Logbook from Getting a Job - the RPG

You have completed college, you now have the ability to interview, move in with parents, and grow a beard.

You have done enough good deeds that you have your professor's friendship. Call him anytime if you get lost or if you need some items for your journey, like a letter of recommendation or job contact

You have a 4 star rating in grades. You now have the ability to apply at small business or intern at medium size business

You have gained a reputation in extra-curricular activities. Try using this to augment your resume.

Your boss at your work study job has taken note of your reputation and wants to give you something. Meet her in the office.

Your boss has given you her recommendation and career advice.

You know have enough reputation that you have been offered a small business job (+10 gold, +100 xp, +5 reputation). Will you take it?

You decided to not take the small business job. Try focusing your will on finding new jobs, building experience, or completing a side-job.

Word has gotten out of your small town about you! A creative director at a medium business wants to meet you.

You met with creative director at medium business, and you know have access to three business cards of employees at medium business. Feel free to contact them anytime. Beware though, they may be busy.

You have used your experience to apply at a small company.

You have been interviewed by small company.

You have been offered an internship at a small company! (0 gold, 50 xp, 25 reputation) will you take it?

You have taken the internship at the small company. Bring up job quests for this company anytime using your gmail.

A friend from your hometown remembers you! They are now powerful and want to help you. Contact them to learn more.

Your friend wants to introduce you to famous executive. You have enough experience and reputation to meet.

Your experience, reputation, and personality have impressed famous executive! He has given you The List of Important Job Contacts (100 gold + 1000 xp). You can bring up The List of Important Job Contacts anytime to find new job opportunities. Be sure your experience and reputation are high to prevent embarrassment.

You now have famous executive's business card. Contact him anytime.

You have contacted Medium Company President from The List of Important Job Contacts. She sounds interested in your reputation, but first you must impress her HR Supervisor.

The HR Supervisor is thinking of offering you an internship at Medium Company (50 gold, 250 xp, 500 reputation), but wants to eat Turkey and Dressing and Pie before deciding.

You now have HR Supervisor's business card. Contact her anytime.

Your college professor remembers you! They have arranged an interview for you at a Small Boring Company for Assistantship. (500 gold, 100 xp, 75 reputation). Will you interview?

New Job Oppurtunities are opening up in distant lands. Be sure to check out your Google Maps and travel with your Taurus to explore.

take it easy.

today was a slow day at work. which means that you are told to take your time, and not worry about goofing off for a little while. i'm afraid this is going to spoil me when i get some other job somewhere. i assume that not many companies encourage this.

love,

NERRRRRRRRD!

today i finished printing some merchandise for a kansas city company, Nerd Bots. Their company is actually super rad, they take vintage electronic and stuff and turn them into "found" robots. Nuff said.

Also, i worked late today. this translated, means that when i went to have a t-shirt approved, my boss started showing me all of the new shit that coalesce has been recording. so, i got payed to listen to unreleased, unheard, coalesce tracks with sean ingram. so many hxc kids are shitting themselves right now. what's also cool, is that all of their new stuff is totally awesome. probably going to be one of their best records ever.

also, i was going to write about this last week, but then forgot what it was. in an alley in lawrence, one that i travel frequently, so hoodlum has recently graffitotagged the wall. this, i don't care much about, but what it says really made me think.

RioT 4 (peace sign)
(poorly made anarchy symbol)

now, i don't know if this is supposed to be ironic, but it really makes no sense when you break it down. anarchy and peace are complete opposites. i feel like people have forgotten this. no law and no order is going to equal chaos. and rioting for peace, is an oxymoron. however, if you think back to the weather underground, which was totally badass, it still did not bring about peace. finally, my cynical brain came to this conclusion: there is no peace where there is man. so, no matter what man does to try to bring about peace, whether it be war or loving kindness, it's not going to work. it's not possible. and i think the fact that i came to that conclusion 60 seconds after seeing this graffiti, makes me think that i put more thought into debunking that green paint, than the brainless person who put it there.

unless they were being ironic. and in that case, good job... i guess.

love,

On the improving of life and how to "chut up"

Donnie Darko is one of my favorite movies of all time. The conflicting emotions, complex relatable characters, moments of unexpected humor, and intricate plot all make for one of the only movies I can enjoy watching more than once.

