Tagged: Work

August 16, 2012

Shitty Jobs Save Lives

Hello and welcome to advice time!

David says:

I fucking loathe my job. The people are toxic and I have zero friends. None if them are even my FB friends. The upside…. I get payed pretty ok. The hours are perfect. I can take time off if needed. I can work overtime and I get free insurance. The downside…..I work with cunts. There’s no real future unless I get certified (which means two years of college for something I have zero passion for) (I’m a lab technician at a derm lab) So do I find another job to start over? It will mean starting at the bottom, getting payed less with hopes of gaining raises with my awesomeness, and paying for insurance but possibly being happier…..fml

It sounds like you have a perfect launch pad under you. A job that pays well, has perfect hours, and that you won’t be sad to kick to the curb when you’re done with it is more of a blessing than a curse.

When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be a librarian, which is a completely retarded thing for a person like me to want to be. Things I hate: research. Things I love: yelling. Seriously, every single person that knows me has had to tell me to quiet down at least once, and usually on a regular basis.

The reason I thought it would be awesome to be a librarian is because I got a job working for my university library. It was laid back, the librarians were all really cool, and the library itself was a great place to be in. Thankfully, before I actually applied to library school, I got a horrible job in the city library where I learned my lesson: As much as I love books and reading, that’s not what being a librarian is about. It took the horrible people at the city library, where I mind-numbingly organized and shelved the same shitty bestsellers between the random excitement of getting threatened by homeless people to yank me back into reality. Thankfully, I was still an undergrad when I got that terrible job, and the limited hours and high rate of pay allowed me to focus on school, which is where my attention should have been anyway.

So what does any of this have to do with your problem? Like I was with the city library, you have been blessed with a source of money that is easy to get, requires no real investment on your part, and at the same time gives you the time you need to work on other stuff. Yeah, working with cunts is awful, but you just have to look at those people as little opportunities to get the fuck out of there and never come back. Every cunty thing they say or do is one more piece of motivation to cultivate your own shit in the background and outside of work.

Take their money and invest it in yourself. Take a class, teach a class, set up an online empire, get a customer base for your start-up, do whatever you want to. The sky’s the limit, especially since it sounds like you can take time if you need it, but also get overtime if you need money. This place seems like the perfect job to finance your future.

Make a list of everything that’s keeping you from making comparable money at a career you really want. Then take the extra time you have from this job, get the training and cultivate the skills and experience it’ll take you to get those things while these cunts pay for it all. Make every terrible day with them a reason to go straight to your real work as soon as you get home.

When you feel like you’re ready (or if you feel like you’re ready now) start looking with the intention of finding a new job in 6 months. It’ll be easier to asses your potential employers or business ventures with objectivity if you don’t need the job. When you already have a job, you don’t have to take shit just because that’s the first thing that comes along. In the meantime, you can do things like save money on the chance that you do have to take a pay cut, and if you get offers you’re not sure about, you can really think about them without worrying about what turning them down will mean for you.

I happened to be lucky in that even at the city library I did manage to find a few friends, and even though it was hard to have so many people with such shitty attitudes around me all day long, I focused on the good eggs, kept my head down, and planned my escape.

July 23, 2012

Gendered Bullying in Gaming

Today at 1:00 p.m. PST, 5 friends and I had a panel discussion on gendered bullying in gaming. We ended up talking about bullying in general, as well as what to do about it as gamers and as consumers. We had a lot of fun recording this, and I look forward to having a conversation with you guys in the comments.

The first 4 mintues are basically us setting up, the real discussion starts at about 8 minutes in.

You can watch the full stream over at Marina’s UStream Channel Here

July 16, 2012

Is OUYA a Better Mouse Trap?

