I've been thinking about what exactly to post next. The initial trauma of the job loss has subsided and I've been able to settle into a fairly regular routine. In the week after my return to Chicago from Madison, I allowed myself to slide into a semi-debauched lifestyle. Friends visited from NYC and Wisconsin, there was much beer drank and many brunches languidly muddled through. It was fun, a lot of fun actually, I very much like the city and without a job, I'm free to prattle around all day and drink all night. But that week wore me out completely. When I saw my friend off on her way back to NYC I decided that I had to watch my booze intake for fear of developing a habit, plus to say I felt physically, like absolute garbage wouldn't be an exaggeration. I knew I needed to develop a new routine, something that's easy for me to do when I have the structure of a nine-to-five but less so when my day is utterly blank. And herein is the theme of this essay: the development of new habits and routines; the development of even the most cursory scaffolding of a day and the development of the self discipline to get out of bed for no other reason than to stop sleeping.
The day after my friends had left town was very hot. I woke up late and as I sat in the dense humidity of my living room I found myself staring at my roommate's dog, Otto. Otto was panting, lying immobile in a moat of sunlight on the floor. As I looked at the dog with his pitbull grin of vague satisfaction, I realized that my daily life was quickly becoming the same as his and that he was reflecting my lassitude back at me. I too sat, similarly inert, sweating on the couch, playing Call of Duty, sipping McDonald's 1$ coffee and felt that this was what meant to be unemployed. Not having a job means long stretches of boredom and emptiness punctuated by brief and painful moments of panic and ennui. I thought to myself as I turned off my Xbox that the most important thing to do is find reasons not to drink too much though there really isn't any reason why you can't go ahead and burn another day in a hungover torpor.
Drinking is the constant temptation, supreme luxury and worst enemy. In concert with sleep it has the potential to sap days away from you with startling efficiency. It's that temptation that I buttress myself against while reminding myself that comfort can be a form of depression.
I have come to realize that in each day, there are two potential options: I can either not drink and though my days are not exactly regular, fall into a rough rhythm that is at least nominally productive, or drink, hang out, and recover (which is socially productive in its own right and fun, but also dangerous). The following is a cursory description of what those days look like (I hope it isn't painfully dull to those reading).
My days usually start with Otto waking me up at around nine by flopping into my bed with me. There we stay until about eleven or noon at which point, we rise and I make a light breakfast some of which I share with the dog. After that we usually lounge in the house, I play video-games (Call of Duty is an onerous addiction) and Otto sits on the front porch and sunbathes. Around three I go for a jog and Otto is picked up by a friend of mine who's also currently unemployed for his daily walk and socializing session (Otto is quite the gregarious hound). At half past four I eat again, if Otto has returned, he eats as well. I shower (sans dog) and then make my way to a cafe near my house to work on blog stuff or the few freelance projects that have filtered down to me from my ex-employer. I stop working around ten, return home, eat again. This is where I hit the crucial fork in my day, one that really determines how my following day will be conducted. I will either avoid drinking, do basic upkeep stuff -- my laundry, clean my room or do dishes -- the night will wind down, I'll go to bed at about three, do some reading then sleep. In these days I am reminded of the main character in Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle whose wife leaves the house everyday for her job, leaving him in a sun-filled and empty home where he takes great joy in doing banal chores like making pasta and ironing his shirts while musing about how his cat spends its days. The other road in the fork prevails if my roommates in service are hanging out or if I'd made a date with someone. If they are drinking or I am otherwise going out to get drinks, I will most likely end up drinking too much since I'm free of morning commitments. I will not go to bed until four and consider myself responsible for drinking a glass of water and brushing my teeth before I hit the sheets. This prong naturally costs me a good portion of my following day, I may not get out of bed until two, spend my day in a pair of athletic shorts and watch the entire new season of Game of Thrones in a single sitting (which is how I employed my day yesterday).
But the days in which I party are in a way, less interesting in terms of the unemployed lifestyle. I am a 24-year-old man without any real responsibility and just enough money coming in to get blotto on a six-pack of tallboys any time I want. Of course I do what anyone else in that situation would do and is a common not just to people who are unemployed but also underemployed. What's more strange and interesting is the sense of letting your body basically determine what you do and at what time you do it (excluding, again days lost to hangovers). You wake up when you feel like it, work when you feel like it, eat when you feel like it and go to bed when you feel like it. My days all last roughly the same number of hours but those hours can be anything from ten in the morning until one at night to one in the afternoon until four in the morning. I'm currently writing this at nine in the evening as I find my productive hours are usually crepuscular and nocturnal. A schedule where I can be awake until four and sleep until one fits me far better than one in which I have to be up at 7:30 AM and in bed by midnight. Time is surprisingly liquid in that way.