In the movie, there's an obese asian girl who is fluent in Engrish who is unfit for the gauntlet of american high school. She is a pretty tangential character to the movie, but she somehow elicits a lot of emotion in each scene she is in; whether getting verbally tortured by bullies or dancing in a decidedly uncool ballet at the high school talent show.

All that to say, one of my favorite moments of the movie comes near the end of the movie. Donnie is becoming overwhelmed with life around him, and upon seeing the girl, he grabs her earmuffed head and states soundly something to the effect of, "I promise, things will get better for you". Her ears being covered to his encouragement, she intreprets his gesture as just another taunt, and runs away, telling Donnie to "chut up!".

The simplicity of being told "things will get better for you" is something that resonates rather soundly in my current stage of life.

Life is open to all opportunities at this moment, and every morning I have to remind myself of the opportunities while shedding the feeling of being paralyzed by the demons of a hard season in life.

Every morning, I have to wonder how I am going to keep it all together for the day. Every night, I go to sleep exhausted, the task of simply pressing through time without panic attacks, teary eyes, or the feeling of numerous shotgun blasts to the chest becoming laborious.

Despite this, I am able to find things each day that shed a glimpse to a better future and a meaningful present. A note from my mom, a phone conversation with an old friend, a job contact sending me an encouraging email, the bliss of running to exhaustion, the feeling of having a meaningful Christian faith for the first time in my life.

There they are, each and every day. I wake up completely weak every morning, but each day I can rely on something, someone telling me, "I promise, things will get better for you"

hey hey the devil may hey hey

i discovered this near my house the other day.
it's part of a dam on a small lake.
they decided to add a lot of architecture and fountaintry.

love,
anthony

exercising my muscle

finally designing something after like 8 months, or however long it's been since i graduated. i found the font on a typography website here, and i acquired the diamond's colors from a photo of a motel from kirk demaris' blog.



getting a little rusty. i've forgotten a lot of shortcuts, hot keys, and i accidentally exported it in CMYK instead of RGB. bret and tim are the only ones who are going to truly understand that, i think.

love,

gather round children, and i shall spin a tale of mystery, intrigue, and gender confusion.

so, one of my coworkers is transgender. this was not a hard conclusion to come by, because this person worked there last year when i did,... and was a man then. let's call this person, "x." i have never felt a connection to x because we have mismatched personalities. even when x was a man, i found him awkward, and any conversation with x leaves me feeling puzzled. my friend who also works with me, absolutely hates x, and has for a long time. this is something he is very open about. i try not to let his hatred spill onto me, and that my feelings toward x are not governed by my friend's. so i don't. and i don't hate x, and i don't dislike x because she is a transgender.

anyway, i have had several lengthy, awkward conversations with x, and have learned more about her life than i would care to know. however, today i had a lot of stuff cleared up by a conversation with her. she was asking me if i was going to have to quit working at blue collar if gas started getting too high because i have to drive 30 min to get there, and i told her that i was moving to denver soon, so, no. and then we talked about moving different places and she started talking about wanting to move out west out of a need to meet more transgenders in her situation.

now background, x is an ex-crust punk who grew up in the 80s and was always surrounded by violence between jocks and gays, punks and skinheads, punks and jocks, etc. etc. she has been an alcoholic who would stalk the streets with a 40 and hang out with anyone, including jumping in cars with strangers and getting into all sorts of danger. moving around from okc, to dallas, to austin, and finally to lawrence. she is married and supposedly can't get the full operation because her marriage will be nulled and her insurance would triple. she became a transgender sometime around last year, after i left and went back to school. we have the same birthday and she's 35.

