Farewell, Cushy Office Job. Hello, Personal Crisis.

I'm sitting in a cubicle. It's my last full day of work at a job I've hated since last February, when I started. I gave my two weeks notice on Halloween, and tomorrow I'll begin my part time job at a bread bakery, where I'll make almost four dollars less per hour. I have a college degree, and nearly $17,000 in student loans.

It's hard to explain the decision to quit, even to myself. If someone asked me to make a list of reasons why I hate it here, it might look something like this:

1. I have to talk to inarticulate, depressing people on the phone all day.
2. My commute is longer than I'd like.
3. The grounds and office are smelly, dirty and unsightly.
4. I get bored and restless, and end up staring at the internet for too long.

In summary, it's not that bad. I'm treated very well by my boss, and the money is good. I never have to work more than forty hours a week. I get to write emails, look at Facebook, and work on my blog, all while getting paid. If I continued working here, I could probably have my loans paid off in about three years. It's difficult to justify my choice to quit and work in a bakery for barely above minimum wage, with people who were born in the 1990s. Still, I'm leaving.

I'm leaving because it's not the job that's the problem. The problem is me.

Or at least that's the current conclusion I've come to. I wont go into too much boring personal detail. Let's just say that I'm embarking on an experiment of will and dedication, two concepts with which I have minimal experience.

I'm leaving this post intentionally vague, to give myself room to develop a theme that's still in the works. Wish me luck. You'll be hearing from me soon.

Continued Musings

Since I've been back home from school, I've spent most of my time hanging out with people who I've known for a good portion of a decade, or longer. This is a positive thing.

But it is also a thing that makes me ponder. I was in another city, part of a different crowd, for four years. Now, with the passage of time and acquisition of experience, I look at my old relationships in a new light.

Mainly, observing the behavior of and my relationship to my dear old friends has made me realize how integral a role it all played in my development as a person. And this is no surprise.

But often over the past year I've found myself looking around at my friends and companions and wondering aloud: "Who else on Earth behaves this way?"

For instance, in my closest group of friends it is totally acceptable, even expected, to consistently break plans with one another. And by "consistently," I mean always.

Get out of work early to meet up and go to that show? The one we've been talking about all week? Think again. Another friend is making dinner, and there's a party afterward.

Still want to meet up and play some tennis tonight? Don't feel like it anymore? No problem. We're going to happy hour, anyway.

And so on.

But this sort of thing isn't a problem for me. Not anymore, anyway. If anything, it's left me open to the idea that good things can happen in unexpected places. More so, it's helped me develop a deep reserve of patience for the prevailing fickleness of the world. And that is what I call looking on the bright side.

This is just one example. Most of what I feel when I look around me, at the places I've lived and the people I know, I can't accurately put into words. Sometimes I become so overwhelmed with the idea that I'm part of such a unique, specific little niche in time and space that I don't know what to do with myself.

So I guess that's when I blog about it.

Fond Memories

There was a year long period in middle school when my friends beat the shit out of me on an almost daily basis.

I wasn't the only one who suffered these beatings. We all had a tendency to take out our strange, suppressed, pubescent aggressions on one another. But sometimes I think I bore the brunt of it.

Most days after school, a large clan of us would trample down the street to my parents house, where an overwhelming lack of parental supervision left us free to run rampant. Here, our shallow seventh grade depths of lip gloss and ponytails gave way abruptly to an intense and terrifying savagery.

I can't pinpoint the exact origin of these group beatings; I don't remember how or why it all started. Instead, my memory is infiltrated with short, dreamlike clips of specific instances, like the feeling of suddenly coming to after having blacked out from drinking.

I remember the smallest one, sitting on my chest, gulping triumphantly from a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper, my favorite brand of pop. Two others had been assigned the task of wrangling my squirming, ungainly legs until I had been effectively pinned down to my own kitchen floor.

(In time, we had developed a highly efficient strategy for pinning down our victims. You had to start with the legs. Left unbound, they would thrash desperately and violently, and were liable to do any amount of damage necessary to become freed.)

