employablog

I used to work in an office doing curriculum editing and development for a certain test preparation company, specifically for the MCAT.  The MCAT is the big daddy of all standardized admissions tests. It makes the SAT look like a summer breeze and the GRE look like your differently-abled neighbor.

It is the longest, it is the hardest, and golly, it’s the only one that actually tests science.

Anyhoo, I used to do all this stuff for it, and I used to have to do it in an office, an office located in Times Square, which, although it is in the best city in the world (New York) is just about the worst place in the world.

Unless you are an obese couple from Iowa, or a Japanese tourist. Then it’s a dream-cum-laude.

Anyways.

Now I set students straight. They contact me, and I tell them how it is via email, and I get paid for this. It is great, it is incredible, and it keeps my head full of all this stuff, some of which is pretty interesting. Don’t ever tell me the Krebs Cycle is lame. It is not. It’s awesome, and you love it. If you don’t, send me an email, and I’ll get paid to tell you why the Krebs Cycle rules.

So, as a teacher, I used to have to teach in person. It was no fun, I get anxiety, I turn red, I sweat, and so on. Though all this is on the inside. On the outside I look fine, a little awkward, but otherwise together. But I don’t want an ulcer. So, e-teaching is the way to go. Either way, all the teaching materials are online, and we have a monthly password to access them. My buddy T makes the password. I used to be able to walk down the hall and see him. Now he doesn’t even have a facebook picture, just a question mark, and so my only contact is a monthly email telling me the new password. And lately they’ve all been internal marketing codes. T’s creative flair gets overridden and I can feel him hurting a tiny, but unimportant bit.

I mean, he’s made such passwords as zamb0n1, during the winter! It seems like a lame way to get kicks. But after dozens of log-ons, every day of every week, something like zamb0n1 can make me smile more than a cryptic marketing code. We already work there, so marketing to the worker bees is well … subliminally … mean. Besides, there’s nothing funny about marketing codes — yet. But zamb0n1, that one’s still my favorite. Like a little Christmas present from T.

And now, I just got another little gift. No more marketing codes, just raw T.

But this password is current, so I can’t tell.

Best believe it’s a T classic.

I just finished moving into my new apartment, and with it, I left a number of things behind. Most of them are tangible, some tangible (my twin bed mattress) and all of them (like my twin bed mattress) are gladly left behind.

I’m not old, nor am I mature, but moving gave me the terrible oozing possibility to pick off all the scabs that had been bothering me, bleed on the way over and make sure that they never returned. For example, here is a list of things that I have outgrown:

Dimmer switches that hum. Seriously.

Road bike tires. Mountain bike tires are stupid and slow, especially when your bike is your car, and vice versa. Winter will be interesting.

Rollerblades. I bike to get a round, I run for exercise. Rollerblades are some unholy bastard child of terrible fashion and low impact exercise for fatties. If it ever comes to that I’ll sign up for water aerobics thankyouverymuch.

Leaky roofs. Eesh, especially in Minnesota.

Excessive knick-knacks. When I started painting, I began producing more than enough stuff to be saving porcelain manatees and blown glass porpoises.

My old filing system. Now I use a cabinet instead of any old flat surface I happen to pass by. The psychological relief from the new system is beyond words. But still nowhere near as good as orgasm … or procrasturbation.
Dirty dishes. Never again. Too many roommates, too many tears.

SO with that, I began my new life, chapter 4, to a good start. And there are still a ton of things that I haven’t nor ever will outgrow, so, cheers cheers to:

Exposed brick

Hugs

Cheap, cheap beer
Fart jokes

My pants (I’m real slender, an anatomist would say gracile)

I was a little nervous this weekend as I prepared to do my taxes. I made a cup of tea and found my calculator (previous use: Tetris, 12th grade calculus). I found a pencil, purchased a pencil sharpener, and I would have taken the phone off the hook, except I don’t have a phone with a hook. I settled for ‘Silent’: These were the steps I could recall from watching my parents do their taxes until sometime in the mid 90s when I guess they hired an accountant. The whole thing seemed like quite an operation.