so, x has complained that around the country she has met transgenders like herself, except they're aging women who remind her of her mom or grandma. no one her age, with her taste in music. and it seems the younger generation of trangenders just want to be fabulous, slutty, divas who throw around bj's and look glamorous. however, her wife wants to move east, and x thinks that living in the mountains of virgina, surrounded by hicks, will not be easy for her. and i guess they both badly want to move other places, but cannot come to an agreement, and i think they'll live in lawrence for a very long time.

anyway, i found this out today while printing demon hunter shirts, and it was really interesting. not that i completely back x in her hardships, or that i really care if it works out for her. i think there's a lot of confusion and delusion. which seems normal considering that if you lived your life for 34 years as a man, and then decided to become a woman, how do you even do that? no amount of estrogen pills and surgery is going to make you change your MANnerisms. pun intended.

love,

Highest Form

I am in the process of developing a new "highest form of humor."

Being Really Serious About Everything.

I tried it earlier when i was watching commercials. I glued my face to the screen, amazed at the significance of it all.

Imagine the implications.

What if I'd been born fifty years before you in a house on a street where you lived?

today, i fell in love with a woman i do not know. a woman, who i heard on the radio. to be more precise, the radio station that was picking up my FM transmitted ipod podcast playing This American Life. this woman lived through the great depression, and is therefor, around 50-60 years older than me, at the least. she was amidst a bunch of interviews from people giving testimonies about growing up in that time. she was one of the more positive and awesome of the bunch.

she only attended school through 6th grade, when she dropped out to get a job. she was married at 15, and she and her husband began hitchhiking around america looking for jobs. this woman was so free spirited, and the only negative things she had to say, were about herself, and how ashamed she was of herself in those times for being so racist. she talked about how it took her living the life as the poorest of the poor, picking cotton alongside black people, to realize that she was just like them. however, she didn't come to this realization until years later. this was surprising to hear, after hearing from other old ladies who were still vehemently raciest, and started choking about how mad they were when people said it was ok for black people to get jobs.

this woman talked about working in the valley of texas, picking lemons and grapefruit in orchards, while living in government housing. and about the kindness and generosity of strangers in a time where people didn't even have food for themselves, let alone two drifters. listening to this woman talk was like having Ben Folds' The Luckiest and Jeff Mangum's My Dreamgirl Don't Exist blend together and unfurl before my eyes. My dreamgirl does exist, the person that is my one and only, is a woman i've never met before, and is at least as old as my grandma.

que sera sera, but my heart will not go on.

love,

Live, From Behind the Orange Curtain

This first post from me is basically to relate my current living experiences so that people can know sort of where I am coming from in later posts that are more topical or ideological. This first post is going to be fairly helter skelter since there's a lot to cram in so that you know sort of where I am in life right now, and I promise to try and make following posts more organized and clear.

First of all I love Orange County. Yes I know... yuppies, extremely rich, the proud and arrogent.. but this I can deal with. From the perspective I see it with is full of enjoyable hard-working people with a zeal for life and it's clean, fun, and all-around exciting and great to live here. I just wish I had a job. Everything in my life right now is basically in a complete face-to-the-wall stall hinging upon a job. I should be in the absolute prime of my life, healthy and living it up post and pre family. Instead I'm broke, and by proxy I can't afford a gym to workout at, I have no dental or health insurance so I can't get these darkened spots on some of my teeth checked out. After sobering up (literally and figuratively) from my several week-long binge of discouragement, depression, and alchohol, I now work all day on projects that ironically are probably doomed to be passed over with a 2 second glance, if even looked at. I also have to live in the room of a family here in Irvine. Absolutely my entire life hinges on finding a job, in an industry known as much for the brutal competition in the starting block position as its easy ride with a couple years of experience, and in a super time in the job market.

