Long Overdue Update

I don't think anyone reads this blog, and don't expect anyone to. It's hidden in plain sight, which for all intents and purposes on the internet, is hidden.
Since my last post, I took a trip to Turkey to stay with my inlaws. It was an unbelievable time. When I returned, I was offered a job as a marketing assistant at the educational publisher where I worked in the mailroom. When I went back for my last two weeks in the mailroom, I discovered that the problem employee who was making me frustrated and embarassed to be associated with him, had been fired while I was out. And they say passivity will get you nowhere. Clearly, it was passivity that has been my secret weapon all along!
My new job is now not so new. It's a placeholder job, but it's good experience, it's the lynchpin of my resume, making it look like a planned if bizarre career, rather than a pinball's course from one nonsensically buzzing box to the next. I like my two managers. Their manager, who is ultimately mine...well, I don't have that many issues with him...
Since then, I've started volunteering at an afterschool writing workshop for highschool kids, run out of the non-profit where I've been taking adult workshops. I love it. I want to be a teacher. Teaching is something meaningful, somehting important, something I get excited about, something that matters to me. Guiding creative young people, helping them think their way through writing issues...this is really what I do.
I'm trying to get into a teacher ed program called the Boston Teacher Residency. It's a highly selective, essentially no-cost M.Ed program. Once you complete the 13 month training and co-teaching year, you are obligated to teach in the city public schools for three years. Each year forgives one third of your tuition. This also means that you get three years of experience teaching, as well as a Master's.
If I can go in five years from an embarassingly overqualified mailclerk having trouble getting excited enough to finish a story, to a young urban high school English teacher with a Masters of Education, dual licenses in English and ESL or Special Ed (another facet of the program!) and a union salary reflective of that experience and qualifications...I'll be proud of myself, satisfied that I'm improving the quality of life in the city I love, and making a damn decent living.

Living the Dream

Half-watching an episode of LA Ink, when the veteran tattoo artist says of a guy who works at a BMX magazine "Any grown man who's still doing what he was doing when he was twelve is gotta be...living the dream." And those ellipses captures everything that's pathetic and inspiring and fascinating and utterly boring about the tattoo/rock/etc. world.

War

I feel like I'm at war with my own company. Really, I'm only at war with my HR department, which seems to exist to keep me in my place, to prevent me from advancing in the company, to top me from taking advantage of any of the benefits that come with my full time position. It's purpose seems to be to maintain the status quo, to stop people from reaching above their place, to raise the incompetent up to the middle and to drag the exceptional down to that same middle. to create a false middle ground and adjust the weak and the strong so that they are both confined by it. I hate, detest and revile the company I work for. I will immortalize the epic of beaurocracy and unfairness that it has put me through. 

Clunk, rattle, CLANG.

My radiators sound like the beings in the cellar are launching a full-frontal assault on us surface dwellers.

Gay Marriage

http://www.slate.com/id/2212893/

I read a fascinating article in Slate about gay marriage. The gist of the issue was state governments vs. the federals government. The general, stereotypical Conservative response is that the federal government should stay out of state governments' business, BUT in this case, that same argument would favor gay marriage. I know several "traditional-common-sense-values" conservatives who are utterly Small-Government until people start doin' gay shit, when they want the government to step in and stop people from exercising offensive freedoms. As the article says, if you really support state autonomy, then you have to implicitly support gay marriage rights, since two of our states allow gay marriage. Although, I suppose you could say that even if the state allows something, the federal government doesn't have to listen. Except, then the federal government would be squelching state's right.
I still think that if we leave the states alone, in twenty years zero smart, creative, progressive, forward-thinking people will live in the tundra states, and then, HUGE surprise! industries in those states will flounder by relying on antique, unsustainable business practices. The coastal states will try some new-fangled ideas that seem weird and scary for a couple years and eventually come to seem perfectly logical, inevitable and reasonable.

Lazy Idiots

Some of the people I work with are so stupid it hurts me. Several times I've heard people say, "How can America have a deficit? Why don't we just print more money?" And this is not just people in the mailroom, this is actual editors saying things this retarded, things that I was taught were stupid when I was fucking eight.
My manager today said that he told his kids in high school, and he hated to say it, to learn Spanish. I gave a sort of horrified/dumbstruck look. He said, "I mean, I feel, if you come to this country, you should learn English." I said, "Well, I think everyone should know at least two languages." He didn't seem to really have anything to say to this.
How many jobs are non-English-speaking immigrants stealing from "hard-working regular American Joes" like my manager who barely peels his fat ass off the computer seat twice a day? If all the immigrants who work seventy hours a week washing dishes and mopping floors learned English, they would suddenly get the easy jobs that dumb, lazy generic fat white people have been hogging for two hundred years. There are a lot of jobs, like mail room supervisor, sanitation company manager, etc., that any moron can do, but always winds up going to some braindead older white guy where no one expects anything from him and he delivers even less.
What is so horrible about white people learning to speak a second language? How does you learning Spanish obviate the need for Mexicans to learn English? I used to work with a lazy, dumb-as-shit fucking retard Puerto Rican guy and this dumbshit spoke three languages (conversationally, at least) fluently. There's a big difference between thinking that people should learn the language of the country they immigrate to, and wondering why you should learn a language other than English. It's like saying, "Hey, I'm a fat lazy white guy and I have no ambition other than to sit around in some condo drinking Bud light, why should I dream of anything greater? How dare you suggest such a thing?!"