Friends, Romans... and Zoidberg
Hey guys. Been gone a while. Didn't expect it to happen, but there it is, right?
Got a new job. Has some good parts. Has some bad parts that I wasn't expecting, but really should have seen coming.
I realized that I haven't been blogging here... but it's not out of a desire to not blog. The fact is, I've been blogging a ton. But it hasn't been here. Nerd Fitness, that other site, opened up a blogging section, and I've been talking about things like push ups and pull ups and doing things that hurt yet leave me feeling awesome.
It's also a blog about my life and the living of it. And I realize that I haven't been sharing that with you guys.
Totally my bad.
Fortunately, that's not a mistake I have to keep living with.
All right, so if I haven't already, I'm going to out myself as a lit nerd. Not a complete lit nerd - I don't have much of an appetite for the classics - but one who has done some reading. You know. For high school and stuff.
One of my favorite books was The Grapes of Wrath, by Steinbeck. It was a book with real grit, and it really put in my mind the struggles of the people in those days. You lose your hope in something, and you go out to try and find it again, and you think you have it. But you get to what you thought was a farm in California only to find that it was a dream. Hard reality sets in, and you're left not much better than when you started. You gaze outward, and as the flood waters rise you get ready to swim.
I've found myself in very much the same situation. I didn't know that I had idolized the job, but I had. And God has been kind to me - he has been chastising me, stripping me of the illusion that a new job was ever really a solution to me, to my problems.
Consider:
-I have been raised from $8 per hour to $11 per hour. Pretty sweet raise, on paper. That's not accounting for the taxes that are taken out from it, though. I lose about twenty percent to taxes, which means that I only get to keep about $8.80 of the hour's work. That's an eighty cent raise, combined with the added expense of gas. Not what I was hoping for.
-There is overtime attached to this job. That said, we're temps. We are paid out of a budget. Our supervisors are encouraged to not go over budget. Since overtime means getting paid 1.5x what you were making, they really don't want to pay us that. It means that the hours are structured in such a way that you can't get much overtime.
-That's not getting into the fact that there isn't a scheduled lunchtime in those hours, meaning that even if you do get scheduled for some overtime, you can't actually earn it because you've used up some time getting food in your stomach.
-And, on a personal note, I end up eating too early in the day, and getting back home too late. The Leangains protocol I'm following only allows an eight hour feeding window, and if all you bring is a salad and some walnuts, you end up in caloric restriction which is totally not good. I've lately been supplementing with fast food, and that has got to stop.
On the plus side, there's direct deposit, and my coworkers are really awesome. So there's that.
I've been working on some things, since I haven't been here. I decided that I don't like Convict Conditioning's pistol progression. I've changed that game up a bit. Now, I'm doing modified pistols and using the stairs in my home as a marker for progress. Amazingly, I'm down to just using a single step, and I can knock out a single set of five on each leg. I figure I'll use the Convict Conditioning progression scheme, and when I can do a master set with one step, I'll start over again with full pistol squats.
That's some Tsatsouline there. His understanding just makes too much sense to me to ignore it.
The time I've been gone has been spent just doing a lot of thinking. I've been working out some, of course - I'm back to half pull ups, and I'm doing close push ups again, even if it's only 2x10 for now - but honestly you guys? I think I'm just going to call this challenge a wash. Between my rehab, the life changes, and the complete and utter disregard for true discipline, I think it's safe to say that I have successfully failed: I have failed the challenge, but succeeded in restoring myself back to something like what I was at the outset.
So. I thought I'd leveled up my life, but at the end of it it seems that nothing has really changed. And I'm not willing to accept that.
I've been doing a lot of reading, about the nature of work and if you read between the lines of the latest reports, it only confirms something that I've believed ever since the recession started. The job market belongs to the employers. They control how many jobs are generated, what those jobs are, and what comes with them. We, with our college educations and our debts, have been trained to accept this as the status quo, as something that we have to accept.
And I'm thinking, honestly? Screw that.
God made me a writer. It's in me. My fingers ache for the keyboard, and the ideas pour out of me. I still need to work on writing that crappy novel, but I think that writing a crappy blog might be a great place to start.
Only thing is, I have no idea what to write about. My initial thought is to write something about being a writer and struggling to break through, documenting this experiment that I call following the dream. Only problem is, I want to write something that people would actually read.