And more than anything, I desperately long for a job so that I can move to my own place, even if it is a small crackerbox studio apartment. To their credit they are great, sweet, generous people who have been so gracious and understanding, allowing me to stay in a room in their house rent free while I look for my proverbial foot-in-the door. However:

1) The lady as nice as she is, is one of those people that makes me ashamed to be a political conservative. Literally hissing at the television screen everytime Pres-Elect Obama opened his mouth whether what he was saying was actual opposing policy philosophy or simply pronoucing Pakistan differently, which was met with "Well sure, you want to blow up our country! Did you here how he pronounced Pakistan! He's and Arab! An Arab! I told you I told you!" This is met with silent disinterest and vague wandering eyes from her intellectually brilliant and almost world-weary husband. He works as a programmer on the algorithms for the trading computers at finance company, and has been working desperately the past month to calm down the pajama traders in their terrified binge selling as they drop the market faster in a day than ever before due to the fact that they can just trade and get scared all from home and watching CNN rather than listening to time-honored prudence and advice from trained financial advisors who have been through and weathered many of the previous bear markets and crashes. Several nights a week he goes to neihboring gang-infested Santa Ana and works with gang-intervention groups for elementary kids.

2) They hate violent video games and movies.

3) They only like hymns. They also try relentlessly to get me involved in the singles group at our church. I can't bring myself to do it because the one time I did go I felt like I was basically surrounded by a large awkward conglomerate of peers all desperate and on the prowl for marriage and sex.

4) They're out of touch with weird random aspects of life that I have to face in the real world. I was talking to them once and they mentioned how there's no reason for anyone to not have a college education because it's so cheap and makes such a huge difference in salary. This was one of those rare occasions where I had to break from my nod and smile routine and just flat out told them that actually the Wall Street Journal had several articles lately making a point of the fact that the benefits in salary of many jobs today versus the amount of debt a student could incur were quite often no longer exceeding said cons. I then related my $50,000 of debt which I had to start paying off in January.

**In a slight break from narration.. here's a fun story about fairness. I have a cousin.. this cousin is the laziest and most insubbordinate person I personally know. He did poorly in high school and he did poorly on his ACT's (not for lack of intelligence but because he was too lazy to try). Now, after being kicked out of military service for insubbordination, and though several years older than I, he continues to live at his moms house where he refuses to do chores, pick up after himself, and does nothing but play video games for nearly 8 hours a day. He has just recently been given a full-ride federally funded opportunity at a college education (again, the first time was when he originally graduated from High School). He recieves these opportunities because his mom is divorced and makes a teachers salary. I come from an upper-middle class home founded in the happy marriage of my parents, and I now get to start life with $50,000 in debt. Draw your own conclusions

Okay that's a lot for now.. Coming up: "The Other (Crazy Left) Hand of California", "My Crazy Adventure and Journey Getting Out Here in the First Place", "Does God Actively Work in Peoples Lives or Did the Majority of the Founding Fathers Know What They Were Talking About(or, We All Know the Before and After But Does This Whole Middle Part Make A Lick of Fair and Just Sense?)", and "Your College Education: Is It Worth Squat or Should You Spend Meager Money At a Tech School and Get an Occupational Jump Start on Your Sap Friends at College?".

interests of an aging man

lately, i have been listening almost exclusively to music that is over 40 years old. including, 60s production music, the kinks, the zombies, the ink spots, leadbelly, scott walker, the walker brothers, joe dassin, peter sarstedt, and the turtles.

also, the new cartoon on adult swim, "SUPERJAIL," is absolutely wonderful.


neither of those have anything in common.

the virgin steps up to the plate...

hullo friends. if you have tried to contact me via my now deceased school email, then you are among the person you tried to have me join this blog long ago, only to never hear from me. anyway, here is a riveting update.

