So - it's only been over 3 months since my last post. In fact, I wasn't even sure if my blog still existed until a week ago. My dedication is truly awe-inspiring.
More gunshots outside my apt. the other night in Bed-Stuy. Summer and i were awoken around 5 am Saturday morning by 4 shots on the sidewalk below. Milo ran to the window to see and Summer quickly retrieved him to avoid any feline accidents. I am growing tired of my neighborhood and all its 'personality'.
I think I must have slept almost the entire weekend still trying to re-cover from my illness. Summer and I went to Kansas last week and the very last night I cought her cold due to sleeping in a tiny bed together at my grandma's house. Ive been snotty for over a week not and just now finally starting to feel better. We visited my both my grandmothers who are currently living in the same nursing home. It was one of the worst things I have ever done in my life. My Dad's mom, now confined to her bed, looked terrible and was begging us to let her sit in a chair or go outside. She has lost the use of her hands and is in the throws of dementia. I nearly broke down in tears talking with her. My Mom's mother looked great and spoke with mental clarity. Across the street lives my Uncle Denny in a different home. We got there late and interupted his dinner. Since his stroke, he can no longer form words very well but still seems mentally sharp. We met his new love, Emma(?), who was a surgeon that was paralyzed after being hit by a drunk driver and later abandoned by her husband and family. Everyone else in the nursing home looked like zombies and barely made eye contact as you walked past. Such sad places they are. We went for dinner right after seeing my uncle, and along the way I couldn't hold back the tears after seeing my grandmother in such pain. She was a completely different person and I dont even think she knew who I was.
It was really strange returning to the city of my relatives and where my parents grew up, to not visit my grandmothers at home. We stayed at my Dad's Mom's place which was especially creepy without her and piles of things stacked everywhere as my dad and aunt attempt to go through it all keeping the valuables and tossing the junk. The pool, an object of so many memories for me, was covered by a tarp, apparently full of frogs. I had also never visited this place with a girlfriend before. She was disturbed by all the animal heads that my grandfather had placed all over the house. Needless to say, it was my worst visit to Joplin ever.
Ever since the visit, I havent been right mentally. I have spent this last week feeling completely lost and utterly hopeless. I hate my job, which doesnt help matters, and every morning I wake up totally depressed about having to return. I know it's a stepping stone to something better, but I'm feeling paralyzed on the first step - that and I'm too busy in the job to work on getting out of it. The only way for me to get ahead will be to stay late everyday and make steps in the direction I want to continue in. I'm trying to enroll in a class or two this Fall but I still dont have the cash to do it. The company will reimburse me upon completion of the class but I need to pay for it up front. My job is pretty much my idea of hell - ad sales. If there is one thing I never thought I would be doing, it's ad sales. I'm basically a slave for a large publishing company's websites working for two people and sometimes feeling like im getting paid to do two jobs. It's really tedious busy work that allows you no room to let your thoughts wander. I work 9-6 through lunch everyday. Today is one of the first lunches in a long time that I have actually taken.
Working here has made me realize that I am simply not cut out for the corporate workforce, and maybe not even for the work force in general. Everything about it: the routine, dealing with annoying ignorant people, living in a cube, sitting on my ass, working through lunch, being worked to the bone - all of it makes me nothing but unhappy. I used to hope I would get fired. This place has made me feel totally inhuman and uncreative. When I get home I'm so tired from working that I have no energy to pursue anything outside of this place. It sucks me dry. IM MISERABLE! The world of a media indentured slave is not for me. If I was intent on rising to the top and making an inflated salary, then this would be perfect - but I'm not. I feel like I'm having a mid-life crisis in my late twenties.
I want to write, travel, create, live an existence outside of buildings! Im completely stagnated in this environment. I dont need the cush 9-5 life, I need excitement and variety, kinetic tasks and entropy! I don't want to politically tiptoe around heads and whisper about co-workers I despise. I dont want to participate in the pettiness of corporate homeostasis. Unlike others, my goal in life is not to impress my bosses. I have settled, once again, for this position, and the results should not be surprising to me in the least. Settlement = early death. I'm 28 years old and I feel like I have made no progress in my life in the last 4 years. Do you know how frustrating that is? I feel like I have made reverse progress, like I've been held back while all my friends ran ahead. At this rate, I'm gonna hit 30 and still have no clue as to what direction to take with my life. I blame television and un-diagnosed ADD.
So, hopefully no one ever reads these rantings of a rotten American ex-youth who doesnt know how good he has it. I've lived in 3rd-world countries so i dont lack experience or awareness. It's just that without them right in front of me 24-7 I simply forget. Being surrounded in the sesspool of the USA, I hate participating - I refuse to swim, and I begin to drown. I won't even dog-paddle cause it looks silly. I choose to continue on in search of clean water, where people don't throw all their garbage, where adults live like kids- or at least retain that sense of pleasure and happiness in the life process. I'm like a kid that is still refusing to become an adult, there is simply nothing there that interests me.
Ok, enough from this sad sack. It's back to performing the duties of a robot. At least a robot serves a purpose, I'm not even sure I do that. If they had told me that this was what lay at the end of the educational process, I never would have left. At least I can still be free when I'm asleep.