So the gaming world is all atwitter about the new, $99 console that’s set to turn the industry on its boring, old ear. Gamers are tired of the same old consoles, they want the excitement of another consumer opportunity. Which is why we were all so excited to jump on the Playstation Move and the XBOX Kinect, right? Oh wait…

I find myself completely baffled by the excitement everybody has for a chance to spend their hard earned money for a thing that basically does the same stuff their current consoles already do. Frequently, the gaming industry confuses me. Nobody’s jumping down my throat to hype me for another microwave, or blender. Even my computer, which is definitely an appliance with a shelf-life, gets to wirrr out the rest of its days on my desk without much threat of being pushed out by The Next Big Thing before it’s short career is at an obvious end. Yet the gaming community seems to be enamored by a past where consoles went in and out of style like polo shirts. In his Engadget editorial, Tim Stevens laments the dullness of the industry, and decrys the domestication of gaming systems. He pines for a time when “videogame consoles were put to pasture just as they hit their stride.” In my opinion, the console industry isn’t getting borring, it’s maturing, and I am glad for it. The level of constant device turn over and product waste of the past is appalling.

Maybe it’s because while Stevens was deep in the heat of the console wars, I wasn’t allowed to play video games, and then family situations changed and we couldn’t even afford living room furniture let alone videogame consoles. After that, I was on my own, and food was my main priority. So the idea of buying a system, waiting until it got awesome, and then throwing it aside for the a newer system is altogether baffling to me. It’s like buying a hamburger, loving it like crazy, but throwing it in the trash half-way through and going back to buy a cheeseburger. Not that you shouldn’t get the cheeseburger after the hamburger is done, and when you’re hungry again, but double fisting burgers is weird and people will stare at you. Especially if you’re fat.

We have what I consider to be a really nice TV. I’d never bought a TV before, but it became a necessity when the TV we inherited from our old roommate grew increasingly impossible to play videogames on. Batman Arkham Asylum was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I thought I hated that game when I first played it, but it turned out that I couldn’t see anything because our ancient TV’s resolution was so low, half the graphics were just blurs. I tried to give the TV away, but even our youngest and poorest friends turned their nose up at our old CRT. Eventually, it went to a Goodwill in Hollywood where it was likely turned into an art installation by some uninspired undergrad.

What does our shitty old TV have to do with the OUYA? Frugality. which is why I hate the idea of the OUYA, but it’s also why I like the OUYA itself. Let me explain: I like that I haven’t had to buy a new gaming console in 7 years. I like that the XBOX is our entire entertainment system. Want to watch TV? Turn on the XBOX. Listen to music? XBOX. Movies? XBOX. Gaming, socializing with my friends online or at a party, even exercise: XBOX, XBOX, XBOX. I love that stupid box, and you can pry it from my cold dead hands. I feel, as a frugal gamer, that by some miracle, we’ve managed to convince console developers that we won’t be buying another $500 piece of hardware anytime soon. Veterans of the console wars have grown fat with console satisfaction in this protracted and beneficial peace. Others of us who are new to the scene are spoiled by the lack of turn-over. We are familiar with our one or two consoles and we don’t see the need for anything else. Ever. You should have seen me when we had to switch from original XBOX to the 360. There was much crying and rending of garments. It’s as if my pet had been run over and my boyfriend tried to pretend that this younger, healthier purebred was really my same dog. Fool me once….

I don’t like change. It usually costs me money. And I know, the whole gaming culture is based firmly in consumerism, which makes me very much an odd duck. But since we’ve become more serious about gaming, we’ve actually saved a ton of money. The XBOX360 and the PS3 combined cost about $1000, the Kinect was free because we were beta testers. Our cable bill was about $100 a month when we turned it off after we bought the 360. In just 10 months, both consoles paid for themselves (although I should mention that the PS3 was actually purchased years after the XBOX). A game costs about $60 new, but aside from Bioware titles, I’ve never met a game I couldn’t wait for the price to drop on. So, for $40 at a time, we get literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, when any other non-free activity would cost at least $10 bucks an hour.

