Thanks to Nick for sharing this with me...

Ugh!

Anxious, maybe, is a better descriptor. Fair warning, usually my blog is about subjects significantly less serious than this, but I've got the time this morning to blog and let some of this out (hooray, assembly schedule!), and since most everyone who reads this has heard this in some form or another, it's as easy a place as any to articulate it.

This week THE JOB is supposed to let me know whether or not they're going to keep me around, and my boss, whom I otherwise like, is being so damnably tight-lipped about it. I can't tell if it's some kind of professionalism-on-overdrive thing, or if it's an act (and if so, for who's benefit?), or what, but it's starting to make me feel alot of pressure. I like this job, and I really want it, but I'm just about to the point where I wish they'd tell me "NO" just so I could get on with my life. Time is beginning to draw out like a blade, and it's just kind of wrecking me on the inside.

Gindo and I watched this X-files episode last night called "Drive." These people were accidental subjects in a Navy communications experiment, and this weird radio wave put an incredible amount of pressure in their inner ears until their heads exploded, and the only way that they could beat it was to drive really fast. Neat metaphor for life, I guess, and that's kinda how I feel, too. I need to relax, but alot of the life-decisions I've made for later-on and coming-up are kidna contingent on this thing (not YES or NO, but the timing of these other things is dependent, you know?). And that's how I feel... like the pressure is just gonna keep building and building until my head explodes. I'm as busy as I can possibly be, and like everybody, keeping busy helps keep your mind off of it.

Except my mind's really not off of it. It's always there, kind of lurking. I don't have any anxiety about failure or the future or any of the shit I had when I was younger; I've fallen down enough times now to know that I'll land on my feet, so it's not that. Just a kind of desperate impatience, maybe. I had to chuckle earlier when I saw my principal on the phone in her office. Nice lady, but I wanted to run in there screaming for just a moment.

"DAMMIT! YES OR NO, MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND BUT I CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE!" I yearned to say. Dad and I were laughing about it (the situation) too.

"Shit, boy, haven't they made up their minds yet? I mean, I can see them maybe not knowing who they want, but 6 months seems like plenty of time to decide whether or not they want you."

Sage words.

I'm doing everything I can to cope with it. The schedule is getting to me, and while I'm doing a pretty good job at staying shiney most of the time, I can feel it starting to pull at the seams a little. Gindo's feeling the effects, and I know where it's coming from. I want to spend time with her and our relationship, and I can do that by letting go of the rock band, which I would like nothing better than to do (10 years is long enough, I've decided) just that, but I really can't until I have an answer from THE JOB, which they've been waiting and waiting on, and it's really starting to piss me off!

I want out! I want some relief! I want some time to myself! I want to not have basketball games and rock band rehearsals/shows, both of which are mind-numbing and pointless activities, every fucking night of the week, so all I want to do is drink and sleep when I have time to myself, which makes me surly and unlivable and depressed! Someone please, either hire me or fire me but just fucking tell me so I know where to put my goddamed energy for the immediate future and I can finally turn one of these two release valves before they, and I, come completely un-fucking-hinged and explode!

*whew*

There. I think I feel a little better.

Inteview(s) tomorrow

So, tomorrow I've got an interview at the job I'm already interim-ing at (finally). The interview is at 4:00pm. I think I've got a pretty good shot at it.
I'm hedging my bets, though. I've got an interview with their main competition (across the street) 3 hours before.
Here's to hoping someone gives me a job...

If only it were this easy:

This irritated me

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-hymowitz_27edi.ART0.State.Edition1.378ca5b.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18482794

*note, the first is the long version, the second is the short...

Now then.

Once in a while, I see something on Fark that I care enough about to actually read. Thus I found myself reading the angry and high-handed rant of one Kay Hymowitz (and you have no idea what it takes not take a few "frat-minded" cracks at the possible permutations of that name!), a woman who is obviously literate, and who also is probably desperately alone and unable to reconcile her lesbian-icity on account of being from Texas. Before I wade in, keep in mind that I'm certain this woman's ire and ennui could be excised if only she'd do what she's accused the male population of doing. More on that later.

I suppose the most stringent objection I take is that it has somehow become wrong to like playing X-box, to like drinking, and to like hanging out. Wait, wait, I hear you say! That's not what she's talking about at all! She's talking about guys remaining in adolescence until they're nearly out of their 20's, or even past, and those things are just symptomatic of that paradigm! Right, sure.

What she's really saying, what the core, underlying message of her article is simple: A man is not a man until he's a husband and a father. She doesn't come out and say it in so many words, but the message is clear. And she cites a great deal of women agreeing with her, ie, men don't want to settle down, get married, and all the hanging out and playing of video games and drinking with buddies is somehow keeping men from achieving what Hymowitz offensively referred to as "milestones of adult life." Point: As near as I can figure, by Hymowitz's definition, Milestones of Adult Life mostly means being in irreconcilable debt for years on end, working in a dreary job that you hate in order to afford the lives of the people living in your house, and not having the freedom to chase something down that might offer you the possibility of transcendence. If THAT'S the adult milestone I'm missing, she can fucking keep it.