Of course, my parents never had the benefit of tax software with deduction maximizers, so I had that going for me. I plopped my laptop on top of all the papers and fired up the software. It asked me a series of questions and the deduction total kept climbing. “Awesome,” I thought. “Doing taxes is fun!” About an hour later I was nearly done. As I was only fully employed for around 25% of 2006, the federal government apparently considers me basically impoverished and I am going to be getting back a lot of what was withheld from each paycheck over the past few months. What success!

I felt confident, I felt grown up. I had done it.

“There are only a few more steps to ensure you’ve maximized your deductions!”

“OK!” I was in a great mood.

“Good news!” the next box said. “The Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return. It is designed to refund previously collected long distance telephone taxes. Almost everyone is eligible!”

Everyone except those who have never had a home phone. “No,” I answered, and clicked my ringtone back to Final Countdown.

“Were you affected by Hurricane Katrina?”

Wow, buzz kill, tax software. “No.”

“Did you become a widow/er this year?”

There’s a box I hope I never have to check. I was beginning to understand why people don’t usually think of taxes as awesome. The thought crossed my mind that a real deduction maximizer would be a pretty tough character: “Not a widower, eh? BLAHM! You are now! Oh, and I signed you up for AT&T. In Biloxi.”

“No.”

A couple weeks ago, the viscous necessities of all sorts in my apartment began to run out.

I first noticed this when I was doing the dishes. My dish soap formerly featured an omnipotent blue luster, as if to say “I dare you to use me all.” Each day I squirted a small bit onto my sponge—taking the “ultra-concentrated” label to heart—and watched as the rest of the soap confidently oozed back into place until it appeared I had used none at all. Now, what’s left of the dish soap cowers at the bottom of its clear plastic container stained with faint traces dirty dishwater and dried suds.

There are other things too; laundry detergent, tooth paste, shampoo… all of a sudden items I formally dosed with abandon I am now rationing out in impossibly small quantities with the hopes of recreating my own personal Chanukah-style miracle.

Of course, this was bound to happen. With enough loads of dishes, trips to the laundromat, hair washings, teeth brushings, window scrubbings — eventually these things run out. The strange part is how they are all giving out at the same time, almost as if they were designed with my particular patterns in mind. But how could they know that the guy who uses a little dish soap and a lot of shaving cream, a tiny amount of laundry detergent and a copius amount of windex would have arrived at “empty” with so many products at the same time?

For lack of another credible explanation, I’m tentatively blaming Google. They know everything.

Every time I fire up iTunes, I am presented with a concrete reminder of the new life in the real world. Where there used to be dozens of shared music libraries with cute names like “mikes hott tunz” or “inda club” or “Untitled Music Library,” now there’s just one: my roommate’s.

Last week, her computer broke down, and there are no longer any shared music libraries in my iTunes. MyTunes are iLonely.

While in college, I accomplished very little work during the daylight hours. Instead, readings, papers and the occasional interactive media installation were accomplished mostly in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied by copious amounts of Diet Coke and dining hall conversation. In the working world, things are a little different. I show up at the office around nine o’clock, sit down in front of my computer, and am expected to be productive for roughly 9-14 hours. After this, I’m free to go home and do whatever I’d like until the next weekday morning at nine.

Though it took some getting used to, there are some advantages to this arrangement. First, I no longer require multiple liters of Diet Coke followed by consecutive nights awake followed by consecutive days in bed in order to accomplish something. At least as importantly, I almost never have homework. Since productivity is basically forced on me during the day, my nights can be used for ‘me time.’ You know, things like… I don’t know, reading I guess. Or balancing my checkbook? Or whatever. The point is, I own my nights.

Except now my brain is reverting to its old ways.

For the past several days, I’ve been dreaming of spreadsheets. Not in a fantastical way either. Instead, my brain logically sorts through whatever problem I spent the previous day working on, and I wake up with a list of what to do when I start again. I don’t know what to make of this, except that I’m pretty sure this is something like double jeopardy and it should be illegal in this, and every country.