Which is where my liking the OUYA comes in. The entire system costs a cool hundred bucks. As cheap as I am, I’ve spent more than that on a romantic steak dinner… twice as much once if memory serves me. The fact that every single title will either have a free demo, be free to play, or have some sort of subscription model really catches my eye as a consumer. Not to mention that the console is extremely developer friendly. It’s no secret that the big three haven’t exactly courted the developer set. They’ve never needed to. Until now, which brings me back to hating the OUYA. If OUYA is anything close to successful, it’s going to jump start the industry, and I’m not interested in seeing what kind of Bing-style crapbox Microsoft rushes through development in order to compete. I’m especially not interested in having to buy that after all my favorite developers start making games for it and abandon my beautiful XBOX.

From where I’m sitting, the OUYA is going to be a great thing for independent developers, casual gamers, and low-income families who can’t afford to invest in expensive consoles or $60 games, and need an alternative source of entertainment to paying ever-increasing cable and satellite bills. We know that because it’s an android system, players will have access to android apps, like netflix and hulu in addition to their games. I’m going to be watching this system, and the big three with interest as it develops further. My hope for the OUYA is that it will find a niche in the aforementioned categories, that the big three will maybe learn a valuable lesson in developer service, and that none of it will cost me a dime.

June 12, 2012

Dance Central 2 Dance Party

So a couple of weeks ago, I bought just about the most fun, addictive game ever: Dance Central 2. It was on sale at the Best Buy, and I was already there to replace my crapshack controller (pro tip: the $20 controller is not your friend.) Turns out the Kinect is good for more than just shouting “Liara, singularity!” This game is crazy fun, and since Dance Central 3 was just announced at E3, I thought I’d have a dance party with my friends and take pictures of them because that’s vaguely related.

I had the idea for a dance party on Wednesday and by Saturday, the date of the party, I manged to wrangle two whole friends! Which is actually a good thing, because I don’t think anymore people would have fit in my tiny living room. My amazing boyfriend is absent because he wasn’t feeling well and actually slept through the entire party, much to our surprise.

Anyway, meet Jono and Big Ben, two of my best friends. They are totally awesome people and all-around great (single) guys (ladies.) I dare you to find a more giving (ladies,) selfless (ladies,) helpful (you know what I’m saying) pair of gentlemen. Seriously, I didn’t even have food in my fridge. I invited them over to dance for this article and then I made them pay for their own dinner. Maybe there’s a reason only two people came to my dance party. (I only just realized that I should probably have had food and drinks. There’s a reason I play videogames so much: No social interaction.)

Jono (left) and Big Ben (right) being awesome

We all took turns alternately dancing and taking pictures. As you will no doubt realize, none of us are photographers.

To the right of Jono and Ben, you can see that I had to move the couch into the kitchen in order to have enough space for two 6 foot plus dudes to dance in my house. We also had to move the ottoman into the hallway, although I didn’t get a picture of that.

Before any dancing could be done, we ran into some difficulty with the Kinect. It recognized me, it recognized Ben, but it wouldn’t pick up Jono for anything. It caused a lot of consternation.

Jono tries to join the game by raising both arms

We finally decided that it must not have liked Jono’s black jeans, even though that made no sense because it had no problem with Ben’s black jeans. I ended up lending Jono my red basketball shorts and it picked him up just fine after that.

Everything's better in basketball shorts

The one thing I really find difficult with Dance Central is the menu selection. It doesn’t pick up arm movements very well, and when it does get that you’re waving your arm to select a menu item, actually getting the Kinect to track you long enough in order to let you select that item is a pain. This is specially true with two players, because if the other player even shifts their weight, the screen will suddenly switch from pink to blue, and start responding to the other player instead of you. Ultimately we just had the cameraman/extra person select everything with the controller.

The Kinect can't see you if you're backlit

You should also make sure you’re not dancing in front of a window, like I was here because the window completely washes you out and you end up getting thirty-nine thousand points on “Whip My Hair” by Willow Smith when you know you killed that song. Granted, Jono was really good at this game. Like, crazy good. Bitch please good.

Ben and I, on the other hand.

Let’s just say that we had fun.

One thing that you should watch out for when you have tall friends and are playing this game, is that they have a much smaller range of movement available than the rest of us. Big Ben is about 6′ 5″, and as you can see here, the Kinect viewfinder cut off his head whenever he got too close to the entertainment center.

