cleaning equipment and watching is too much. The real mentality at work behind all of that is “when I wanted to be a tattoo artist some asshole used me as a slave for 3 years while I forked over $3g's. I'm not going to be cheated out of the chance to do the same to someone else!” I said it before and I'll say it again, “It makes me feel like I've been ripped off, robbed, cheated”.
This whole series of events has conspired to really ruin my mood. I keep trying to follow my shrink's “thought process blocking” tricks, but its incredibly hard to be positive when everything you're dealing with is negative. I guess a plus side would be another small win-fall we got recently. My wife used to drive a '08 Scion XD. It was leased and we got fucked on the payments. She had loads of negative equity from a trade from her shitty '05 Chevy Cobalt and Toyota just shit in her face. She went to a Chrysler dealership and traded in her Scion, they bought her out of her lease. And she bought (no lease, these payments are to own the car free-and-clear) an '09 Dodge Journey. It isn't the peppiest thing in the world, but she's happy with it. Her monthly payments on it are $50+ less than the Scion, they took it with less than $600 negative equity from the Scion (taken care of in the down payment), and her insurance is $35 a month less, as well. The big win came when she canceled the warranties on the Scion. It was pro-rated and last week we got a check in the mail for over $1400. That's a big help for the bills, and I hope that Voc Rehab gets back to me before we run through that.
Again, I don't know how to end these things so...