I've read about a Frenchman that lived in a cave completely devoid of natural light, external sound or clocks in order to find out what a human's natural circadian rhythm was. After his weeks spent subterranean he concluded that he had been sleeping for some outrageous portion of his day, around 14 hours. I feel like I am that man. I have no responsibility to be anywhere or do anything and the strongest determining factor in how I spend my day, when I do what I do, is my body.
I would say the feeling is a good one. I'm my own boss and my time is as valuable as I make it. I feel good when I do things I see as valuable, I feel bad when I treat my day like it's worthless. Depression and immobility is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you think your day is worthless, it is, and as I wrote in my last post, what is a person but their days stacking up, one on top of another?
Monday, June 3, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
April 20, 2013 "The Liberal Arts Blues"
I'm writing this from a coffee shop I used to frequent as an undergrad in Madison. I'm not big on school-spirit but I am a little susceptible to nostalgia and seeing the campus today while I was jogging definitely gives me that kind of heavy, ghostly feeling. I read a book a little while ago about pop music called Retromania and since then I've been kicking around the idea that the greatest trauma in life is realizing its ephemerality; the pain of never knowing quite where you are or what you have until it's gone and and you've moved beyond it. It's not a new idea but it's one that has become more visceral and painful as I've grown older. But maybe it's some "good-old-days" fallacy to which I'm falling victim. It might be because I'm not very old and have an immature grasp on things, weak concepts, bad ideas. The cafe I'm in is now run by students who've never met the people I'd known who'd worked here. I'm stung by the thought that life's responsibilities amount to a constant push against atrophy and entropy through the unflappable mince-step of minutes. A person is the habits they keep; what is a person but a person's life and what is a person's life but days stacking up? But I'm waxing platitudinal. It's been a year since I was last here, I miss it in a way but less so the city than the people in it who are mostly gone now. Madison has a way of making you feel old at 24 and I find the students walking around campus looking more to me like children. At the same time, I'm in the city to visit my grandparents who are turning 90 and 91 this weekend. My grandfather has been retired for over thirty years. They seem content to me, not irrevocably rent by the passage of time or obsessed with their own mortality, which if my theory were right, you would guess someone who is very old would be. Nostalgia is painful but not unpleasant, similar to running.
I passed through Memorial Library this afternoon. I went into the computer labs and the fourth floor reading room where I used to do the heavy lifting for my degree. While I looked out the bay windows of the fourth floor at the chipping spring waves on Lake Mendota and at the austere crenulations of the Red Gym, I felt oddly betrayed. Perhaps I'd been pig-headed to think that all of the time spent pouring over obscurities at those long tables was anything but time wasted. It was time though which, at the time, felt good, felt right. I was working on something I cared about and towards something I wanted. It was difficult work but it was good work and I'd assumed that after school, work would continue to be, at least to some extent, challenging and satisfying. What I realize now is that opportunities to do good work take an enormous amount of work to find and a good amount of luck to have a chance to participate in. But I loved my time in school and value highly what I learned. I am who I am because of those classes, many of which changed how I think on a scale that can only be described as seismic. My stepmother, my dad's wife, however, relishes pointing out that my brother (an engineering major) is working towards a "useful" degree which will get him a job which is "what's important." I usually fill in the "unlike your feckless brother who's pissed away five years of his life and a pile of our cash," though I might be projecting. I can't help but think back to the little jokes on how unemployable someone with a pure liberal arts education is. I had always thought if I was a successful student, I would be successful finding work -- that hard work then, even in something like epistemology would pay off somehow (I tried to explain exactly what epistemology was to my uncle yesterday and the topic was off-handedly dismissed). Maybe my time right now is a casualty of the growing pains of an antiquated system. Or perhaps, like my friend Simon says, no one in the middle class should ever really have had the opportunity to verse themselves in the liberal arts; it used to be a purely aristocratic pursuit and literature is and always was a means of personal enrichment for the well-to-do. But I'm speculating again and Simon does love fiction that deals with the upper-crust...