Tall people beware: Dance Central may decapitate you

In the two weeks since I bought this game, I’ve played it more than any other game in my collection. Running through fitness mode is now my favorite work-out, not least of all because I don’t have to leave the house in order to do it. The calorie calculator basically just assigns 25 calories burned to every song, which I think is inaccurate, but I don’t really care. I just enjoy jumping around in my living room to pop songs and being able to call that exercise.

My friends and I had a crazy fun time playing this game. I got all red from jumping around so much, and we had to cool down with a couple rounds of Trials Evolution once we pulled the couch out of the kitchen. Best three person Just Dance 2 dance party ever.

May 4, 2012

What I Wore: All My Old Clothes

a fat girl in a black sweater and black pants

I was doing some manual labor around the office today, so I wore some old grungy clothes. One thing I have learned is that vans with no socks are not such a good on-your-feet-all-day-lifting-heavy-things shoe choice.

Sweater was bought on the street in San Francisco
Patches are from various places
Dead Kennedys Shirt patched with plaid fabric and was given to me by Katy’s little sister Shery;’s high school boyfriend. Forgot his name
Blue undershirt is from Target
Black Corduroy pants are from The Gap
Skull patterned Vans are from the Vans store

April 30, 2012

Review: Trials Evolution Races Into Top Gear

I play all my games on easy because I have a saying: Life is hard, videogames should not be. I also have another saying: Life is boring, videogames should not be.Trials Evolution is neither boring, nor difficult…at first. It never gets boring, but it also happens to get insanely difficult, and sort of in the way where you can hear the developer laughing at you from the ether as you crash face first into an oil barrel, a stone fist, a shipping container, and so on. Really, when you buy Trials Evo, you’re getting two games: a fun, visually stunning, self aware motocross game, and a serious platformer with an outpouring of creativity and depth behind it. Even if you only appreciate one of those things, this game will be good to you.

First off, let’s get to the basics. Every course shows three medals that you can get: bronze, silver and gold. I’ve read that if you do insanely well, you can get a platinum medal, although there’s no spot for it on the stats page, and of course I’m not about to bring my 45 second run down to 25 before this review is out the door. Just completing a course will get you a bronze medal, everybody gets that. Silver, gold and platinum are doled out when you make a certain time. The game won’t tell you what that time is, but it does offer a handy little yellow dot with your name on it to show you where your best time racer would be if you were racing yourself. It also shows you handy white dots with your friends’ names on them so you can not only see who’s kicking the pants off you, but also glean how they’re doing that. If they hang back on a jump you gun it on, and end up face planting at the end of, you can get an idea of what to do next time. But even if you do crash, it’s usually a good time because the rider will fall out ragdoll style, much to everyone’s amusement. If you don’t get to see your rider crash, you get a treat anyway because at the end of every race, the rider is usually exploded, or dropped, or catapulted to his death in a rather graphic way, which is awesome and funny.

Trials Evolution has four basic sections separated by four different tutorial levels, or license tests. Licenses D and C have one level each, licenses B and A have two. The levels have anywhere from 5 to 12 courses in them for you to ride. In order to get to the next license test level, you must earn a certain amount of medals. This is always more medals than you can earn by simply completing each course, which is a good thing. At first, I was annoyed by the repetition of courses, as I am always annoyed by having to repeat anything at all ever (pet peeve). But my annoyance was diminished by the fact that these courses are beautiful and fun, and the better you are at riding them, the more you can take in the course while you go, and the more delightful it is when you don’t keep crashing all over the place. Besides, Trials isn’t really a game you want to blow through. If I hadn’t been writing this review, I would have moved a lot slower through the levels.

The License D beginner level is called Walk in the Park is exactly what it says on the tin: No rough stuff, above the belt, over the clothes and all that. In License C’s Fuel for the Flames, it gets a little more exciting as you can do more complex tricks with your bike, so you get more interesting courses to ride.

