Trying to think outside of the box

I think it would be an understatement to say that the economy has affected everyone in different ways. In addition to the economic factors, I have a personal situation that makes it that much harder to look for work. One of the the things I neglected to do over the summer of my Senior year was document what was happening in my life; perhaps if I had done so, I would have been able to foresee the stupidity that wound up being my multiple citations and guilty pleas in the Douglas and Sarpy County court.

For some reason or another, I had made the decision that I was going to stop listening to the conventional rules of society and live life my own way. While my DGAF attitude did provide me with numerous good times and continues to assist in keeping myself laid back, I wasn’t very in touch with reality. I wound up getting busted twice for possession of marijuana and then two weeks later, I was caught shoplifting at the local wal-mart. At the time I had been shoplifting quite frequently, when I was bored or when someone in the house or I needed something, I would pocket the cash and just steal what I needed from the store. At the time, it was a very convenient way of shopping indeed. Long story short, my brother and I wanted some stuff to do during the day’s ‘activities’, got caught trying to steal it, haven’t been able to prove to anyone that I’ve learned my lesson since.

When the event transpired, it took a long while to dawn on me what had just occurred. In fact, so stuck in my stubborn punk rock ways, I went home and took LSD (didn’t tie-dye, if you were curious what we were trying to steal), woke up the next morning and drove to a family reunion, and just forgot about it all together. That is, until I had to go to court. The prosecutor was very unforgiving. Given my previous charges for possession, he wasn’t at all fond of the idea of giving us a bargain or an option to take some sort of diversion class, and at the time, my mother wouldn’t have considered representing either of us, and I couldn’t afford an attorney to fight it. My brother and I were both left but with little option but to plead guilty and pay the fine.

Two years and seven months later, I haven’t left a single store without paying for the merchandise, and couldn’t dream of trying to steal anymore. There aren’t a whole lot of ways to prove to potential employers that my background check isn’t really congruent to the kind of employee I am, let alone let the check speak for my character as a person. I feel as though I can’t be the only person that is dealing with a problem similar to this. The law hasn’t caught up with the technology we have yet. As it stands, the consequences of a simple misdemeanor have far reaching effects, some that may not have been intended when they were served. Unfortunately for me, employers aren’t wild about hiring someone with a documented history of theft, so I am being forced to really think outside of the box when it comes to finding employment in this kind of economy.

I’ve been thinking about a couple of options: working somewhere that doesn’t require a background check, applying for apprenticeships, getting back into school, starting my own business, or attempting to find a job through networking by using the internet. I think what I am going to do is start another blog and write about more technical things and use it as a portfolio of sorts to potential employers, and maybe I might be able to find a job as a writer or a proofreader of sorts.

Being unemployed has also given me a lot of unstructured time that I need to learn how to manage. I am going to try and make some sort of calendar and schedule that I want to hold myself accountable to so that I can start achieving more with my days than surfing reddit and masturbating. If I start allotting time for job-hunting and working out, I feel like my time surfing the web and taking naps will feel much more accomplished. I am going to start with cleaning my room and organizing my thoughts tomorrow, and then we’ll see where the rest of the week takes me. I will post more later.

Peace

My thoughts on moving and technology obsolecense.

Well…I finally did it. I made the voyage west hoping that the grass would be greener and hopefully find a place that I could call home. I love Omaha, however, I feel my urge to move out west was more out of a desire to make my own independent decisions, and hopefully come to find that the difference in culture out here compared to my beloved, conservative, Catholic city would be everything I had hoped for. As it stands now, things are going okay. Work is hard to find, and I haven’t had the chance or the finances to enroll in school, so meeting new people is difficult. As of now, we have met a few really cool people, but the weather and my lack of income and mobility have made it difficult to develop these new relationships.

