Sick Days

Welp, I've missed two days of work this week because I probably have strep throat.  I say "probably" because when I went to the urgent care on Sunday to get meself checked out, the instant test came back negative, but the PA said that those things are only 80% accurate, so based on my symptoms, she went ahead and gave me antibiotics.  Since said antibiotics have pretty drastically improved my situation in the last couple of days (although I still called in sick yesterday), I'm inclined to believe it was strep after all.  Just a sneaky little strep that didn't want to show up on the test.  The bastard.

I went and saw New Found Glory in concert a week and a half-ish ago.  They were pretty rockin'.  I'm a child of the early 2000s; can't help my love for pop punk.  I was surprised by how many youngins were there.  Especially since they all seemed to know the old songs, too.  I sure as hell didn't listen to ten-year-old B-listers when I was in high school.

Other than that, my life is less than interesting.  I'm floundering through NaNoWriMo.  I'm just having a lot of trouble with the characters for what I'm trying to work on.  There's only one that I feel like I know at all, and I feel like he's monstrous hard to write well.  Oh well.  Nothing's good in the first draft.  We endure.

Turkey Day is coming.  And I fucking love turkey.

Also, I just discovered that two of my favorite bands, Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto, are going to play a show in Seattle on December 14.  This is especially exciting because they already did a tour together that didn't come anywhere near Seattle (the closest they got was San Francisco, if I recall correctly).  Tickets have already been acquired.  I'm pretty psyched.  (Shit, I almost wrote "stoked."  What's happening to me?)  How nice it is to live in a city where things happen.

Here's some music.

That is all.

Adventures in Customer Service: The State of the Art

Let's start a running series, shall we?  We'll call it "Adventures in Customer Service."  Herein I shall bitch about how much customer service sucks, surprising no one.  (An original thesis, I know.)

In any case, here are some general thoughts on customer service.  Generally speaking, customer servants are there because they have to be, not because they want to be.  This is definitely the case for me.  I met the first person I've ever met in my life who openly professed to genuinely loving customer service exactly three weeks and a day ago.  Most people just hate that shit.

There are a lot of reasons, but they can basically be boiled down into one: people are fucking monsters, and your job in customer service is to suck up to them no matter what they say to you.  Seriously, people gotta get genuinely abusive before I'd even think of calling up a manager and saying, "Hey, can I hang up on this fucker?"  But there's plenty of emotional abuse you can take up till then that's just part of the job.  Individually, most of these interactions aren't so bad.  Dickish, sure, but who doesn't deal with an asshole every now and then?

No, the part that sucks most about customer service is that these interactions happen constantly, eight hours a day, five days a week, ad infinitum until you get another job.  For most of us, that shit adds up.  There are a rare few who can genuinely shrug it off, and don't let it bother them.  The rest of us just pretend we can when a manager can hear us.

What most people don't seem to understand is that customer servants have very little genuine power, and even less to do with the problem that they're calling about.  I'd hazard a guess that 98% of my daily contacts are not related to a failure of customer service in the slightest.  (According to company statistics, full 50% of our contacts are 100% related to customers not fucking reading, but that's a story for another post.)

A few people get this.  Even angry ones, sometimes.  Today, actually, I had a lady that was pissed about some other thing or something.  Livid.  But at one point in the conversation, she said something along the lines of, "Now, you know none of this is directed at you personally."

Thank you, lady.  Now I do.  This may not seem like an important thing to say.  You may think that customer servants assume that shit.  Guess what: It is important, and we don't, because usually people are wishing us, personally, all sorts of ill will.  So if you're pissed, super-extra pissed, about some shit, make sure to take a deep breath and remember you're talking to someone who had nothing to do with your offense, who can only pretend to a modicum of independence, who tells you the company line because s/he has to.  Because, at the end of the day, customer service people aren't really there to serve you.  We're there for the same reason every other employee is: to make the company some motherfucking money.  The company believes this is best accomplished by providing quality customer service and that's why it pays someone with a master's degree $12 an hour to listen to inbred rednecks complain about how it's your fault that their illiteracy prevents them from being well-informed.