So, what about you guys? What kind of blogs do you guys like to read?
Got a new job. Has some good parts. Has some bad parts that I wasn't expecting, but really should have seen coming.
I realized that I haven't been blogging here... but it's not out of a desire to not blog. The fact is, I've been blogging a ton. But it hasn't been here. Nerd Fitness, that other site, opened up a blogging section, and I've been talking about things like push ups and pull ups and doing things that hurt yet leave me feeling awesome.
It's also a blog about my life and the living of it. And I realize that I haven't been sharing that with you guys.
Totally my bad.
Fortunately, that's not a mistake I have to keep living with.
All right, so if I haven't already, I'm going to out myself as a lit nerd. Not a complete lit nerd - I don't have much of an appetite for the classics - but one who has done some reading. You know. For high school and stuff.
One of my favorite books was The Grapes of Wrath, by Steinbeck. It was a book with real grit, and it really put in my mind the struggles of the people in those days. You lose your hope in something, and you go out to try and find it again, and you think you have it. But you get to what you thought was a farm in California only to find that it was a dream. Hard reality sets in, and you're left not much better than when you started. You gaze outward, and as the flood waters rise you get ready to swim.
I've found myself in very much the same situation. I didn't know that I had idolized the job, but I had. And God has been kind to me - he has been chastising me, stripping me of the illusion that a new job was ever really a solution to me, to my problems.
Consider:
-I have been raised from $8 per hour to $11 per hour. Pretty sweet raise, on paper. That's not accounting for the taxes that are taken out from it, though. I lose about twenty percent to taxes, which means that I only get to keep about $8.80 of the hour's work. That's an eighty cent raise, combined with the added expense of gas. Not what I was hoping for.
-There is overtime attached to this job. That said, we're temps. We are paid out of a budget. Our supervisors are encouraged to not go over budget. Since overtime means getting paid 1.5x what you were making, they really don't want to pay us that. It means that the hours are structured in such a way that you can't get much overtime.
-That's not getting into the fact that there isn't a scheduled lunchtime in those hours, meaning that even if you do get scheduled for some overtime, you can't actually earn it because you've used up some time getting food in your stomach.
-And, on a personal note, I end up eating too early in the day, and getting back home too late. The Leangains protocol I'm following only allows an eight hour feeding window, and if all you bring is a salad and some walnuts, you end up in caloric restriction which is totally not good. I've lately been supplementing with fast food, and that has got to stop.
On the plus side, there's direct deposit, and my coworkers are really awesome. So there's that.
I've been working on some things, since I haven't been here. I decided that I don't like Convict Conditioning's pistol progression. I've changed that game up a bit. Now, I'm doing modified pistols and using the stairs in my home as a marker for progress. Amazingly, I'm down to just using a single step, and I can knock out a single set of five on each leg. I figure I'll use the Convict Conditioning progression scheme, and when I can do a master set with one step, I'll start over again with full pistol squats.
That's some Tsatsouline there. His understanding just makes too much sense to me to ignore it.
The time I've been gone has been spent just doing a lot of thinking. I've been working out some, of course - I'm back to half pull ups, and I'm doing close push ups again, even if it's only 2x10 for now - but honestly you guys? I think I'm just going to call this challenge a wash. Between my rehab, the life changes, and the complete and utter disregard for true discipline, I think it's safe to say that I have successfully failed: I have failed the challenge, but succeeded in restoring myself back to something like what I was at the outset.
So. I thought I'd leveled up my life, but at the end of it it seems that nothing has really changed. And I'm not willing to accept that.
I've been doing a lot of reading, about the nature of work and if you read between the lines of the latest reports, it only confirms something that I've believed ever since the recession started. The job market belongs to the employers. They control how many jobs are generated, what those jobs are, and what comes with them. We, with our college educations and our debts, have been trained to accept this as the status quo, as something that we have to accept.
And I'm thinking, honestly? Screw that.
God made me a writer. It's in me. My fingers ache for the keyboard, and the ideas pour out of me. I still need to work on writing that crappy novel, but I think that writing a crappy blog might be a great place to start.
Only thing is, I have no idea what to write about. My initial thought is to write something about being a writer and struggling to break through, documenting this experiment that I call following the dream. Only problem is, I want to write something that people would actually read.
So, what about you guys? What kind of blogs do you guys like to read?