after college i...
1. stayed in siloam for 1 month to work at a coffee shop and hangout. which i did, with my one roomate, the only over friend who stayed. nice.
2. moved home to de soto, ks to live with my parents and beg the dudes at a screen printing company, that i interned at last year, for a printing job.
3. play disc golf daily with older brother, who also graduated and moved home.
4. finally hear back from printing company, accept job
5. visit siloam for a week before i have to accept my new job
6. accept new job as a manual screen printer, working 4 day 40 hr weeks at $8
7. have no friends to hang out with
8. go to denver for friend's wedding, see ms. hoover & ms. peabody & mr. ramlet
9. go to siloam for homecoming. have friends again
10. go back to siloam 2 weeks later for another wedding. have friends again.

and in just those 10 steps, you will be in my shoes. soak it up, assholes. recently, highlights of my life have been...
1. convince parents to finally stop buying internet via AOL
2. parents buy cable and dvr, so i would stop stealing it from the internet people
3. being able to have all of my songs scrobbled on last.fm, and being able to post photos online again.

riveting shit right there. other facts: after binge drinking/smoking in siloam, i find myself wanting cigarettes on a regular basis. i don't believe that god is active in peoples' lives anymore, rendering prayer useless. this does not bode well in my cynical brain while attending my parents' uber conservative presbyterian church. my dad consistently tries to convince me that i need to join a small group, or maybe a different church, to meet other christians my age. i shrug him off to avoid telling my parents that i think it's all bullshit.

life is happy! i buy lots of records because i don't pay rent! i'm listening to the shins right now! it's ok, i guess!

love,

Don't let me be free.

The biggest problem with life after college is the freedom.

Freedom is one of the most revered words in America, it peppers our political speaches, works as a replacement adjective for items derived from annoying countries, elicits a lot of wordplay from citizens wishing to compound their ethos into a bumper sticker, and strikes the singing lips of everyone from Broadway singers to East Coast hardcore tough guys.

Freedom is like the final sword in the videogame Fable. We know about it when we don't have it, we revere the idea of it, we gather a lot of XP and kill a lot of theives and werewolves to obtain it, but when we finally kill our teleporting former mentor to obtain it, we see that we don't really need it. Everyone has been conquered and we are left to stroll The United States of Albion with our Freedom Sword looking for something to use its almighty, hallowed power on.

I have freedom. I don't have debt, I don't have a child, I don't have a significant other, I don't have a steady job, I don't have a lease. I have a trusty Ford Taurus and enough money to get me anywhere in the country or a plane ticket out of it.

I work at Starbucks, and have days of with no time commitments.

This is every man's dream, and I should be relishing it like a child relishing his alfalfa sprouts that a starving child in Africa would love to eat.

I should be watching V for Vendetta daily, listening to Frank Sinatra, and showing off a different colored derby hat every day. I should be scheduling my plane flight to prague. I should ask the middle aged south african reporter who comes to Starbucks on a date. I should be running on the beach with my shirt off. I should be getting in my car to drive to des moines just to eat pancakes with cousin. I should call up the girls that had a crush on me in college. I should bring a football to a park and start a game with strangers. I should wake up at 6 am and drink 24 Coors lights by lunch and then fall asleep. I should get a night job and day job for two weeks, and use all my money to buy a scooter. I should wear my best clothes and dance with vacuous strangers in overpriced clubs. I should learn how to breakdance. I should draw portraits of my least favorite actors. I should get a 100% completion on GTA IV. I should call up my friend in Texas and see what he was doing, because I just got into town. I should move home for 3 weeks for the sole reason of training my dog. I should read Harry Potter.


But I don't want to.

I want a job to go to everyday that I am needed at. I want to have a family who I am tied down to. I want a dog that gets upset when I don't feed him.

I want stability and reliability far more than freedom. I know this is heresy and I will hate myself for writing this when I am older and long for the freedom and brashness of youth. Such is the way of us always wanting what we had/don't have more than what we have, but for now, I am firmly entrenched in this beginning-life crisis.

Mystery

So, Vince and I are in this constant dilemna of whether or not the neighborhood that we live in is a "bad" neighborhood.