So be fucking nice.  Because here's what we all wish we could do:

And one day, one of us somewhere just might be able to do it.  I can only hope.

So... let's try this again

Ah, blog.  How you must loathe me.  I'm the neglectful parent who promises to do better just often enough to keep your hopes up.  And the worst part about it is, I genuinely mean it when I promise to do better, which makes it even more hard for you to swallow when I inevitably fail to follow through.

But I promise, blog, this time is different.  This time, I'll be true.  And update you every once in a while.  At the very least, I'm going to use you as a warm-up before I write.  Except for today, because I have other shit to do, and I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to write after this.  Well.  Fuck.  There went that plan.

Here's a random thought: I don't much care for getting dressed up on Halloween.  I fucking loved it when I was a kid.  My moms made some epic costumes, and that shit was the best.  No sarcasm in that previous sentence; my mom's Halloween costumes are among my fondest childhood memories.

But nowadays, I'm way too lazy for that shit.  And unlike my mother, I suck at sewing.  I can do basic tasks, after a fashion.  (When the apocalypse comes, don't ask me to stitch you up unless there's literally no one else around, or else you'll end up with a hell of a scar.)  But complex stuff is beyond me.  I don't have the machinery and I don't have the training.

Nor am I really a sculptor.  I'm hella creative, it's true, but those energies are poured and always have been poured primarily into writing, drawing and building little plastic models.  Costume-making is just not really my thing.

Anyway, some stupid portion of my brain forgot that I like to dress up like a lazy alcoholic for Halloween and enjoy beer and movies rather than costumed hijinks.  This is how it ended up being arrange that my roommate and I will be dressing as Captain Ahab and Moby Dick.  Thanks to the assistance of my lady friend, my last-minute Moby costume is actually pretty impressive.  I'll put up some pics when I have them.

I imagine I'll have more things to ruminate on in the future.  I keep meaning to write a post about work, and my opinion on customers and humanity in general, but I'm not super fond of what customer service does to me, so I'm fighting that one off for now.

We'll see.

A Triumphant Return

Or so I would like to have you believe.  Yes, it's true, I have viciously ignored this blog like an ugly and future-less bastard child whose mother I owed money in the state of Nevada, but I promise, I'm going to be a better blogger now.  I'm going to come to all my blog's baseball games and maybe even a family picnic or two.  If I don't have better things to do.  You know how it is, blog.

Anyway, if'n you haven't heard, I got a job.  I work for a certain online purveyor of clothing and other random shit that's based in Seattle and isn't Amazon.com.  I do customer service, somehow.  Fortunately, I make slightly more money than I did at OfficeMax, meaning that I didn't quite go off to get a master's degree only to come back to the exact same shit.  Supposedly, this job isn't nearly as dead-end though; I might get to go places in the company, provided I prove my worth.  On the other hand, employers talk a lot of shit, so who knows.  But for now, it gets me moneys, I work with a good group of people, and even though customer service is far from my ideal gig--being a mean and spiteful person when it comes to those I perceive as less intelligent than me--the days go by pretty quickly.  I wouldn't say I like it, but I don't really dislike it either.

At the very least, my job gets me in a bitchy mood every now and then and bitchiness = productivity.  No one produces when they're happy.  No conflict, no story.

On what I so super swear is a totally unrelated note, my conviction that the one constant in human behavior is intense stupidity deepens by the day.

Seriously, people, read the fucking fine print.  Especially when it's clearly marked and in the open.

The current project is moving to Seattle.  I'm trying to find a place to live in West Seattle with my homeboy Jason.  This is turning out to be more of a pain in the ass than I anticipated, but such is the way of things.  Some places really have a high opinion of themselves.  Others dislike pets, which is a problem for both of us.  Others won't call you back and others have fucking mold issues.  Went and checked out a place last night that was half really cozy little house, half total shithole, but it could work.  Nice neighborhood anyway.