What has been unnerving about my visit and what may be one of the hardest parts of being unemployed is the pity. It's a terrible feeling to know that you are being pitied, it's something I've never really felt and it's far too real. I realized I was being pitied by my grandmother after I'd arrived in Madison last night. We had a conversation in which she referred to this phase in my life as a "bump." I always thought of divorces as pitiable "bumps," car accidents, deaths and addictions; to hear the word come from my grandmother about me, made me want to cry. The rest of my relatives behaved very strangely toward me as well. I take umbrage with my dad for telling them about my employment predicament*. It's not really any of their business and being thought of as my father's "troubled son" is neither helpful nor accurate, but as I sat down to eat with everyone, I couldn't help feeling like that's exactly what I was to them.
After my visit with my grandparents who are in enviable spirits and health, I went to a bar to meet John, a close friend of mine, and his girlfriend Jane (a combination of names with a pleasant alliterative flow, don't you think?). John is in med school and some of his classmates had put together a band that was playing a show. The band was terrible but considering their future day jobs, they can afford to be bad. Jane is currently employed at the Childrens Museum in Madison. She too was a liberal arts major; she studied journalism and mass-com. We drank some had a conversation about the dearth of viable employment in our desired fields (I told her I was recently laid off again though it's something I generally try to avoid leading with in a conversation; the title "unemployed" comes with no small amount of shame). The J School at Madison is competitive, you have you apply to get in and maintain a minimum GPA to stay in. Jane was a successful student but since graduation the closest she's come to working in her field is an unpaid internship at Madison's public radio station. It was relieving to talk to her about shared frustrations. She lamented the death of print journalism and how unclear it was that the labor market was so weak and what that meant when she decided to follow a comprehensive and expensive path into the field. Maybe twenty years ago a journalism degree was as apt to get someone a job as an engineering degree is today but I don't know. All I know is that now, many people like Jane and I are left basically singing the same tune, various versions of the liberal arts blues (I knew I'd shoehorn the title in here somewhere!).
After the mediocre band comprised of very smart people finished playing, the three of us went to a second bar to meet some old friends and acquaintances. The prodigious amount of beer I'd drank by then had begun to assuage the malaise that my family had left me in but finding the crew of old friends, not seen for some time, all variously employed in engineering, med school and law school gave me a new twinge of ambivalence. I'm happy for the continuing successes of all of my friends but comparisons are inevitable and often hurtful. And if the students I saw on the street looked like children, my old friends looked startlingly like men. By the end of the night -- though I was very happy to have seen everyone -- I was feeling a bit small (I also played pool and played very badly). I was ill at ease and restive and as I thrashed in my sleeping bag on John's floor, the conversation I'd had with my grandmother repeating itself in my mind. I contemplated just leaving town in the morning least be faced with the humiliation of pity all over again during the next day's birthday celebrations. If I left I wouldn't have to be confronted with the fact that, contrary to how I feel, my family thinks all I'm capable of is wasting time.
PS* While I was standing in the shower today, I realized I was the one who blurted out, upon my arrival in Madison that I no longer had a job. I told my grandparents I'd lost my job over dinner my first evening there. I think they asked how the job was going and I said something like "it's gone." I apologize for the mistake, no umbrage taken towards you, Dad.
I passed through Memorial Library this afternoon. I went into the computer labs and the fourth floor reading room where I used to do the heavy lifting for my degree. While I looked out the bay windows of the fourth floor at the chipping spring waves on Lake Mendota and at the austere crenulations of the Red Gym, I felt oddly betrayed. Perhaps I'd been pig-headed to think that all of the time spent pouring over obscurities at those long tables was anything but time wasted. It was time though which, at the time, felt good, felt right. I was working on something I cared about and towards something I wanted. It was difficult work but it was good work and I'd assumed that after school, work would continue to be, at least to some extent, challenging and satisfying. What I realize now is that opportunities to do good work take an enormous amount of work to find and a good amount of luck to have a chance to participate in. But I loved my time in school and value highly what I learned. I am who I am because of those classes, many of which changed how I think on a scale that can only be described as seismic. My stepmother, my dad's wife, however, relishes pointing out that my brother (an engineering major) is working towards a "useful" degree which will get him a job which is "what's important." I usually fill in the "unlike your feckless brother who's pissed away five years of his life and a pile of our cash," though I might be projecting. I can't help but think back to the little jokes on how unemployable someone with a pure liberal arts education is. I had always thought if I was a successful student, I would be successful finding work -- that hard work then, even in something like epistemology would pay off somehow (I tried to explain exactly what epistemology was to my uncle yesterday and the topic was off-handedly dismissed). Maybe my time right now is a casualty of the growing pains of an antiquated system. Or perhaps, like my friend Simon says, no one in the middle class should ever really have had the opportunity to verse themselves in the liberal arts; it used to be a purely aristocratic pursuit and literature is and always was a means of personal enrichment for the well-to-do. But I'm speculating again and Simon does love fiction that deals with the upper-crust...