I haven’t really been trying that hard to make better decisions for myself. The situation I was in while my brother and I were living alone in Omaha was so poisonous (Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed my independence in Omaha, but the finances and working situation I was involved in made things in my home almost unbearable) that I think I am just enjoying some time off to reflect and enjoy some more of my less marketable skills. Finding work is also difficult with a dirty background check, so aside from going back to Omaha at some point this summer to work things out and hopefully finding some assistance from an employment office here in Tumwater, finding work will continue to be an extravagantly difficult task. I have been considering applying for some apprenticeships in carpentry to work on residential furnishings; construction crews often don’t mind if I have hair on my face or holes in my ears. One of the more difficult things about growing up has been deciphering what I really want with my work in the long run. At one point, I had imagined that I wouldn’t do anything other than a professional job, but the more I think about going to Law School or getting a job in an office, the more the thought of living behind a computer screen in an office would drive me insane. This move has given me a lot of time to reflect and think about what I’m going to do…now if only I could just get around to doing it.

The things I have enjoyed most about Washington has been the nature and the culture. There are green trees everywhere I look, and I am only getting more and more excited about the Summer the more I hear about it. I am dying to play a game of frisbee golf again. The rain hasn’t bothered me that much, as I have always been more of a fair-weather guy, but it has certainly had an affect on my sleep schedule. I imagine that I will become more used to it with time and experience. The culture up here is great. From what I’ve seen, people here seem to be much more laid back, and somewhere west of the continental divide, people collectively are much more accepting and realistic about the way that people are, i.e. the Washington Senate is getting closer to legalizing gay marriage, food service workers that have facial piercings, incredibly large state systems set up to help people get on their feet with employment and assistance, and there is a huge amount of people that are down with the green, nevermind the ability to get a medical card.

I have missed Omaha. I think it’s hard for anyone to move away and not develop some sort of home-sickness. I miss my friends and my old job, sometimes even my slum of an apartment. Most of what I have to realize is that once I start making a greater effort to set some roots down here in Olympia, I will soon have a life of my own here that I will be excited to return to once I am done visiting my hometown this summer. Also, I will have the resources to have my old friends come and enjoy Washington the way I have.

I was originally going to record this on a webcam, seeing as how we live in the 21st century and all, but the quality of video that it takes SUCKS! So maybe once I get some more sophisticated technology I will start incorporating some media to the blog. I hoping to continue writing this as kind of a documentation of my life. The older I get, the more I realize it’s becoming harder and harder to keep my memories, let alone my thoughts together. I want to keep track of the progress that I am making towards personal goals, and also to capture the way I am feeling as I am making these new strides in my life. I’m hoping that I can keep up with it, so that one of these days when I am living in a swanky urban apartment, I can look back at the time I was still living in my Uncle’s house with a grand in unpaid bills from my old apartment and see how far I’ve come…so undoubtedly with my vast amounts of free time, I will be writing or posting something again soon…probably later this week.

On Second Thought

Well, things have certainly changed since my last post, and it’s been a while just becuase nothing is ever super exciting I guess. Instead of leaving for the University of Wyoming this fall, I decided to stay at home and take some classes at the Community College. The year of English I took over the summer have proven my courses to be pretty easy. I start Sociology and Spanish for the Fall quarter on Monday. It’s very very weird to see the facebook statuses of all your friends moving out and going to college, and while I am still “in college” it definitely wasn’t what I was expecting. Had you asked me a year ago where I saw myself in August of 2009, I would have never in a million years said Omaha, let alone my parents’ house. And it’s not terrible, becuase of my recent employment with the Oriental Trading Company, I will be able to save quite a bit of money and go to school without taking any loans out, planning to be a Music Education major, leaving school with debt is not a good idea (Unless I get a job on the West Coast where apparently teachers are more important). haha. I did defer my acceptance to Wyoming for the next Fall, so move-out day will happen, just a year later than I originally thought.

In other news, my little town of residence, Bellevue, NE, made it on to national news over the Carhart Abortion Clinic. If you know anything about me, then you know my opinion on the whole thing. What was really pissing me off was the anti-choice individuals driving around in their trucks with dismembered fetuses plastered on the side. It was a really eloquent way to demonstrate that their argument contains no intellectual logic, but instead that sensationalist pictures with no decency or respect are more informative. My brother and I drove by this morning, we honked and rose some thumbs up to the NOW group. ’twas righteous.