Also, there's some goofy personal relationshipy stuff going on that I'd love to tell each of you about but am loath to put on the internet.  Suffice to say I may have stumbled into a situation from which there is no clean extrication.  A quagmire, if you will.  I'm not really sure what I want from the situation and that presents its own problem.  I do know that I fervently wish I was half as ruthlessly self-interested as I advise other people to be.

Expedition to Poulsbo and Other Stories

This weekend, I headed out to Poulsbo to see my good friend Lisa, in the States from Norway for a visit.  Much beer was consumed.  At one point, I was holding a banana slug and trying to educate someone on the beneficial role such creatures play in your garden (pro-tip: banana slugs are carnivores that eat those black slugs that get all up in your vegetables).  So definitely a good party.  And this morning, we stopped at J J's Fishhouse for some of the best fish and chips ever.  Seriously, them shits is delicious.  Great to see you again, Lisa; had a blast, and can't wait for the next time!

In other news, the job search continues.  I had an interview, but I think I kind of fucked it up.  Didn't lie when I should have.  In any case, didn't get the job.  I soldier on.

I kept thinking about posting something about the bullshit manufactured crisis over the debt limit, but the whole thing was so fucking stupid that I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  Suffice it to say, shit didn't need to happen, and the American people got screwed, even if half of them are too goddamn dumb to realize it.  Why poor people vote for Republicans is beyond me.

Finally, I discovered that Lollapalooza has been live-streaming concerts all weekend.  Awesome.  I managed to catch the Foo Fighters' set and holy shit, do they kick some asses.  They've never been my favorite band ever, but they've always been solidly good, and they apparently do a hell of a live gig.  Now I'm just hoping I can get employed and get the money to see them in Vancouver before that shit sells out.

(I would put up a Foo Fighters song to close out this post, but they're still going, and I really don't want to turn off the volume on "Everlong.")

Edit: Here's the vid of the aforementioned "Everlong":

Update, Again

It's funny, now I have all the time in the world to update this thing, and I just don't feel like it.  Perhaps I'm becoming post-blog.  Considering that I primarily used blogging as an outlet for my emotional traumas, this is a good thing.  Then again, I also used it for political commentary, and I've pretty much given up on politics in America, so maybe it's not all good.

I'm back to Washington and I've settled down in Maple Valley with my aunts on their gorgeous lake (I lived there a couple years ago, before I moved to Vermont).  I have absolutely no grounds for complaint there.  Nice basement suite to myself, a killer view, good company.  Oh, and the proximity of the amenities of civilization that I was sorely lacking in Vermont.  Things like Target, Dairy Queen, Taco Bell, Safeway and QFC.  Pretty much all of which I'm too broke to visit, but it feels good to see them, and know that it's my financial prospects that prevent me from visiting them, and not their nonexistence in my state.

Also, it's nice to be near Seattle.  I've been into the city a few times for interviews--with temp agencies, nothing special--and family gatherings, and while I haven't gotten to poke around much, goddamn I love the energy of a big city.  I didn't realize quite how much Bumfuckville, Vermont was slowly killing me inside until I went to see my brother in San Francisco, and it's grand to be living in the shadow of the metropole, at least.  It'll be even more awesome when I finally get a job and can move to the city proper.

As to jobs, there is little to report.  I have applied to many and heard from none, aside from the occasional entreaty to fill out more paperwork, which doesn't really count as contact, in my opinion.  The effort continues.  I've resolved to join NOAA and sail the ocean blue if I haven't found anything after six months.  Might as well.  Hopefully, this little MA of mine will start to pull its goddamn weight one of these days and I'll have something long before that.  If not... oh, well, a life at sea for me!  Maybe someday I'll captain my own research ship.  Or the Republicans will butcher NOAA's funding and I'll get laid off months after they hire me.  One or the other.

And now, to round out this post, here're some pics from the 4th of July party we had at my cousin's place.  My cousin lives in a fly apartment in Eastlake, overlooking Lake Union, and damn it was a great venue for some barbecuing, drinking and fireworks.  Much fun was had by all.  Including the massive bro party at the neighbors' place.