We just moved into a one bedroom apartment in the City of Joliet, Illinois, a decent sized city right outside of Chicago. Our brown, three story aparment building is surrounded by many very similar other buildings, forming a large apartment complex. Our apartment is pretty standard apartment fare complete with outside hallways that smell like a curious blend of cigarette smoke and J. Alvin.

The neighborhood is not nice, but its not un-nice either. Its right off of a busy street littered with discount shopping places. The suburban neighborhoods closest to the apartment buildings are like normal suburban neighborhoods but just slightly more rundown and the houses are slightly smaller. But Is this an indication of the status of our safety?

What we cannot figure out is if our neighborhood could be called by such terms as "dangerous," or "unsafe."

Vince and I never really considered it until some of the following circumstances occured:

1.Vince's sister implied that it was sort of shady. This being a ridiculous statment, Vince and I scoffed at the idea, but then proceded to be more on edge when walking past groups of 1 or more people gathered near entrances in the apartment complex.

2.When we signed our lease, we got a bunch of papers, one of which was a coupon to Domino's pizza. When we called to order pizza at around 7:30 pm one night, they informed us that they do not deliver to our neighborhood after dark. We ordered from Pizza Hut. It was delicious.

3.Vince went to walgreens the other day to pick up some smokes. Its like 6:00 pm or something. He is walking out of Walgreens when a large African American Gentleman approaches him and proceeds to make statements to Vince, both advising Vince of his unfortunate current affairs and suggesting that Vince should monetarily assuage the accrued grief. The man made statements similar to the following:

• "Man I am f***ing hypoglycemic"
• "I Don't have any f***ing money right now"
• "Can you (f***ing) help me out?"

These questions were interspersed with vince mumbling statements like:

• "hmm"
• "dang"
• and "I have to go I have to be somewhere"

Not a big deal, except for directly afterwards as vince was walking to his car a large white man in an SUV pulled up behind Vince's vehicle, blocking his exit.

"get in the car" says the man."
"what?" says Vince.
"Did that guy hurt you?"
"what?"
"get in the f***ing car!"
"what?"
"that guy is dangerous and crazy!"

hmmm. seemed like that was just a crazy paranoid white guy. But are Vince and I just naive? Listen to some further indications:

4. Gunshots? we are pretty sure thats what we heard in the apartment buildings directly across the parking lot in the middle of the complex. Vince and I momentarily paused our Wii Boxing venture for approximately 10 seconds to peer casually out the window and then forgot about it. A police car showed up but it didnt seem too intense and we failed to further investigate the event, such was the quality of our boxing competition and the food we were consuming. My dad will probably send me an email of a news clipping of that shooting, asking me if i live nearby. I will probably reply that no, i live in a different suburb called "Joliette" and it has a french pronunciation.

5. At "Ultra Foods" the other day, the checkout girl was making casual conversation and we found that she lived in the same apartment complex as we do. "Lock your doors!" she cautioned, proceding to relate that her apartment was recently broken into.

So are these indications of a normal neighborhood or a mini-gotham city?

Vince and I have maintained a pretty cavalier attitude about our own personal safety, even finding it humorous. We have had several debates on the topic of the neighborhoods safety, none of them lasting more than 17 seconds. As soon as the topic is brought up, we realize its absurdity and dismiss it.

Yet in spite of this seeming offhandedness, indications like the ones related above keep the topic in the back of our minds, and a slight degree of uneasiness wedges its way in. Tonight before he went to bed, vince came out of his room in his boxers and asked me if i had locked the windows. "good" he said, as i replied in the afirmative. We recently bought rental insurance that will insure all of our stuff if it is stolen. We make sure the doors are always locked.

But until something really significant and unavoidable happens, we will probably continue boxing away our time on the Wii.

why are some things so cool?

Ok I have a question for...everyone.

I can't figure out why some things are so cool. Like some bands and some colors.