The other week, I took upon a HUGE project. I actually went through and cleaned my room. Including the closet and getting rid of shit I haven’t seen in months. My closet is still organized and my room is still clean, I haven’t put much more effort into keeping my room clean, but it is still together and neat. Once the shit is organized, it’s a lot easier to keep clean. Good Vibes as far as that is concerned.

Other than that, my summer has been relatively boring. No huge vacations, no extravagant parties or outings. Shit’s just been pretty normal. I finally found a very good paying job that I hopefully get to keep after my “season” is up. I am in the market for a new car though, then I will be able to leave the abode once in a while, which will be nice. I will try and post more later I guess.

Peace.

Go Pokes…

So, it has been a while since I have posted and not many things have changed since it was recently cleaning my room that prompted this impromptu post. I have been going through shit that landed on my floor that has been collecting throughout my college application process, my senior year, all that good stuff. I ran across the housing applications for University of Oregon, the brochures of schools I was considering late in my Junior year. And even from just a year ago, I am a completely different person. As cool as it would have been to run off and eat sprouts in Oregon, or smoke mad weed all the time in Alaska, I decided that Wyoming would probably be best. I am a little closer to home, it’s a little more affordable, and to be quite frank, there were enough people wearing hemp hats and ponchos on my college visit, that I think i will be okay. haha. It’s hard to think back on what was going through my mind in the first few weeks of my senior year. It has been a BLUR. Literally, it went by so fast, I only have 6 days of class left followed by 2 final exams and I am done with my high school career. It’s kind of cool to say “I am an alumni of Creighton Prep” and thinking back on it, I don’t think I would change anything, even if it meant that I wouldn’t be broke later this year or whatever. I have really enjoyed my time at the school, and it wasn’t so much being at Prep, but it was the community, and the friends that I made. I kind of cringe at the thought that I won’t walk into the band room early next August and play through the ever familiar C scale. The things that am feeling about it are hard to put into words, the best explination I can give is excited, nervous, bittersweet anxiety. It’s odd, change, I guess, is inevitable. I can’t live in my parents’ house forever, (honestly, I don’t think I want to), and I can’t keep going to high school. It’s just odd. Anyhoo.

The band trip to Colorado was fucking ridiculous. I had so much fun. It was certainly the summation of my high school band experience. We did really well in the competition, and a few weeks later we did really well in the District Music Contest, straight ones to be exact. On Tuesday I have the Senior Recognition Concert, I don’t know exactly what I am going to say yet. I am just anxious I suppose. I should get back to work…I just wanted to capture some thoughts.

Peace

catchy lingo here…

fuck titles…
Anyhoo, this week has been good. We had natquals on Friday for speech, Daniel and I made it to quarter finals with our duo and he made it to semi-finals with HI. It was fun, and we did pretty well, as a small team, it was kind of expected that we wouldn’t qualify anyone for nationals, especially since the last half of the year was such a shitstorm. Now he and I are focused on state, hoping and practicing to bring our A game and break to finals. Since it’s my senior year, this will be the last chance I have to win at a state tournament. We are also kinda hoping that we get selected to Catholic Nationals in NY. I have been the past two years and Daniel has yet to go, but I am worried that our lame attendance in the first half of the year will work against us. But as far as speech is concerned, keeping our fingers crossed and moving along quite well.
We had our band adjudication on Thursday morning as well. That went pretty well, enough to get us out of early band on Friday which was a life saver. And now that we are on spring break, we have sectionals for the next three days. I will possibly make it to none of them due to another issue with my parents and illicit drug use, but I am working on that….again. I have had a lot of time to think about where I am going to be going with my music and decided that i hope to continue it in college. It gives me a lot of joy, and hopefully it will help with some dough, becuase I need it! haha.
I finally finished filling out the fucking FAFSA today. As expected, my EFC is something off the charts that don’t really matter because it could be half as much and the Real Family contribution is still going to be zero. Now that I have spring break, I have a whole bunch of stuff that I want to get finished before the week is over, one of them being applying for all of my financial aid stuff and apply for a few scholarships.
In other musings, once I had this idea for a vegan restaurant that I wanted to start and own called tofu dream. I didn’t really think much of it, but I was bored tonight and decided to make a logo on photoshop:

cool, huh? I love that program.