Auggie the dog.  Magnificent bastard.

The view, part 1.

The view, part 2.

Emerald City what what!!

"America, fuck yeah!  Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah..." 

"Baby you're a firework, so blah blah blah I'm pretty..."

Moving

I have spent a great deal of time in the last week or so packing my worldly possessions in anticipation for the big cross-country move.  Today shall (hopefully) be my final day of putting things into boxes, as tomorrow I acquire the truck and stuff it full.

(Well, actually, I had to get a larger than I wanted in order to be able to tow my car, so I will likely have room to spare.  That's good, because I'm not very good at packing.)

Some reflections on moving: I hate it.  There's nothing good to be said about it.  And that is all.

I'm sad to be leaving my friends here, but damn am I glad to be out of Vermont and headed back for civilization.  At long last, I'm going to be moving to the Washingtonian metropole and out of the periphery.  Soon, I will enjoy the best a city has to offer--like businesses that are open later than 10, and on Sundays, music venues that host actual bands and not just Phish and other hippy shit, and good food from varied ethnic traditions.

Somewhere in there, I hope to find gainful employment.  That'd be nice, too.

So Vermont, it's been swell.  As much as I bitch about you, I did on the whole enjoy my time here.  But it's time for us to part ways.  I bid you a fond-ish adieu.

Update

I am presently in the process of preparing to leave Vermont.  Mostly, this means I sit around and relax.  The weather is pretty nice, when it's not thunderstorms, which are initially cool, but can be kind of a pain in the ass when they go on for a week.  I might go on a walk after I get done writing this before such activities become dangerous.  In any case, much of Vermont is being flooded.  My slice is not.

Spent last weekend in San Francisco for my brother's college graduation.  Was a great time; San Francisco is an amazing city, and I heartily encourage anyone who hasn't be there to visit.  Congrats to him.  Congrats to me, too, as I officially got my master of arts that same weekend.  I picked up the diploma from the registrar the other day and damn, is it huge.  Way bigger than my puny undergrad diploma.  If I got a PhD, it'd have to be poster-sized to keep up the trend.

Still don't have a job lined up.  It will hopefully be much easier to find one once I get to Washington.  At the very least, there are some temp agencies that want me.

Romantic/sexual misadventures continue.  I'm not going to publicly share the details of this one, but it essentially boils down to me being totally about to hook up with a chick and being defeated by the demon liquor (her fault, not mine).  Were I to pick one word to describe my Vermont experience, it might have to be "celibate."  At least I got to do some shameless drunk flirting with my friend's sister and feel kinda sexy when she was responsive.

(Yes, I tried to hook up with one of my friend's sisters.  That's how I do.)

I'm starting to get really excited about leaving Vermont and returning to the Best Coast.  San Francisco reminded me of how much I love the Pacific states and how inferior I find New England.  Plus, I can't wait to live in an actual city, with actual city things.  So while a shitful of packing lies between me and June 16... bring that shit on.

And finally, I have a cold, no doubt contracted during my recent travels.  This perhaps explains the general dourness of this blog post.

That is all.

To California!

Going to California for my brother's graduation.  Should be good times.  San Francisco is an awesome city under any circumstances.

Done

As of Thursday, 12 May 2011, I am done with grad school.

Here's something strange/awesome to help me celebrate.

Thoughts on bin Laden's Death

So unless you've been living under a rock, you've become aware that American troops killed Osama bin Laden yesterday.  This event has stirred a lot of different reactions in the US.  Most disturbing are the belligerent celebrations of the death of a human being.  Relief is one thing; I think both of the wars are immoral and unnecessary, but I can't say I'm not relieved that bin Laden is no longer with us.  But jubilation over the death of a human--any human--is too much.  Have more respect for life.  I can't believe I have to tell a nation of ostensibly Christian people this--remember how your god said all that shit about loving thy neighbor as thyself and turning the other cheek and not being happy about people getting killed?!  Try practicing what you preach before telling my atheist, human-life-respecting ass that I'm going to hell.