What has been unnerving about my visit and what may be one of the hardest parts of being unemployed is the pity. It's a terrible feeling to know that you are being pitied, it's something I've never really felt and it's far too real. I realized I was being pitied by my grandmother after I'd arrived in Madison last night. We had a conversation in which she referred to this phase in my life as a "bump." I always thought of divorces as pitiable "bumps," car accidents, deaths and addictions; to hear the word come from my grandmother about me, made me want to cry. The rest of my relatives behaved very strangely toward me as well. I take umbrage with my dad for telling them about my employment predicament*. It's not really any of their business and being thought of as my father's "troubled son" is neither helpful nor accurate, but as I sat down to eat with everyone, I couldn't help feeling like that's exactly what I was to them.
After my visit with my grandparents who are in enviable spirits and health, I went to a bar to meet John, a close friend of mine, and his girlfriend Jane (a combination of names with a pleasant alliterative flow, don't you think?). John is in med school and some of his classmates had put together a band that was playing a show. The band was terrible but considering their future day jobs, they can afford to be bad. Jane is currently employed at the Childrens Museum in Madison. She too was a liberal arts major; she studied journalism and mass-com. We drank some had a conversation about the dearth of viable employment in our desired fields (I told her I was recently laid off again though it's something I generally try to avoid leading with in a conversation; the title "unemployed" comes with no small amount of shame). The J School at Madison is competitive, you have you apply to get in and maintain a minimum GPA to stay in. Jane was a successful student but since graduation the closest she's come to working in her field is an unpaid internship at Madison's public radio station. It was relieving to talk to her about shared frustrations. She lamented the death of print journalism and how unclear it was that the labor market was so weak and what that meant when she decided to follow a comprehensive and expensive path into the field. Maybe twenty years ago a journalism degree was as apt to get someone a job as an engineering degree is today but I don't know. All I know is that now, many people like Jane and I are left basically singing the same tune, various versions of the liberal arts blues (I knew I'd shoehorn the title in here somewhere!).
After the mediocre band comprised of very smart people finished playing, the three of us went to a second bar to meet some old friends and acquaintances. The prodigious amount of beer I'd drank by then had begun to assuage the malaise that my family had left me in but finding the crew of old friends, not seen for some time, all variously employed in engineering, med school and law school gave me a new twinge of ambivalence. I'm happy for the continuing successes of all of my friends but comparisons are inevitable and often hurtful. And if the students I saw on the street looked like children, my old friends looked startlingly like men. By the end of the night -- though I was very happy to have seen everyone -- I was feeling a bit small (I also played pool and played very badly). I was ill at ease and restive and as I thrashed in my sleeping bag on John's floor, the conversation I'd had with my grandmother repeating itself in my mind. I contemplated just leaving town in the morning least be faced with the humiliation of pity all over again during the next day's birthday celebrations. If I left I wouldn't have to be confronted with the fact that, contrary to how I feel, my family thinks all I'm capable of is wasting time.
PS* While I was standing in the shower today, I realized I was the one who blurted out, upon my arrival in Madison that I no longer had a job. I told my grandparents I'd lost my job over dinner my first evening there. I think they asked how the job was going and I said something like "it's gone." I apologize for the mistake, no umbrage taken towards you, Dad.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
April 16, 2013, "Dispatches from the Void"
I'm beginning this blog as I'm sitting down to eat a (free) lunch at my mom's house in Wauwatosa, WI (an urban suburb about three miles from downtown Milwaukee). My current address is in the Logan square neighborhood of Chicago. This is my first Tuesday being re-unemployed. I was laid off from my first job, a miscellaneous, IT tele-slave position that was located near Millenium Park in Chicago, in March of 2012. I was laid off again from my job as an editor's assistant (though it was technically an internship) last week, the first week in April. At the end of a full day working on the project I'd been assigned, an email popped up on my screen saying that there was no more work for me to do for the season, adios muchacho. Since I was an intern, I guess my boss didn't needed neither an in lieu-of notice (a two week heads up that you'll be laid off "in lieu" of a severance package) nor a, you guessed it, severance package.