Another afternoon, sunny and early fall, two of us waited for my sister to come pick us up after school and take us to the mall. In the time it took her to get there, one of my best friends pushed me backwards off a bench and whipped me repeatedly across the face with the straps of a backpack. I was left with a red, rashy mark across my face that looked like spaghetti sauce.

I don't want to play the victim. I know for a fact that time in the schoolyard I reciprocated in the same violent gist. And I remember the day I left a hand-print shaped bruise on another friends arm. There were plenty of times when I played the assailant, and not the assailed.

It's the sort of erratic behavior that could easily be attributed to an extreme excess of energy. Untapped aggression. Unchecked insecurities. As with everything, there had to be more to it than what appeared on the surface, and sometimes I still wonder if there was something about me, specifically, that caused my friends to act out like that.

I guess I'll never know, and it doesn't really matter now anyway. I think of it as the gnarly, twisted core of our friendship, and it's a good reminder to judge how far we've really come.

mandatory make-over

I used to be on the tee-vee. This was an email I got from my boss around the time I started.

"I was talking with Jeff and we'd like to get you in the studio to take some photos for the website to accompany your bio, but first we need you to go to John Six salon and Merle Norman. Just seeing if you've made arrangements to do so yet because we really can't photograph you until you do that."

Merle Norman was the make up studio where we on-air folk were given free consultations and face paint.

The email was sent as my non-confrontational boss sat directly across from me.

Good Morning

Up until now, I can remember experiencing only two celebrity related dreams. The first one featured a semi-sexual situation with Will Arnett and occurred when I was taking in an inordinate amount of Arrested Development. The second was a bit more involved and entailed Luke Wilson operating on me in a local grocery store after my sister and I made a pact to shoot ourselves in the head.

Last night I drifted into an easy sleep that led me down an unusual path. I awoke refreshed and feeling particularly well and immediately headed out to my little vegetable garden. Standing in the morning sunshine snapping fuzzy green beans from the vine, a series of dreamy snapshots manifested a larger picture in my mind. A nautical themed restaurant, shaped like a boat. Hairless chests on shirtless men. Velvet-cushioned benches. Blinding, grinning white teeth.

I came inside and sat on the edge of my bed, musing and munching my harvest, and there it came to me. A love triangle. Matt Damon. Ben Afleck. And Me.

(I'll Have Myself a) Big Mac Attack

I find myself sitting at Rosie O'Gradys in downtown Ferndale, somewhere I have no desire to be but where, by a series of unfortunate events, Violet has ended up working as a waitress. My plan was to come here and film her undertaking of a "detox" program in which she eats nothing and drinks only a sad mixture of water, maple syrup, powdered cayenne and lemon juice. I thought this would be a good idea when yesterday I picked her up mid-day from our friend Amelia's and she ambled out clutching a suspicious looking grocery bag full of said ingredients. My pseudo-boyfriend Bryan and I looked on with amusement as, in typical Violet fashion, she hastily assembled the beverage, failing not to loudly smack the excess syrup from her finger tips, Susie-Q style (according to her, a main “perk” of the system).

Electronics in tow and ready to take action, I arrive at the restaurant. I sit down and ask Violet how the diet's going. “It's not,” she replies. Less than 24 hours into the program she caved, having been tormented all last night by a sole pastry sitting on the counter at work. The culprit took the form of an apple torte, but she “only ate the insides, so that's not that bad, right?” Immediately after her confession a co-worker appears to accuse her of recently stealing half an order of spinach dip. Five minutes later a large quesadilla arrives at our table and we are swarmed by a posse of hungry waitresses who greedily devour the shoddy fare and trade tales of experience with the Master Cleanse. “I'll pay for that,” Violet assures me, mid-chew.

Despite her break with the system I did end up filming Violet concocting the tonic one last time, complete with unsolicited onscreen input from her waitress friends. Unfortunately, the video is a lengthy and largely uninteresting three minutes. Eventually I do plan on honing my video-editing skills; until then I believe the above image of a confused looking Violet offering her viewers a sampling of the cleanse should suffice in fulfilling your visual needs.

A Typical Exchange