License B is where the game starts to take a turn. The goal is still to complete the race in good time, but instead of racing through and trying not to fall, the player will notice that speed is not really their friend. These courses have a lot of jumping the bike, stalling it at just the right moment, and taking advantage of weight shifting in order to manipulate the machine to cover varied and unpredictable terrain. The first of the B license levels, Terminal Velocity, isn’t really that bad: It’s interesting to shift gears and try something new. I’ve always been a fan of platformers, so this is definitely fun. Although difficult, it’s rewarding to coax the bike into new and different feats of agility. The second level, Cutting Edge, is where they lost me. This tedious, concept album of a level feels like it’s basically a collection of all the courses the developers made when they were messing around after work. There’s a completely black and white course with the camera fixed at a panorama in which you have to navigate moving gears as a feature. There’s also a seemingly never ending course where the respawn points are as far away from each other as the length of some other courses in their entirety. Someone on my friends list managed to finish it in 14 minutes, earning them a bronze medal. I spent thirty minutes in the same position, gritting my teeth trying to get through this course before the game decided I was finished for me. My feet, legs, butt and trigger finger all went numb and I got nothing.

Needless to say, I was unable to make it to the A license test. If you play the game at a leisurely pace, unlike myself, your skill level will increase naturally over time, and I have a feeling that you’ll appreciate the insanely hard upper levels as you continue to play.

Not being a big fan of getting cussed at by 12 year olds, I don’t find myself on live that often, but as this is a review, I played a couple of rounds. Live play is really simple. There are 3 or 4 players on a track, your name is colored a nice green and trails out behind you as you ride, and the tracks are from the game so you’ll be familiar with them. Everyone was younger than me and better than me, so that’s nothing new. At-home multiplayer is more fun, in my opinion. Multiplayer supports 2 to 4 players, names in white, familiar tracks except modified for 4 people. If you crash or fall behind, the game kindly respawns you at a future point in the course so the screen doesn’t pan out too much. Points in multiplayer are calculated in an obscure way and frequently the person who finished first is not the real winner. I think this may have something to do with respawns and tricks, although I wasn’t really able to figure that out completely.

I liked that bike and rider customizations carry over into multiplayer both at home and on live. I often have trouble telling my track from that of the other player, even if my name is sticking out of my head the whole time. Something about there being more than one person on the screen always makes me look at the other person’s character. Customization in this instance can be invaluable. Besides, I was always the kind of kid that dressed her barbies up and then threw them back in the box, so you know my biker is fab-u-las. Also, he keeps me from trying to drive another player’s bike, which usually results in me crashed and flailing around for several seconds while my eyeline follows someone else’s rider off the screen.

Speaking of customization, I also tried the level maker. Having only ever dealt with the level maker from Little Big Planet, I can honestly say this is the easiest, most intuitive and helpful level maker I’ve ever used. Ever. There are two different kinds of level maker: easy for the casual creator and pro for those with broader talents. Unlike in Trials HD, the predecessor to this game, you can share your levels with every other user, and download levels to play yourself. Let me just say that people have been busy. There are already a ton of different levels to choose from. Most of the higher rated levels are homages to other games or movies. I played a recreation of the Terminator 2 LA River chase scene by one suttonleo2 that was rather awesome. Of course, fan made levels won’t have the smoothness of finished game tracks, but what they lose in catchiness, they make up for in creativity. The semi truck in the terminator course was made entirely out of gameplay materials, none of which is a semi truck.

Overall, I highly recommend Trials Evolution. For 1200 microsoft points, or roughly 15 American dollars, this game is a great one to have around the house. It’s fun to play with friends, it’s fun to play for a wind-down, it’s even fun to play on Live. There are tons of hours of entertainment packed into this thing, and for only $15 it’s a hell of a deal. Yeah, I got frustrated with the higher levels, but those aren’t there for someone who’s only had the game a week. This is the kind of game you go back to over and over again. This is the game you pull out when your mom wants to know why xbox is so fun, this is the game you sit your little cousins in front of on Thanksgiving, this is the game you tool around on when you’ve got no plans and the television sucks. The price is right, the game is fun, I’d buy it for you if I liked you enough. What are you waiting for? Get this game!