I have, however, been relieved that the voices saying basically what I did (just less bitterly) have been considerably more numerous than I expected.  It turns out the people of this country aren't as universally stupid, ignorant and brutally self-centered as I tend to characterize them.  Who knew that someone who speaks almost entirely in hyperbole could be wrong.  (See?  That last sentence was hyperbole, too!  Shit, I'm on a roll!)

Listening to the radio today (yeah, I'm an NPR-listening leftist), I heard several callers on various programs express their disappointment that bin Laden had not been apprehended alive to face trial for his crimes.  Quite frankly, given the sad state of what passes for justice for suspected terrorists in US custody nowadays, I'm glad he's just fucking dead.  It's ironic that, in reportedly giving him a burial at see in accordance with Muslim tradition, we treated him in death with far more respect than we've afforded his alleged co-belligerents illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons throughout the world.  The more I think about that, the more fucked up the whole situation seems to me.

There's one thing that's I've found to be missing from the conversation on bin Laden: perspective.  I don't mean that this is a largely symbolic victory--that's been covered.  I mean that, as we mourn the approximately three thousand victims of 9/11, and make speeches that discuss the ten-year search for bin Laden and the justice that has finally been visited upon him, there seems to be no awareness that in the process of that ten-year hunt, we've killed a shitful of innocent people.  Even ignoring the ones we didn't directly kill, but who would almost certainly be alive today if it weren't for the wars we started, we have the blood of untold thousands of civilians on our hands, collateral damage of what is being depicted in the media as a righteous crusade in response to one man's evil deeds.  Perhaps bin Laden and 9/11 justified what we subsequently unleashed on the world.  (I don't think it did; even by extremely conservative estimations, we have killed many times the number of people that died in 9/11, and justice is in no small part about proportional response.  But that is a topic for another day.)  But the reality of the matter is that this war/these wars were wars, no matter what you think about their morality, and that we destroyed huge numbers of people who had offered us no offense, and whose only crime was living in a crappy country.

I don't really have a point to all this, other than the blood on our own hands is something we ought to be considering as well.  No one comes out of any war squeaky clean.  Maybe if we remembered that a little better, we wouldn't start so fucking many of them.

More Music

Holy shit, I just found this epic live version of "Jocasta" by Noah and the Whale and it was so good I had to share it, too.

That is all.

Music

Just to prove I haven't forgotten this blog, here's some premature birthday music for myself.  "Hop a Plane" by Tegan and Sara.

Taxes

EDIT: Here's a much better article about taxes.  It has numbers and stuff!

Congress is all kinds of fucking up these days.  We barely dodged a government shutdown that wouldn't have done anything good to the economy, and now the Democrats are starting their negotiations with the Republicans by offering up a conservative-leaning plan to begin with.  (Protip: You're supposed to start way more to the left than you think you can get and negotiate toward the middle, not start in their neighborhood and get negotiated even further to the right.)  And of course, no one's talking about raising taxes.

I'm not saying that various adjustments and cuts shouldn't happen.  I'm in favor of raising the age limit for Medicare and Social Security--seems only fair, when people are living longer--and you all know I think we ought to gut the Pentagon's budget (as it, by at least three-quarters, not by a few tens of billions here or there).  And programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security could no doubt be streamlined and adjusted for greater efficiency--nothing's perfect, after all.

(A quick aside--I don't mean "streamlined" or "adjusted" the way the Republicans do, e.g., destroyed.  Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are vital to the health of this society and its most vulnerable members, and anyone who gives a damn about the elderly, the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged is a moron or morally bankrupt if they are not horrified by Republican plans to literally end some of these programs for future generations.)

