Okay, I haven't written in a while. It's been 6 years. I hope this is worth waiting for. Nothing much has changed with me. I'm still looking for a job that turns me on. I mean, I have many jobs, but they're all part-timers. And I like doing them. I was watching an episode of MAD MEN, you know, the ad agency 1960s serial. The elevator was out of order and the two big time ad men actors (one was John Hamm, the other was John Slattery) had to walk up 23 floors to their office. The two, Don and Roger, barely made it up the elevators, what with all their smoking and drinking habits. These guys hadn't done an ounce of conditioning in their lives. Roger tossed his cookies after arriving on the 23rd. Walking stairs should not be that hard. Reminded me of the perils of not taking care of ourselves in life. Reminded me to work harder at my job-seeking and that I need to be able to climb my metaphorical (big word) stairs with a little more energy and a little more purpose. I talked to a career counselor and he said I needed more 'reflection' about what I do. So I got up this morning and stared at my reflection in the mirror while I brushed my teeth. I didn't see much beyond that I needed to clean my glasses. So the reflection thing hasn't worked so far. But i'll keep working on it. And I'll try to make sure that I can climb those stairs with a little more hard work and thinking about what I should do in life. Schmegley out.
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I was thinking about Steve Jobs the other day. I know he died a while ago, but I was looking at the new IPhone, and thought about how many millions they sold the very first day. I wonder how long Apple can keep its brand going without the mighty Jobs?
Steve was one of a kind, one of the smartest guys in the world. He created stuff that changed the way we live our lives. I'm miffed that he's gone, and won't be making his cool gadgets anymore. I guess I'm really angry with the Grim Reaper, not Steve, for taking him away from me far too early. I really sad because... well... because, I never had the chance to meet him. I know what you're thinking. Why would Steve want to meet with you anyways? Well, maybe he wasn't exactly interested in meeting me, but I sure was in meeting him. Okay, I"m babbling, but meeting him was on my bucket list. I know I would have had to dress like a jewelry burglar in black duds with a bella clava, scale his house ivy (I assume he has some), slip in through one of his windows, startle him in his sleep, and tie him up in a chair before he'd even utter a word to me, but I'd take anything, even "Get the %$%&^$%^ out of my house, you nut-job!" (but not before he signed my socks). My point is, and I do have one, is that I've always admired him so much. He built his first apple computer in a garage with his buddy, Steve Wozniak. He even once got fired from Apple. He created Pixar. Then he got hired by Apple again. Then he created Itunes. Then he created the Iphone. Geez, how much can a single guy do? I just want to hang with creative types like Steve. That's why I love my buddy, Billy Bingley. He's a Steve Jobs type who always questions what I'm up to and always thinks about why things work the way they do. Steve never backed away from a fight, especially if he believed in what he was doing. And i think that's the way to live your life. That's the way I want to live my life. On my own terms. Now, just need to figure out how to get a job. Hey, Gotta go, I heard Mc D's is hiring... I love taking my dog Tryp for walks, especially in the Spring-Summer season. He's a Chocolate Lab who been with me through thick and thin. No matter what happens in my day, he is always waiting for me, with his tail wagging and his tongue hanging out. Lots of drool. Actually, he's a little disgusting at times. But I love him anyways. That's for another blog...
