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?".