April 24, 2012

Ok, You’re Special, But Not in the Way You Think

Untitled

I tend to think I’m really smart and creative. I got this trait from my father, who thinks we are both smart and creative. And we are. The fallacy here isn’t weather or not we’re awesome people, the fallacy here is weather or not that is actually worth anything. Dad and I tend to think it is, but in the real world, it really isn’t. In fact, if you ask any employer, chances are he’d really rather not have the smart and creative over the hard working and quiet.

Smart and creative people tend to think we’re special, we say things like “I’m more of an IDEA man, myself,” and we are completely serious when we say things like that. Other than being a huge truckload of horseshit, the concept of being ‘an idea man’ only works when your ideas are good, and unless you have several floors of cubicled minions to test those ideas for you, you’re going to have to do some LEGWORK to figure out if they’re any good. In terms of what this planet needs, the ratio of IDEA men to LEGWORK men is about one million to one in favor of legwork.

Not every actor can be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or whatever hot-n-totty the children are a abluster for these days. For the rest of the cast of Bowlingbrook Montucky JV Senior Cheer Squad, there is LEGWORK. Learn how to wait tables, or deliver packages by bicycle, or do voiceovers, because you may think you’re G.I. JOE material, but you’re going to have to prove it before they bring you to rehearsal and sit you next to Marlon Wayans.

And that’s the sad little boat every IDEA man finds herself in. There’s a million more like you, whose daddy told her she was special, vying for a space at the top of the cube pile, wondering why no one will notice their glory. The reason no one cares is simple: no one cares. Out of the piles and piles of IDEA men in the universe, the lucky ones of us only have one daddy, the rest of these bastards don’t even have that.

Obviously my own dad knows I’m awesome, hopefully at least one of your parents or guardians felt that way about you too. But nobody else gives a half a dry, white shit. All of us who walk around with great ideas hemorrhaging out of us like a homemade tracheotomy need to find a buddy and learn how to do the LEGWORK. Chances are your legwork buddy has great ideas too, and nobody ever told them they were worth anything. Teach your legwork buddy to believe in their creativity, and get them to teach you how to get your hands dirty and how to not be a douche.

April 17, 2012

Neighborhood Drama Turns Into Navel Gazing Freak Out

ben's car with side view mirror torn off
This morning when Ben went to get into his car to go to work, he found it missing a side view mirror. It was torn off the sidewalk side, so the culprit is definitely a person and not a bad driver. This is the second time someone has broken off his side view mirror. The only thing we can think of is that the kids in the neighborhood have some sort of crew, initiation to which is procured in trade for a side view mirror from the shittiest car on the block.

I get really mad when bad things happen to my boyfriend, and I feel totally powerless over whichever punks have targeted his poor, run down little car two times in a row. He works really hard, he drives a shitty car because he doesn’t make enough money to buy a new one and somebody decides that it’s okay to take pieces of his car just because they can. It costs a lot of money to replace a side view mirror, even a plain old plastic mirror you have to adjust with your hand like the one he has.

I don’t know why, but my immediate reaction to something like that is to wish I had committed more vandalism in my youth. That’s completely, one hundred percent the wrong answer, but that’s the first thing I think. I have an overinflated sense of fairness, especially when it comes to me and mine. I want to balance the scales on a universal level, but I cant.

There are days when I love my neighborhood, and then there are days like today. When I finally trudged home from work myself there was a random stranger, (I know a good number of the neighbors) standing in our courtyard yelling about this “bitch” who “had touched my stuff,” and how he felt that “she had no right” to touch it. The yelling only lasted for 5 minutes at the very most, but that’s kind of a scary experience. One second you’re saving the citizens of Skyrim from various nefarious foes, the next there’s a grown ass man in a hoodie yelling incomprehensible gibberish in the courtyard and looking fucking scary.

Days like this I just want to know what. the. fuck. I’m going to be 30 in three short years, and when I envision my childhood self, with all her dreams and plans looking at my life, all I can think of her saying is “Jesus, you live in a shithole.” And it’s true. There are roaches, the shower leaks, the sink was literally painted white before we moved in and now there’s always flakes of latex paint in my sponge after I do the dishes. The sidewalks are all cracked, the “front yard” is filled with dog poop that no one picks up and we randomly have electrical outages that affect the half the apartment for weeks at a time.