The first time I was laid off, it was a surreal, "out of a movie" experience (though I loathe to use that expression for it's troubling, post-modernist, "my life is a simulation" undertones). It was a place called Total Attorneys, it had a somewhat untenable business model, they needed to change it so my position ("consumer advocate" cum tele-slave) was extinguished. This company was big though, it still exists but is much smaller than when I was hired on, and I was laid off with about a dozen or so of my coworkers, maybe more. I arrived at my desk, found all the passwords changed to log into the system and then was called into a dimly lit conference room where a rheumy-eyed higher-up (his spot in the company I'm not really sure of, but it isn't important) told us we had no job left. They took their layoff seriously, we were all given boxes and instructed to clear out our "desks" (actually small, particle board cubicles, mine stuffed into an office the size of maybe a full-bathroom in your average house with four other people.)
I got my box, filled it. To my dismay, all of our key-cards had been deactivated which meant I couldn't get into the toilet. I'll always remember the day as cast under the dark cloud of a terrible urge to shit. That and the feeling of riding the El home at 11:00 am with a box of office junk on my lap. Heavy. I got home and played video games the rest of the day, and went for a run.
I was optimistic after the first layoff, I had found a job within about two weeks of moving to Chicago and now I had some full-time experience, albeit a very fake sounding position at a very fake sounding company. I was so wrong it's laughable. A friend of mine said that applying to jobs is like "screaming into the void," which is the best way I've heard the feeling described. It's nightmarish. I surfed the web, hoofed hard copy resumes to restaurants and cafes, clothing stores, did the follow up calls, emailed family friends (though I have few in the city) to beg for leads, literally anything. Every business on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago probably has a resume of mine somewhere. I scanned Craigslist, all the "Monster" type sites and even started a LinkedIn (which is some low, low shit.) I got nothing, in six months from March until mid July, I didn't even get an interview. I was receiving unemployment, about $200 a week, which, don't believe the hype, the notion of anyone living off of that almost anywhere by choice is completely ridiculous. It was enough money to staunch the bleed out of my savings (about $3,000 or so at the end of my employment) but no more than that. It allowed me to continue searching for work for six months rather than four.
Unemployment has a way of eating away at your ego. I have no problem making it to work on time, I go to bed at midnight, get up at 7:30, go to work, no problem. But when you're going on four months of unemployment, there develops this weight that sits on your chest when you try to heave yourself out of bed in the morning. The weight says "you have nowhere to be today, if you didn't leave your room, no one would notice, you have no responsibilities," and man, that weight gets heavy.
When I did finally get another job, the one I was just recently, again, laid off from, I found it through a temporary roommate (I haven't mentioned that I live in a house with six other twenty-somethings in order to make living affordable in the city). He was passing through Chicago on his way to L.A. and had landed a job as an editor's assistant working on children's text books for the summer. He left in late July and all I had to do, after six months of void screaming, was basically show up at the editor's office and I had the job. That was it. I'm not sure what that says about the labor market right now. I guess something like, I was qualified to do the job and was qualified to do most of the jobs I applied to, but who cares? The diffidence I was hired with was puzzling, the more I think about it the stranger it seems. Getting a job seemed so impossible and then to have one with hardly any questions asked; maybe an analogy could be when the president pardons a prisoner from execution, to the president, whether or not the prisoner dies makes no difference, to the prisoner it's quite the opposite.
So I was given a stay of execution, so to speak. I was only making $12 an hour, which is again, not a lot and I had some friends I had to pay back and a security deposit to buy which soaked up a good deal of my cash when I first got hired. But I stabilized a little, started to try to save again and rather liked my job. I did a lot of fact checking, which is basically just going through the manuscript of these supplementary books my boss edited and making sure, sentence by sentence, that every fact, was in fact, a fact. Through the course of the job I amassed a great deal of Jeopardy style knowledge like odds-and-ends facts about countries and the internet and whatever else. But like I mentioned earlier that job, less ceremoniously than the first, has come to an end.