We were walking in a school playground the other day, and, because he's a dog with his nose in everything, and dogs are weird that way -- they'll sniff another dog's butt or roll around in a pile of crap that some owner-dude didn't clean up (that always bugs my butt -- geez, this blog is really getting disgusting...). Anyways, we're walking in the yard, and Tryp beelines for a pile in the corner of the yard. It's a big old pile of leaves that was leftover from the Fall, full of all kinds of interesting smells. So, he throws his paws into this pile and starts rustling the leaves this way and that. Some of the leaves start flying into the air and the wind grabs a few and starts flinging them stupidly in the air. Tryp zeros in on one and starts following it. He's jumping all over the place, trying to catch this beat-up, brown, crunchy leaf. I'm chuckling big time. The leaf flies away. He goes after another leaf. This time he pins it down and starts giving it the once over with his paws. They're pretty good smellers. And talk about having fun. This dog was in heaven. This goes on for a few minutes, until I drag him away to another part of the field. He gets sniffing again. It was all funny to watch, but it made me think. I don't think I've ever sniffed around that hard enough, for anything. If I had this dog's interest in checking out stuff and sniffing around, my life might be a little different. Not that I hate my life. But I am still living in my parents' basement and I really l haven't found a job that I like. Maybe we need to think like dogs, get our noses out, ready to explore the world more. Rustle up some leaves, chase a few, see if they're interesting, and then chase some more. I might even find out what like to do, or what I'm good at. Maybe even a job I like to do. Mmmmmm. I think I might start looking for a few leaf piles. But, only after I grab a Slurpee. Hey, Gotta set my priorities. Okay, it's not really the new year. In fact, we're a month in. But I'm a bit lazy. Okay, there's not really an explosion at all, but I get around to these blogs when I can. And I thought the word "explosion" might attract some people to my blog. Actually, when I think about it, might actually have scared people off, with the terrorism going on int he world today. But that's for another blog.
Okay, it's been a long time, about a year maybe? I just don't get to these things too quickly. I was wondering, though, what the new year might bring me. I'm still in the same boat, living in my parents' basement, looking for a job, not sure exactly what to do with my life. I'll keep trying and plugging away to find what my gig in life is, but it's tough. It's even getting harder to get regular kind of jobs. I noticed in the paper that even fast food joints are being automated in some places in the U.S. That means jobs where I can make some quick cash are slowly but surely becoming dinosaurs. Care plants, construction sites -- they're all becoming more automated. I went to another employment counsellor with the government who told me that I needed to go get more education. I asked her what kind she suggested. She didn't know. I asked her how long she had her current job. She said 30 years. I asked her if she had a fat pension waiting for her at the end of the line. She said yes. I asked here what the new economy that she spewed off about was looking for in a young person. She said brains. Brains, I said? I asked for more information. She couldn't provide more. Looked like she could have used some. Anyways, I'll keep searching in this crazy global economy for something I can do. I'll be checking out what kind of "brains" she's talking about. Beause I know I sure didn't like sitting in my high school desk listening to a teacher rattle off information that I had to throw back onto a test a week later. BORING. I need to find something that makes me want to get out of bed and write more of these blogs. So my new year's resolution is... uhhh... well... not really to have one. Good, glad I got that off my chest. But, I guess I have to figure out exactly what I can offer in this "brain" economy. That's f Another day. Oh well, I'll see if I can bum some coin off my mom to grab a slurpee.... For a little while now I've been making a living as a freelance writer. You wouldn't believe how random and eclectic my writing jobs as a freelancer actually are. Last week I wrote a quick blog post about "Occupy Wall Street" ($15), did a 500-word stock analysis of a big pharmaceutical company ($50), interviewed an author about his new book ($30), and wrote an editorial response to an article about standardized testing ($75), to name a few.