Is this normal? I don’t think this is normal.

To be fair, I’m just upset about Ben’s car, and annoyed at myself because I’m trying to figure out my plan for the next few years, and I’m worried about the future and money and status. Despite my tirade about the roaches and the electricity and the paint in the sink, this is the perfect place for us right now. We work so many hours that it’s almost ludicrous to have the amount of space we occupy anyway, why pay more for something in a nicer neighborhood that will just sit empty for longer because we’ll have to work even more in order to afford it? But I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. Ben and I work until we drop, and what does it get us? Really, the answer to this is: it gets us a lot. We have more fun at our jobs than anybody else I know, even though the amount of care we put into them can sometimes make them extremely frustrating as well as fun. We also have a fairly large apartment considering what we pay and how close we are to the beach. We’re paying off our student loans, living comfortably and creating long term savings.

When I look back at this time last year, and the year before, all the way back to when I was 18 living in a garage, working two menial jobs and going to high school in the hopes of getting a scholarship to college, I remember how amazing it is for me to even live indoors right now.

My computer finally died after nearly 5 years of dedicated service and I was able to pay cash for another machine without any worry at all. There was a time in my life when $1.53 meant the difference between being able to afford a grilled cheese sandwich at In and Out and not eating lunch at all. If 18 year old me got to follow 27 year old me around for a day, she would probably be appalled at how lazy I’ve gotten. I don’t do nearly the hours, or the strenuous labor that I did in school, and yet I feel constantly tired. 18 year old me could live for a year on what I currently make in a month, and yet I wonder if I have enough.

There’s something I’m missing, and I don’t know what it is. Currently my job is in a place where I don’t know if it’ll be here in three months time. It’s stressing me out and making me insecure about my abilities as a worker. I’m trying to save all the money I can before the (in my mind) inevitable lay off, but I can’t help but wonder at times like these, what’s the purpose of all this work? Is there a better way? I personally think that I’m the type of person who will work myself silly no matter the context, I’ll find a way to throw myself in. And the rewards I get from working hard are so much more than monetary. Just like when I was 18, trying to navigate college scholarships and financial aid packages and dorms and books all by myself I want to know “what is all this work for? Will it actually help me, or is it futile?” What I learned from that, and what I lean on now is that hard work is never wasted. Even if you don’t get what you want, or what you think you need, hard work is a perpetual motion machine.

There have been times when it seemed desperate, where if I had just gotten a glimpse of my life today I would have felt relieved. These are the times I have to think about now when I’m frustrated like I was then, wanting to know if it all works out. Based on experience, it does.

Manhattan Beach at Sunrise
I live 15 minutes away from this. How amazing is that?

April 4, 2012

Carmel Vacation: Day 3

For our third and final day in Carmel, we walked over to Katy’s Place for breakfast again. It was so good the day before, we just had to go back. And since it was Monday, there wasn’t a wait at all. After that, we walked around a little bit and enjoyed the feeling of Carmel, wandering in and out of shops and looking at the amazing houses and buildings before we said our goodbyes. Ben and I drove home, and his parents headed to the rest of their vacation.

This trip came in the middle of a very stressful time for me at work. I don’t talk about work on my blog because I feel like it’s unprofessional to blog about the office too much. Suffice it to say we were on a major campaign, and at the time we didn’t know what the outcome would be and the whole team was exhausted.

Even though the vacation was only three days long, it was the perfect amount to reset my brain. I left work definitely edging toward the end of my rope, and came back completely refreshed and ready to do my best no matter what. It just so happened that the campaign was successful, and now things are really getting exciting. I’m glad I had this break to walk around with my awesome boyfriend and his wonderful parents in the crisp, fresh beach air.