You know, it's entirely possible that's the very reason WHY so many SYM's (single young males, for those of you who didn't peruse the article) are spending time into their 20's and 30's playing video games and not getting married, and it sort of the same reason that GenX didn't do it either (I'm speaking from GenY's perspective). Both of our generations (GenX'rs being those who rocked to Nirvana, GenY'rs who rocked to whatever was hip when I graduated high school, and I don't remember because I was listening to TOP and Steely Dan) have more or less seen what our fathers did (for those of us who had live-in fathers) to survive and to help us survive, and while we're greatful, we're in no great hurry to pass the favor on to the next generation by fathering said generation. (I suppose the difference is that GenY is disenfranchised, and GenX is disenfranchised and totally fucking lazy... I'm the GenXer's disagree).

Hymowitz's assertion that manhood does not begin until one is married and a father sort of implies that the most noble or important thing a man can do is become a father, and any man who's not is no man at all. In fact, her massively guilt-speak article comes right out and says that the media (oh no, the MEDIA!) has made it okay for "child-men" to remain in adolesence, well into their 30's and to not take on the role of adulthood or manhood (she uses the terms interchangeably, and at times, sexistly). Well, I can think of two reasons to delay taking on those mantles.

1.) Playing video games, drinking beer, and getting laid are all really fun, and you can't do them with a clear conscience if you have a wife and a kid. At least, not all the time.

2.) And here's the serious reason: There is a contingent of men out there who think just like the young women Hymowitz mentioned in her article. You know, the ones in graduate school who want a career and don't want to get married right away because they think maybe they should get a career together first, that way when they lose their dead-end job down at the mill or the factory or the cock-suckery because of a greedy CEO with a full pad of pink-slips, they might, you know, like, still have a fucking future together. As both of my brothers can now attest (read: my YOUNGER brothers), once you have a kid, your whole life changes. I don't see either of my brothers going back to school any time soon. Not with an infant mouth to feed.

When did it become morally and ethically irresponsible and immature for men to do what they want, but somehow noble and empowering for women to do the same? What if the reverse of the article were printed: Women are too content to sit and talk on the phone and go shopping all day, and aren't really women at all until they're wives and mothers? Can you imagine gasps of horror and cries of outrage? My God, it's almost as bad as George Busch's all-but-tacet health-care policies that would instruct all women to consider themselves "pre-pregnant!" (any coincidence with Busch=TX, Hymowitz=TX? Maybe we could go ahead and never listen to what anyone from TX had to say about anything of social import, EVER AGAIN? Geez, and the rest of the country thinks Kansas is backward (for wit, we are)).

I'll admit, that was paterno-centric thinking in action for alot of years, but now, at a time when we celebrate women for succeeding at the university and the workplace, isn't it a little double-standarded of folks to chide men for not having much of an interest in getting a couple of brats and a mortgage?

And by the way, something tells me that Ms. Hymowitz would lead a happier, more fulfilled life is she moved away from Texas, spent a little less time worrying about this:

http://www.halowars.com/images/mpday002b.jpg

... and a little more time trying to find this:

http://googlegirls.files.wordpress.com/2005/12/dnk-girls-kissing-1713.jpg

Calendar Nightmare

This is about what the calendar in my office looks like now. The problem with being the new guy is that no one tells you shit until right before you're supposed to do it, and then look at you like you're a hare-brained retard when you don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Case in point: "Say, can you have the HS Band at 6 extra basketball games? We go to them every year, but I guess we forgot to tell you. By the way, two of them are the day before League Music Festival. Enjoy!"

Case in point number 2: The MS music festival is scheduled for a SATURDAY, during SPRING BREAK, THE DAY BEFORE F^@&ING EASTER! I don't know calendared that, but I hope they're standing outside the unemployment office right in a dirty undershirt trying to sell a bag of firecrackers so they can afford a bottle of rotgut so they can get a peaceful night's sleep in their favorite back alley.

HELLGA!

Wow!

Everybody PANIC!

So, I'm about to go to bed tonight, and I flip over to the news station so that it will be on that channel when I crawl out of bed in the morning, only to happen upon the unbelievable.

Wichita has actually called off school tomorrow, and since we're following their lead, so has my gig.

Jeez... I can't believe it. A couple of inches of ice and everybody says STAY IN YOUR HOMES!! DON'T GO OUT!! AAARRGHHH!

First of all, I was shocked that they canceled when there's a basketball game tonight (for wit, I didn't see the MSFlyingCircus on the list, but no shocker there. Sorry Deb and Sally!), but I'm really hacked because now I've lost one of my last few rehearsals before the concert on Sunday night. Having already lost Friday for "tutorials," now losing Tuesday which has been statistically shown to be the best rehearsal day of the week, we are down to Wednesday and Thursday, which I'm sure can be interrupted for something irrelevant and time-consuming.

This does not bode well...