The thing about this line of work is you have to take what's available. I'd like to do nothing but write the high-paying articles that take the least amount of time, but I don't have a guaranteed supply of them. When I don't have a paying-gig lined up, I write about something I find interesting and then try to sell the piece to a magazine. I've learned not to let any opportunities pass me by. I will take on any job that I think I can possibly do, even if it's a bit out of my comfort zone. And I will dig through everything I've ever done that is remotely related in order to make the case to a prospective client that I'm the right person for the job. This is where I'm thankful for my high school English teacher. He couldn't know exactly what kinds of writing I would most need in my life (except how to write a cover letter and resume, he was spot on about that). But he had style guides for MLA, Chicago, AP, APA. Even when we wrote resumes he threw a book at us with dozens of different ways of organizing and formatting it, depending on the kind of job and what you wanted to emphasize about yourself. Years later, it's like I'm in English class again, except I'm getting paid for it. Today's assignment: an article on this topic, following these style guidelines, of this length, using those sources. Every place I write for is different. Some are very strict on style, some aren't. Every venue has a different type of audience and I need to write to them. Most of these styles are unique to the publication so I couldn’t have studied them in school. But learning every possible style was never the real lesson. The lesson was learning how to learn a new style. Because that's what I have to do whenever I get a new gig and they send me a 20-page PDF with their style guide. I need to be able to skim through it, get the important information, and refer back to it later to make sure my writing matches expectations. For that matter, those research essays I did in history, it wasn't so I would know that exact detail about the Russian Revolution when I really needed it. None of the kids in the class were even researching the same thing. The one thing that all of us learned was how to research the answer to questions, and that's why I can write an article about the history of a company and whether it's a good stock choice even though I'm not a stockbroker. I know how to learn about new topics. Learning how to learn. I finally get what that means. Schmegley: Hey, nice job J.B. That English teacher -- he must have been a heck of a guy... I was a Montreal Expos fan as a kid. But then they left the city and broke my heart. Obviously, I dumped baseball as an object of interest to me. That is, until I saw the movie, Moneyball. I thought it might be really lame, especially since Brad Pitt was the main actor. I mean, girls may drool over this guy; in fact, my own Pop thinks he's the modern day Robert Redford, whatever that means, but the Pitt-meister does nothing for me. Until this movie. He plays Billy Beane, the real life coach of the Oakland A's baseball team in the early 2000's that has to struggle with a bare bones payroll to compete with huge payrolls from teams like the Yankees and Redsox. It's impossible to compete, right? Wrong! Billy Beane figures out something very important: He has to recruit his baseball players differently than any other team ever has in the history of baseball. He gets that 35-million dollar payrolls cannot compete with 120-million dollar payrolls. Billy needed to run his baseball team differently. He hired my favourite character in the film, a geek named Peter, played by the ultra geeky Jonah Hill to analyze the stats of prospective high school and college players. THe A's started drafting players that other teams didn't even consider because they had a pre-conceived notion of what a baseball player should look like and act like. Getting on base, anyway possible -- getting hit by a pitch, walking ALONG WITH hitting (the usual standard) - became the mantra of the new-look A's. I love the grumpy old-school grizzled coach and the team scouts looking on in horror as Billy and Peter started assembling a group of misfits, like the wackos from the Island of Misfit Toys (see Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, my favourite Christmas show). A funny thing happened. These runts of the litters, these long-shots at the track, these bad news bears (okay, okay, you get the picture...) suddenly started winning because these freaks got on base and scored runs. And isn't that the purpose of the game? Scoring runs? Sometimes the answer to a problem is right under your nose. Unless you feel a sneeze coming on. Then it can be very messy. The cool thing about this movie is that Billy Beane was the most highly recruited high school baseball athlete of his era, a "can't miss" prospect who totally bombed at the major league level, and who passed up a full ride scholarship to Stanford university because he believed all the hype that everyone was jamming down his throat about how great he was. It took a lot of guts for Billy to examine his own life and admit his failure and the failure of what people thought they saw in him. My old English teacher would say that's ironic - the poster child for poor drafting became THE springboard for a new way to draft baseball players. That's some of the problem with kluks like me. Everyone likes to tell me what to do with my life, but I need to find out what I need to do in my life MYSELF, or I'll continue to think that a medium Slurpee is the ultimate fulfillment in life. Anyways, I think this movie is very cool as it reminds me to keep looking and searching for what I'm about and what I need to do in life. And that the path will have its problems. The movie is full of Billy's flashbacks as he looks back at his high school, minor league and major league experiences full of mistakes, broken promises and failures. It also makes me think that I am a little like Billy. I am different than a lot of people. I don't want to follow the path my parents, teachers and employment counselors think I should. I wish school had more time in its huge course load for me to really explore my strengths and weaknesses. Now I'm on my own. But movies like this make me think that I have a purpose and a place -- I'm just not exactly sure what it is at the moment. For anyone who thinks I'm a long shot, think again. I just may be your boss some day. Hey, stop laughing. Okay, I'm chuckling a bit myself. For now, though, I feel like grabbing a Slurpee. I was skipping down Marion Street, after a great roti at Deen's Diner with my buddy Billy Bingley when I saw a kid, couldn't have been more than 5 years old, pick up a stone she found in the sidewalk, and start drawing with it on the paved sidewalk. She was in a major joyful state. Major dope. I wondered how a simple stone could evoke such passion and interest from a little kid. I said so aloud, and Billy told me to shuddap. But seriously, what happens to us when we get older, go through the school system and forget that we don't need Iphones (wait, mine's ringing, wrong number), beautifully coloured chalk or any of the cool gadgets to do cool stuff? I mean, the kid found joy in a rock on the side of the sidewalk. That's cool. I think school kind of erodes the creativity and joy out of you, what with memorizing facts and formulas and always trying to regurgitate stuff onto tests. Wait kid, you won't be grabbing the closst rock in a few years. You'll be sitting in a row in your own little chair taking notes about stuff that other people think and write.