March 19, 2012

What’s Up with the Blog? – Part 1

You may have noticed that this blog has been updating Monday through Friday for awhile now, you may wonder about the sudden burst of content. I sort of wonder about it myself. Given that I don’t know what I’m doing, I do know my motivation, which all stems from a conversation I’ve been having with my amazing boyfriend Ben for several months now. As many of you may know, Ben is from Western Oregon, and he misses it terribly. As a born and bred Los Angeleno, I never thought I would want to live anywhere else. During the time I spent as a kid with my father and his family in Eastern Oregon (they’re really two different states), the time I spent in East LA County in high school, and the time I spent in college in Orange County (check out my blog about moving back to LA) I learned that I did not enjoy places that weren’t Los Angeles. I thought that it would never change, that I everything I wanted was in LA.

The beach is 15 minutes from my house, the mountains are 30 minutes. Within an hour, I can drive to any one of a number of amazingly beautiful or inspiring locations from the naturally occurring to the entirely man made. I can buy anything from any culture or lifestyle, at nearly any time of night or day. Los Angeles is amazing, it really is. It will always be my first home and it will always have a special place in my heart. But as much amazing stuff is everywhere around me, I don’t see it. I don’t experience it or enjoy it.

I don’t go to the beach on certain days or holidays because it’s a nightmare. A 6 mile drive that normally takes 15 minutes turns into a half an hour of lurching the car forward amid a mass of weekend beach goers. Trying to find parking is a chore that you usually have to pay for the privilege of doing, and any restaurant has a wait of 30 minutes. Once you get to the ocean, there’s trash and people everywhere, and when you decide to go home you have an hour of frustrating walk back to the car, fighting traffic back home before you’re back at your house. The same goes for any destination in Los Angeles. Everything costs money, and if there’s even a little traffic you double your commute time.

The work of driving through traffic an hour to work and an hour back every day leaves me drained. I usually insist that Ben drive us everywhere over the weekends, because I have become a person who doesn’t like to drive.

When I was a baby, the car used to put me to sleep. I went on countless road trips with my dad and my grandma growing up and they are happy memories for me. I feel an attachment to my car, I used to love being in the car, but that has changed. I get angry when I’m in the car now, even if it’s a weekend and I have nowhere to be. I’m constantly listening to audiobooks and podcasts to keep myself distracted from the traffic all around me.

I’m starting to think that, even though it’s the perfect geographic location, LA is not my cultural home. The traffic, the noise and the crowds meet with the Hollywood influence, and the weirdly glad-handing social practices to create the perfect douche bag factory. My priorities in life are not to make money, or achieve status, which is good, because I don’t have either. But in this environment, I feel like I’m not able to take time for the things I do find important: my friends, my chosen family and myself. It’s difficult to exercise when every work out has another 30 minutes tacked on for commute. It’s hard to see my friends when they are all an hour drive in traffic away, or even the closer ones don’t see me because I am too tired from driving all week or all day. It’s hard to just walk outside when my neighborhood, while filled with good, hard working people, is not a pretty sight.

We can’t afford to move someplace nicer without endangering our safety (there are some really nice houses in gang territory) or lengthening at least one of our commutes (most likely mine, which is already long). If either of us made any less money we wouldn’t be able to afford our lives, it’s only this year that Ben and I have manged to collect any semblance of savings. And our luxury items tend to run towards organic foods rather than expensive toys, although we both do have tablets, we’re working on old computers and wearing Target or Thrift Store clothes.

We’re both working like dogs, and for the most part, we both enjoy our jobs. We have great co-workers, work on fun projects that we enjoy and learn from, and are relatively respected in our offices and in our respective niches of the industries we work in. But is that enough? This is the conversation we’ve been having the last few months. When you work your butt off Monday through Friday, frequently working extra hours or on the weekend, and you don’t get paid very much and at least you enjoy what you do, but it leaves you unable to enjoy your life outside of work, is that enough?

Maybe if every work day wasn’t lengthened by two hours of mind-numbing traffic, and maybe if every time we wanted to go anywhere we didn’t have to get in the car and drive out of the ghetto to do so, I could say yes. But the conclusion I’ve come to over the last several months is that it’s not. Not for the long term.