And since we’re involved in fixin’ people up, it isn’t too much of a leap to say we are all wizards of sorts … in a sort of wizarding school … if you will, give my love to J.K. Rowling that saucy minx.

We started histology and biochemistry today, meaning I had a lot of chair time, enough time, in fact to create a list of disturbingly apt parallels to Harry Potter. Here is the Harry Potter translation of the four health professions.
Gryffindor = M.D.  obvi.

Ravenclaw = MPH … they’re thinkers, but are they doers?  Is there a House, MPH following an ornery man who doesn’t give a darn what locals think by God, he’ll get them closed sewers where’s my vicodin.

Hufflepuff = Pharm D. They’re real good at mixing those potions.

Slytherin = Dentists. obvi.

And nursing, well, I didn’t want to lose the title to Gryffindor.

time is money.

Then we get our first job, at the ripe age of 14, we learn it first-hand. Literally watching a clock and equating it with minimum wage nickels and dimes. As a cashier at a suburban movie theater, time really was money. Through the window I had a perfect view of a digital clock tower atop a bank. Each minute was worth just over eight-and-a-half cents.

Once that mindset gels, it’s easy to plug anything in this time-money equation. This led me to drop-off service. In Brooklyn, it was cheap, and if you valued your time at anything more than $1, you were actually making imaginary money by doing laundry drop-off service. And that equation also lends itself well to checking up on credit card bills, aberrant phone charges and so on. If it’s worth a decent hourly wage, then the molasses minutes of hold music are worth it.

This is how I met TLG - Just For Me representative Judy Akansas, Judy Deepthroat, or Judy DeepSouth. Monikers aside, her first name was Judy, and the hamster running in her brain was plumb tuckered out.

Many moons ago, my credit card company, JP Chase sent me a check.  A tiny $9.someunevenamountofchange check. It came with no explanation, and looked … suspiciously, like a refund check.

Fasting forward (and breaking the fast, atoning and so forth) to today, TLG-Just For Me billed my for $59.95. Lord knows  who or what they are, how they found me, and why I owe them cashmoney. Anyhoo, the statement also had an 800 number. I nancy drewed that shit, and that brings us back to Judy McInbred. Eventually my words reached her (moneyback moneyback moneyback, how did you find me) reached her, ad I left happy, with all my faculties intact.

But just for kicks I did a search on TLG Just For Me to see what it is. I still have no idea, but I did find a ton of sites regarding the current lawsuits against them and JP Chase for credit card scams.

Que interessante, or French Toastes.

The moral is, I made $9.someunevenamountofchange in about 20 minutes. I still feel a little underpaid, but it won’t go in the regrets column in my permanent record, buried in a capsule ‘neeth the Geenpoint oil spill

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.

So not the case. My professor ambled over, reached his hands into our bodies abdomen and started poking around.

“Mhmm, mhmm,” he said, squinting his eyes, “Oh yes! This feels just like a live specimen! Seems you have a very light preservation.”

‘Light,’ here is a euphemism for “not.” We have something that should be preserved, but is not, so it is decaying.

He then went on, destroying my ideas of cleanliness.

“So, for you guys, under no means are you to open the colon. If you do, yknow, just yell ‘CODE BROWN,’ and I’ll run out the room.” He smiled and laughed, and walked away.

Since then, there have been a few silent code browns, and today, as I was doing my …

my business. It’s what I do after I finish my coffee, I noticed a familiar smell.

Dead poo smells just like real live poo.

I don’t know how it happened, but all my friends have business cards. At first I thought it was a fluke. I saw Adam drop a B-card (I’m so out of the loop — is that cool to say, or is it like saying ‘frisco’?).

He did it casually. He did it like it was something he’d done before.

“Dude, you have a business card? You just give it to people?”

Of course he does. He makes a living doing freelance. That is what he told me. It made sense.

Well. Adam is freelance, of course he’d need a business card, but then each and every one of my roommates had a little cardboard card with their name, some little letterhead thing and some designor font that made it cool. Kelly, Tanveer, Josh, they all had them. Even Kelly’s little sister! They were in irregular shapes, they had backgrounds … they …

I was immediately jealous.

Then I thought of my own business card. What would it say?

“Writer” “Cultural comedian” “Observational humorist” “Part time dissector”

Are these skills marketable?

Furthermore, I won’t have a job for four years, and I already know what that job is going to be.

A professional.

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)

Come back, OK?

Next: I am a unique character. I leave impressions. For example, I play the “misheard,” game. It’s easy, and you can play it at home. Someone says, anything to you and you simply say a word that sounds similar, phrased as a question, or in a related statement.

