My Life- Good 'Til The Last Drop

so i went and revived this blog and then already fell off of the wagon about updating it. i'm sure all of the people who read this thing have been waiting with their breath held for me to write something again.

my life since january:

on january first, things were looking pretty awesome actually. wendy and i had just announced our engagement over the christmas holiday, and for once in my stupid life, i was pretty happy with what i was doing for a living-- the bookstore, and the youth center. at that point, both of those were still going really well.

on january second, things stopped looking awesome. i got a call while i was eating lunch that the bookstore was expected to close. the general manager of the carleton college bookstore-- the store that "owned and operated" our bookstore downtown-- called to tell me that river city books was basically a financial burden for the college and that within the first quarter of 2009, the store would close. the store did close the last week of march, and i spent all of april and the first part of may sorting books that didn't sell, and sending them back to their publishers.

it was also around this point that my job at the youth center became, for lack of a better term, a burden-- time-wise. in august of 2008, when i started, i committed to 1700 hours, which, i thought would just fly right by, and that i would be fine. that, however, was not the case. my supervisor had always stressed concern about how i wasn't working as much as i should have been. in january that really all came to a head, and i began the slow descent into working 50+ hours a week. by the end, in june and july, some of my time sheets had over 100 hours on them. all i was doing was working for the key, and the sad thing is, is that it was never enough for them.

for some reason, i wanted to do a second year of work as the americorps promisefellow for the key. i applied in may, and at the end of june, i re-interviewed for my job. the interview itself was a joke. i was asked questions off of a standard list of americorps interview questions, and almost all of my answers began with "well, in my first year here as the promisefellow..." a few days after my interview, my supervisor told me that the kids decided they didn't want me back as their promisefellow. he said they wanted to hire someone else, and that they thought i wasn't committed enough to the organization. so i spent the end of june, all of july, and most of august still coming in, still working as hard as i could, but i felt like none of it really mattered. it was awkward at times, and at the end-- it was very anti-climactic. i guess that's fitting though, given the experiences that i had there for that year. i shouldn't have expected much. i shouldn't have expected anything.

around the same time all of this was happening, i applied for, and was hired for a job at the northfield entertainment guide-- a free, monthly publication that tells you what is happening in northfield every night of the week. it's free because people advertise. and so i sell ads. it's obviously a different line of work, but since i work in downtown northfield, i get to work with a lot of people that i met through either the bookstore, or the key.

during all of this, i found time to start a band with one of the kids from the key-- who, strangely enough, also got screwed over by the organization, but in a different way.

i also got married at the beginning of august.

my life is a lot different than it was at this time last year. i find myself getting nostalgic for september of 2008. it was colder outside, things at the key hadn't soured, and working at the bookstore was great. really, most of 2008 was awful for me, and a lot of 2009 was too. i'm really hoping that 2010 is going to be better. i just wish that things were easier. that there was more money around, and that life wasn't always such a god damn struggle. i wish that i wrote more, and that i hadn't practically given up on that for most of this year.

maybe things can turn around for the tail end of this year. maybe. i guess we'll see.

Waking The Dead

wow.

so the other day, i realized i still had this blog, and that while i used it all last summer (summer of 2008), i kind of stopped once the fall/winter rolled around. there was a brief attempt in january of this year to revive it, which lasted all but three days.

good job, me.

so now here we are, in september, and i'm sitting at my desk at work, thinking that maybe reviving this thing is a good idea.

then again, maybe it isn't. i guess we'll find out, won't we?

what on earth would i even use this platform for? in the past, i used it to complain about a lot of things. like when i was unemployed. or when i was working at the bookstore and complained about customers. i've gone ahead and deleted all of the old posts from here, because i'm sure they would be pretty painful for me to re-read. so eventually, this will be filled with all new, complainy posts about whatever.

since january, or hell, even since last year, a lot of things are different for me. which i will probably get to later. i will say, for now at least, that one reason to bring this stupid thing backs i because i've noticed that the two people that i graduated with in college, from our department, have slick, fancy websites. and for the most part, they are using their degrees that we all earned together back in the first half of this decade (jesus i'm old) and they are probably using any subsequent degrees that they have earned in the latter half of this decade.

i, however, am not.

when i was still working at the youth center, there were a few choice kids who liked to point out how useless my degree is. it's always fun to have a self-deprecating laugh at what thousands of dollars and four years of a life have amounted to. i'll be the first to admit it-- i may have made a mistake with the field i majored in.

again, as i said, i am at my desk right now-- at work. which means i should probably do some work.

stay tuned, folks. there will, hopefully, be more to come.