Well I just kinda wanted to update some stuff. I will post more later, as I am sure that this week will ensure to be a bore.

Peace

huzzah

Soooo. Things are moving so quickly! We had districts for speech this weekend, Daniel and I qualified to go to state with our duet, We are going to be practicing a lot so we can break. We have NFL NatQuals on Friday. We are going with Millard West since our other coach got kidney cancer and last year’s coaches have a 11 week old baby. Wesleyan Honor Band was a lot of fun. I suppose that I haven’t posted since I got the letter. As of now, I am still not sure about what I am going to do for college. I actually think I am going to apply ton UNL becuase all of my friends are going there and to be quite frank, it’s hard to find new smoking friends. This week I am going to get all of my college shit out of the way, applying for financial aid and housing and all that good stuff. Once I figure out where it’s going to be cheapest for me to go, that’s where I will go. So that’s the update.

On another note, I decided I am going to make a hemp hammock this summer. That will be fun. I am applying for jobs, hopefully I will get a call sometime this week so I can start making some money. I just wanted to post becuase I hadn’t done it in a while.

Peace

I will be straight forward with you…

Legalize it.

Seriously, The entire economic situation that America has drowned itself in could be fixed within a week after legalizing marijuana. First of all, any and all non-violent drug offenders, any inmates that are in prisons and jails for marijuana charges are pardoned of those charges. Anyone who got pulled over with 2 pounds of pot in the back of their car gets pardoned and the price of housing on inmate for 5-7 years is suddenly relieved.  Second of all, you require that dealers and suppliers get government administered courses on drug safety and preparation, as well as liscences to distribute marijuana. That brings in more revenue that doesn’t cost anything than enacting the legislation. Finally, all of a sudden new businesses are popping up, paying lawyers for setting up business, state fees for running business, the taxes on the bud that you sell, contracting jobs for building stores, depending on the store the investigation fees for food grades. Even after all of that, we still haven’t considered the income of stoners running around who don’t want to wait for sketch dealers who leave with your money to get the pot for you. At $60 for an eighth of an ounce of the kind of marijuana that stores would sell, you tax it, you tax the paraphenillia that the pot is smoked out of and other various pot delicacies. You create jobs for Growers, Suppliers, Dealers, Store Owners, The possibilities for revenue on marijuana alone is incredible and worthy of the nation’s attention. But it’s just not only marijuana, you see an increase in grocery sales, a decrease in violent crime, an increase in Police availability, a decrease in hardcore drug users (statistics prove it in Amsterdam) The medicinal uses of marijuana are boundless. Chronic pain, Psoriasis, Glaucoma, Cancer Treatments, the list goes on and on. To me it seems simple. The ramifications of legalizing weed are nothing that we haven’t dealt with since the prohibition of alcohol in Colonial times. Driving while high, and public intoxication are things that the police already deal with. It seems so simple to me. 12% of American adults (18-24) admitted to using marijuana on a regular basis. That’s just the people who admitted it to a random individual who may have asked them on a street corner. There is probably a good chance that there are those who don’t distribute that kind of information when asked.

On another note. It’s been a long week. I had practice on Tuesday night, a concert on Wednesday night, and then I missed school today becuase I was just too tired. I have been working on an entirely different piece for a speech tournament on Saturday, and working on a duo for Saturday, I am excited to go to a tournament. I have been watching a lot more TV than I usually do. Normally I don’t watch the crap that they show on MTV, but somehow it’s strangely addicting. I will post more later.

Peace

Update…i guess.

I have just been hanging out. Second semester has been delightfully relaxed. I got accepted to the University of Wyoming, and I still have to get a hold of Alaska, becuase I have been having some issues with my application and checking it online. We had our speech tournament last night and everything went well, we were done early, and I got out in good time so life is good. I am going to start looking for a job later today. I would kind of like a job at the Bath and Body Shop or Yankee Candle , a lot more relaxed of a retail environment. There aren’t many questions from customers about soaps, candles, and lotions, and anything that they could come up with, it’s only a little information to learn and tell them, so I am not worried. In other news found a really good band. Little Jackie’s CD The Stoop is excellent. I can’t quit listening to it. I just wanted to update…I feel like I haven’t posted in a while, but nothing is new and exciting I suppose.