But--we must raise taxes.  And not just for the rich--I advocate raising them across the board--yeah, for our shrinking middle class, too--at least back to pre-Bush levels.  But we ought to tax the rich a great deal more.  Like, 80-90% of their income.  Opponents of such tax policy say that this will stifle economic growth, etc.  Such people are either lying to you for reasons of ideology or personal greed, or they are idiots.  There is no historical evidence to back them up.  Peep this graph from the National Taxpayers Union (which is, I should mention, dedicated to lowering taxes):

You will notice that for much of the twentieth century, the wealthiest Americans paid what is known in technical terms as a shitful of taxes--sometimes, in excess of 90%.  From the postwar period on, they paid at least 70% until Reagan showed up.  Now, any American historian can tell you that the period from 1945 to the mid to late-1960s was the most economically prosperous era in American history.  That's the period when the United States catapulted from a respectable major power to the global superpower it remained until the War on Terror revealed its combination of incompetence and impotence.

Taxing the rich is good for the economy.  Yes, it's true, higher taxes leave the wealthy with less money to invest.  They thing is, they don't always invest in things that grow the economy.  We've all heard about speculation and the disastrous effect it has on the prices of necessary commodities like food and oil--who ever could be doing that speculative investment?  And the wealthy don't build infrastructure or roads.  Honestly, private individuals don't build much at all anymore--massive corporations open new stores and factories, not individual actors.

Finally, there's the moral side of the equation.  The wealthy receive the most benefits from our society.  They have access to opportunities many of us will never enjoy.  And it's not an accident of the system that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a relative few--that's how capitalism is supposed to work.  That's how it's designed.  Therefore, it doesn't seem at all unfair that the wealthy be expected to pay more to support a system that works to their benefit in the first place.

And, in the final assessment, 10% of $10 million is still $1 million.  30% of $10 million is still $3 million.  And this is a nation with hundreds of billionaires.  By contrast, the median household income in this country is $44,389, with more than 50% of households earning less than $50,000.

How much fucking money do you really need?

(None of the above is particularly original to me, aside from the profanity.  You can find similar arguments all over the interwebs.  But I figured one more voice saying the same shit wouldn't hurt, right?  Plus, it's not like anyone who matters in Congress is listening anyway.)

The Ugly Season

One thing they don't tell you about New England is that it has an ugly season.  This is the period, relatively brief, between when the snow melts in early March to when the spring really kicks in with new growth in May.  During this period, all the trees are bare and all the grass is dead and brown, which makes things very ugly.

Vermonters call this "mud season."  I prefer "ugly season" because there really isn't that much mud.  At least not where I live.  Perhaps in the country.

In any case, I am currently in the thralls of the ugly season.  A land of evergreens keeps sounding better and better.

Update

-Life is currently pretty busy, so I've not had much time to devote to blogging.  I'm not entirely satisfied with the blog's appearance, but I'm going to hold off on something more customized and personal until I get back to the PNW and can take some relevant background pics of my own.

-Also, life, while busy, has been fairly boring, so I also don't have much in the way of stories to tell.  So ist das Leben, as the Germans would say.

-I've decided firmly on moving back to Washington (Seattle, specifically), and am currently seeking jobs along that line.  If anyone knows of anything that might require the skills of a person such as myself, I'd love to hear about it.

-The one-two punch of successfully defending my master's thesis and bombing out of grad school apps has left me with little motivation to continue my homework.  This isn't good, as I still have an independent study to complete.  The indy study is, I should say, incredibly interesting, focusing on the Habsburg Empire during the years of the Dual Monarchy.  It's just that it feels like I have more pressing matters to attend to (i.e., finding a job).

-I still have yet to decide where I stand on bombing Libya.  Seems bizarre to help one set of oppressed people while turning a blind eye to the brutal crackdowns by allied governments in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain.  On the other hand, that's not a particularly compelling argument for ignoring atrocities against civilians altogether.  I'm just not sure NATO intervention in Libya is going to make things any better in the long run--especially if we start arming rebel factions.  All that said, listening to the Republicans take Obama to task for engaging America in another foreign war is nothing short of surreal.

-I see that I've managed to resurrect many of my old labels.  I shall attempt to be more deliberate about their use henceforth.

-Now, finally, here's a collection of random clips from Godzilla movies, set to Busta Rhymes.

First Post

In before ban!