Say that you say to me, “I like those new pants,”

Then I would reply, “I would love to dance!”

Then the person usually thinks you misheard accidentally, not that you are just being a douchebag, and clarifies.

“No, no, pants, I like those pants.”

Now we are in round two. I would say something like,

“Yeah, those ants are crazy.”

It goes on like this until someone catches on, and yells at me.

But, and especially now, the general public found a comeback to my particular breed of hyjinx. They say:

“I can’t believe you’re going to be a doctor.”

What I found out, though, is that quitting, is awesome.

Sure, there are some awkward bits. People say they won’t know what to do without you, which is entirely untrue. They will do the exact same thing they did before I popped into said company. In fact, because I knew how temporary this officeland honeymoon was, I cut a low profile, ducking in and out of the office on the minute, eating lunch at my desk with a spreadsheet open, going to the gym during lunch break.

I was already leaving one life, and since the corporate world has no place for me, and likewise I have no place for it, so leaving two lives seemed reckless and too much. Instead I chose to flit in and out of the work life, honestly checking in between 9 and 10, and checking out each day around six.

But quitting — I would get another job some day just so I could quit it. I don’t think I paid for a lunch during my whole last week. I got more than my share of attention and my modest vacation, Peru for a month to get my head right, surf and learn a language was lauded as independent, incredible and the right thing. Sandwiched between medical school, and I was suddenly congratulated just for doing what I want to do.

People bought me drinks, took me out, asked what I was up to, and cornered me, forcing me to go out for drinks.

My reclusive tendency when stuck in fluorescent cubicles got mistaken for coolness.

I wear my sunglasses at night.

Being bored is a two-edged mistress, it heightens and dulls the senses all at once. So while you may drift in and out of conversation or miss an end parentheses here and there, you also get a knack for noting the most minute minutia.

One thing that I particularly notice is people’s bathroom schedules, and not just that, but their habits. I’m not snooping around like Ramona Quimby, this is just what happens when my method for not falling asleep at my desk is to go take a walk. And because aimlessly wandering through a bunch of semi-cubicles is, well, pathetic, I force a trip to the bathroom.

Here’s how my ‘ol office goes to the bathroom:

CEO guy has the same pee schedule as me, so does Janitor guy. Neither are afraid to talk to you in the bathroom.

Eccentric math guy only uses the handicapped stall (larger, more luxurious) for all his business, and washes his hands in each sink at least once before leaving. There are five sinks total, but the fifth sink is actually in the handicapped stall, and has no soap. The handicapped stall’s sink then is like a preliminary rinse before moving through the main four sinks. The last two sinks are push handles rather than turn handles, so they give shorter bursts of water. These are how he finishes when he has his druthers.

Youth-marketing guy has chronic diarrhea, and is a grunter.

Foreign-market guy continues hallway conversations into the adjacent urinal. He is as foreign as the markets he reaches.

Flamboyant HR guy doesn’t understand that his office spot is in-between my desk and urination, and holds long painful conversations, and I hold painfully contain sweet release, wishing that I hadn’t downed two Nalgenes with the specific goal of leaving my desk for the bathroom.

Executive-who-looks-like-an-absentee-father-from-an-’80s-Disney-movie Guy has poor Kidney — ureter communication. It takes him a while to get going.

This is just the beginning of the taste of the fruits of 6 months of office labor.

Yesterday, just a little past six I walked away from my first and last office job ever. My six-month amble through rush-hour commuting, fabric cubicle walls, beady fluorescent lighting and high-school office cliquery is over, and it wasn’t so bad.

But my life is on a different road, and will have so much more.

During my last two weeks I’d get a lot of,

“I can’t believe you’re leaving us,” and “Oh! We’ll miss you! Who said you could leave?!”

It’s nice to feel wanted and loved, but I had no idea what to do with these. I was leaving, and elated, so, it wasn’t really that bittersweet, more along the lines of sweet. There is something grating and awful about moving the same way as all of humanity every day. We all get on the subway to arrive at work between 9 and 10 in the morning. Then we all pile out to the same places for lunch between noon and 1:30 in the afternoon. Then we all go home at the same damn time, after which we all go to the gym and then the grocery store.

Rush hour is nothing new. I understand why it exists, and God bless Chris Tucker. But this is more — it goes beyond the motions to and from the office, it reaches into everything. I can wear little skull earrings all I want, but I felt like my individuality was starting to crumble away.

And that is why I’m a quitter, at least in terms of this J O B. Now I’m off the schedule and finally on to the last leg of the first next leg of my track.

So, thank you work, you made this year possible, funded my trip to Peru and helped me, well, survive.

Smell ya later work, next time we meet I’ll have a scalpel.