And her parent is telling her to stop fooling around and to keep up. Mom doesn't get how perfect this moment is. I think we all need to find cool in the simple things like rocks. Maybe that's why I'm unemployed and living in my parents' basement. Well, I'm off and a good thing too. That parent thinks I'm kinda weird staring at her five-year old kid. "i'm just expressing my joy at the innocence and true simplicity of life," I scream. DIdn't work. She's calling the police. I'm outta here. Ciao Schmegley What’s Our Gig? (Guest Post)
Ed Schmegley and I had lunch the other day and we were talking about how sometimes life after high school isn’t what you expect. We talked about his efforts to find his gig, and it made me think of a couple of friends of mine who are having the same problem. They could hardly be more different than Schmegley, but it’s funny how the kids who are the most different still end in the same place. My friend Maria had been an honour student as long as she could remember, and her transition to university was as smooth as can be. She got high marks no matter what the subject, and I’m not sure if it’s because she was genuinely interested in everything, or if she wanted to be the top student just to prove that she could. By the end of her bio/chem double major with honours, her grades were all sky-high, and she’d aced her MCATs. She seemed like a shoe-in for med school, until the interviewer asked her why she wanted to be a doctor, and she had no answer. She sat there with her mouth open for what seemed like forever, and she realized that no matter how high your GPA is, you can still feel an idiot. It’s something we’ve talked about more than once, because it was the first time in her life that she realized she didn’t actually know what she wanted to do. She’s working in a lab now, using the skills she developed during her degree, and trying to decide if this is what she really wants to do. I understand where she’s coming from, because I had difficulty choosing a career also. I was the same kind of student. I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. I took all the tough courses because I wanted to keep my options open. In reality though, there comes a point where you need to actually pick one of those options, and I had no idea how to do that. That’s probably why I kept putting it off. I wish I could give my high-school self some advice to really explore some of the career options that are out there, because I really had no idea. Like most people, I could probably think of a few dozen different jobs, but in the whole world there are probably thousands or tens of thousands of unique careers out there. There are literally options out there for every talent, but the problem is most people haven’t heard of them. I was good at math, but I had never heard of an actuary before. Maria was good at biology, but she didn’t know that every food production facility, from dairies to meat-packing plants, had quality control departments that needed people with lab skills. All we could think of when we were still in school were the jobs we either had seen people doing or heard about on TV: mathematician, teacher, lawyer, scientist, doctor, restaurant manager, gas station attendant, mechanic, air force pilot. I have another friend whose favourite subject was social studies. He loves politics, and he’ll talk your ear off about current events while he makes you an espresso at the café where he works. The other day I was watching the news with him and there was this story about someone who was fired from her job as a page in the House of Commons. He said, “Whoa, how come I’m not doing that for a living? I could be talking to MPs instead of about them. Even if I still had to make coffee.” The simple reason is he’d just never thought of it before – he didn’t even know it was an option. In school our teachers and parents all told us, “learn this, pass that, and you’ll get a good job.” But our job skills are only half of the equation. We need to figure out what kind of job we want before we can blow away the interviewers with our employability skills. What’s our gig? Maybe there should be a class where they help kids figure that out. I was chewing on some broccoli the other day, and my buddy, Billy Bingley pointed out that I had some green food on my teeth. Hey, no big deal, I picked the food out with my fingernail. I actually thought about something as I stuck my nail between my front incisors. Now, this phenonenum of food in my teeth doesn't happen often, but it did make me think about how food in the teeth shows just how old you are.