Which brings me to today, right now. My mom has just returned home from her job and is asking me what I want for dinner and I'm feeling disturbingly like my 17-year-old self again.
The first time I was laid off, it was a surreal, "out of a movie" experience (though I loathe to use that expression for it's troubling, post-modernist, "my life is a simulation" undertones). It was a place called Total Attorneys, it had a somewhat untenable business model, they needed to change it so my position ("consumer advocate" cum tele-slave) was extinguished. This company was big though, it still exists but is much smaller than when I was hired on, and I was laid off with about a dozen or so of my coworkers, maybe more. I arrived at my desk, found all the passwords changed to log into the system and then was called into a dimly lit conference room where a rheumy-eyed higher-up (his spot in the company I'm not really sure of, but it isn't important) told us we had no job left. They took their layoff seriously, we were all given boxes and instructed to clear out our "desks" (actually small, particle board cubicles, mine stuffed into an office the size of maybe a full-bathroom in your average house with four other people.)
I got my box, filled it. To my dismay, all of our key-cards had been deactivated which meant I couldn't get into the toilet. I'll always remember the day as cast under the dark cloud of a terrible urge to shit. That and the feeling of riding the El home at 11:00 am with a box of office junk on my lap. Heavy. I got home and played video games the rest of the day, and went for a run.
I was optimistic after the first layoff, I had found a job within about two weeks of moving to Chicago and now I had some full-time experience, albeit a very fake sounding position at a very fake sounding company. I was so wrong it's laughable. A friend of mine said that applying to jobs is like "screaming into the void," which is the best way I've heard the feeling described. It's nightmarish. I surfed the web, hoofed hard copy resumes to restaurants and cafes, clothing stores, did the follow up calls, emailed family friends (though I have few in the city) to beg for leads, literally anything. Every business on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago probably has a resume of mine somewhere. I scanned Craigslist, all the "Monster" type sites and even started a LinkedIn (which is some low, low shit.) I got nothing, in six months from March until mid July, I didn't even get an interview. I was receiving unemployment, about $200 a week, which, don't believe the hype, the notion of anyone living off of that almost anywhere by choice is completely ridiculous. It was enough money to staunch the bleed out of my savings (about $3,000 or so at the end of my employment) but no more than that. It allowed me to continue searching for work for six months rather than four.
Unemployment has a way of eating away at your ego. I have no problem making it to work on time, I go to bed at midnight, get up at 7:30, go to work, no problem. But when you're going on four months of unemployment, there develops this weight that sits on your chest when you try to heave yourself out of bed in the morning. The weight says "you have nowhere to be today, if you didn't leave your room, no one would notice, you have no responsibilities," and man, that weight gets heavy.
When I did finally get another job, the one I was just recently, again, laid off from, I found it through a temporary roommate (I haven't mentioned that I live in a house with six other twenty-somethings in order to make living affordable in the city). He was passing through Chicago on his way to L.A. and had landed a job as an editor's assistant working on children's text books for the summer. He left in late July and all I had to do, after six months of void screaming, was basically show up at the editor's office and I had the job. That was it. I'm not sure what that says about the labor market right now. I guess something like, I was qualified to do the job and was qualified to do most of the jobs I applied to, but who cares? The diffidence I was hired with was puzzling, the more I think about it the stranger it seems. Getting a job seemed so impossible and then to have one with hardly any questions asked; maybe an analogy could be when the president pardons a prisoner from execution, to the president, whether or not the prisoner dies makes no difference, to the prisoner it's quite the opposite.
So I was given a stay of execution, so to speak. I was only making $12 an hour, which is again, not a lot and I had some friends I had to pay back and a security deposit to buy which soaked up a good deal of my cash when I first got hired. But I stabilized a little, started to try to save again and rather liked my job. I did a lot of fact checking, which is basically just going through the manuscript of these supplementary books my boss edited and making sure, sentence by sentence, that every fact, was in fact, a fact. Through the course of the job I amassed a great deal of Jeopardy style knowledge like odds-and-ends facts about countries and the internet and whatever else. But like I mentioned earlier that job, less ceremoniously than the first, has come to an end.
Which brings me to today, right now. My mom has just returned home from her job and is asking me what I want for dinner and I'm feeling disturbingly like my 17-year-old self again.
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