Peace.

Boo, last day of Christmas Break!

This is definitely the earliest morning that I have been up all Christmas break, I thought that it would give me a lovely oppurtunity to blog-a-long. Check out my cats:

Since I got the camera for Christmas, I hadn’t taken many pictures with it becuase I don’t have an SD card, but I had enough to take three pictures, hence my new display picture and two pictures of my lovely cats. The white one is Jeeter, he is fat, but likes cuddling more than Skeeter, who is the black one, she is easily frightened. Just thought I would let you know.

Peace

2009 and other observations

It’s been a while since I posted anything, but I figured I should since it was something I wanted to get done and I have some more time hangin out at the house. I have a feeling now that this will be a ridiculously long post so if you want to read, but don’t have much time…don’t start now. haha.

I will start with Thanksgiving. My grandparents and I drove up first, and my brother stayed behind to go up with my mom. My dad left later on in the day becuase he still had to be at work. The weekend was nice. My cousin and I did a lot of walking and talking, surprisingly enough he was cool with me smoking cigarettes at the time, so I wasn’t shaking in rage that I couldn’t find a minute to get out of the house. And of course the usual went on, played video games, talked about school, we played a game called 654, that you play with dice and money. It was buckets of fun. haha. Then we ate a dinner celebrating the slaughter and rape of millions of Native Americans and went around the tabel saying what we were thankful for. I was thankful for The election results in November, The ability to read, and school. Some of those went over a little bit better than the others. Dinner wasn’t so bad without meat, I was still able to have green bean casserole and mashed potatoes, so life is good.

After Thanksgiving Break there was that very short period of time where you have to be back at school before Christmas starts…and that was a pain. I led the Junior Encounter during the first week of December. It was a really good weekend, everything went really well. I had downloaded some movies before I left so that if I had any free time I could watch them, as well as the seventh season of Scrubs. I was also pretty much checked out of school for the time. I am glad that the first semester is over, I don’t think I could have handled much of those classes much longer. However my math teacher decided that since I wasn’t at school during the last day of class that I would have to stay after exams for 45 minutes and finish some project…I wasn’t going to do it. I hadn’t showered in a few days, looked extremely homeless, and wasn’t necessarily in the clearest mindset, not to mention that my mom was picking me up right there and I had people at home, and I lost my calculator. I was just going to take the 0 out of whatever amount of points, but no. I swear to god this man is so anal he gave me an incomplete, so I am either going to finish this project when I get back to school or I will have wasted a semester in his class (the latter of the two isn’t an option). If you are wondering why my mom was picking me up, it’s a long story that involves a burning plant and a brother who is too worried about his false sense of entitlement to keep his mouth shut. But then came Christmas Break

My Holidays were nice, there was a big hiccup about who was going to be at our house and when they were coming and when we were going to celebrate it, but it’s big long and boring so I will spare you the details. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas with my brother Andrew, Uncle Nathan and Grandmother. It was nice, very calm. I got a camera, some clothes, jelly beans, a mouse for my computer, and other various gifts. I have been playing games like Diner Dash and Cake Mania with my new mouse, so it was definitely my most useful gift. haha. I didn’t get my bike, but if things work out like it looks like it will, bikes aren’t so useful in Alaska. My Grandma made a delicious Christmas Dinner and we just hung out at the house for the rest of the day.  New Year’s Eve was pretty uneventful  as well. We sat in the living room and watched the ABC special or whatever it was and hugged at midnight and went to bed. Those were my holidays, it was wonderful.

On another note, my brother brought along some DVD’s and before he left, he systematically got me addicted to another TV show. If you have never seen it. Google Season 1 Episode 1 of Prison Break, you won’t be able to stop watching it. I have probably spent a good 48 hours watching the show and getting myself caught up to where they are at in Production and I have my fingers crossed that they make a 5th season. www.surfthechannel.com is a good link for finding the shows. While we are on TV, the Season Premiere of Scrubs is coming on January 6th and JD has a beard. It will be wonderful.

So that is my post…it may or may not be long. I have been typing it while chatting and surfing the web so I am not entirely certain. haha. I will post sooner later

Peace