Food in the teeth is a old thing. I mean, my pop and grandpop always carry toothpicks around with them. I never realized why all the rooms in the house had a little container of toothpicks. Check out grandpa's upper left shirt pocket. Yup. Toothpicks. I always thought old cowboys had to use toothpicks because having one of them between their teeth made them look tough. Hey, check out Curly from City Slickers. Now, he was tough. And he chomped down on a toothpick constantly. Really, though, the grizzled chuck-wagon cook probably didn't cook the beef too well and it was stuck in Curly's rotting teeth (hey, were toothbrushes invented in the wild west? What cool cowboy would brush anyways? Hey, hold on, Jesse James, before our gunfight, I've just got to clean up my pearlies a bit. NOT.) I guess old folks' gum separate from their teeth and food find its way easily into spots in teeth. I'm not sure why I'm blogging about this, but it's clear to me that a clear sign of getting old is food in the teeth and the strategic placement of toothpicks packs within easy reach. And I still think Curly is one stinkin' tough hombre, pick or no pick. I was chatting with my buddy, Billy Bingley and we started thinking about our favourite movie characters. He loves Spock from Star Trek, but I couldn’t help thinking about one of my heroes in one of my favorite movies. I’m talking about Yoda, the fuzzy, pointy-eared little firecracker from Revenge of the Jedi. Do you remember the scene when Luke is trying to use the force to move stones in the swamp? Here is that cool exchange:
LUKE Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different. YODA No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned. LUKE (focusing, quietly) All right, I'll give it a try. YODA No! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try. Yoda nailed it. I feel like I have to unlearn many of my learnings from life, especially from high school. I have to unlearn the idea that someone else is responsible for my learning. I was a 50s-60s kid in high school and never finished anything hard, except for goofing around and generally being lazy. I figured out the system, and in a couple of those courses where I thought I failed, I was astounded to see I got a 50, mostly because the teacher didn’t want to see me again. That’s what school generally was – a good try. Now that I’m out of school, I see I’ve got to go a little harder, I have to do more than try. But I’m handcuffed, because I don’t know what I need to try hard at. I’ve got some serious soul searching to do about who I am and what I want to do in life. Geez, I’m going to have to get outta bed for the next 30 years, and I really want to jump out every morning and do something I love. But how do I find out my true passions in life? I was talking to an old high school buddy, Terry, a cat who had a terrible time with school. Poor guy couldn’t bluff his way through Hamlet, so when teach asked for a 3-page paper, he totally folded his cards. He burrowed an essay from the Internet and was caught. He failed the course. He always wanted to be a firefighter, and thought he’d never need to write a 3-page essay again, and just didn’t see the point. Turns out after high school and he was into a second year of training in firefighters school and they asked him for – you guessed it – a 3 page paper about something to do with fires. He was in a panic. I told him I’d help him bluff his way through it, even though I wasn’t a genius with essays myself. What’s the point of this story? Mmmmmm. Give me a second. Oh yeah, maybe school does offer something relevant after all. But we just don’t see it at the time. Hey, if you have to do something, you may as well give it your all. Terry needed to know why we write papers in high school. He needed to know writing essays would come in handy some day. . "If only I had known about the importance of this skill way back when..." doesn't cut it. I really need to unlearn those bad high school habits. BTW, Terry got a C on the firefighting paper, one of the best marks I.... err.... he ever got. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. Smart little critter, that Yoda. |
Ed SchmegleyEd is a Gen Y kluk , a couple of years out of high school, out of work and looking for his gig. HIs best buddy, Billy Bingley and he, share a life passion for... well... ummm... okay.. .these dudes don't do a lot, but they are philosophical in their approach to nothingness. This site is Waiting for Godot without the tension or purpose. Vladimir and Estragon never looked so purposeful.... Archives
August 2019
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