Life

[Thrik]

It's definitely a challenging thing, Hermie. I'm quite fortunate because I'm an anti-social fuck anyway, so a small number of friends I see occasionally is enough for me.

 

My girlfriend was struggling with finding new friends for a while, but eventually found some great ones through Roller Derby. Like many cities, there's a local team; while the sport is hard work, the girls that do it form extremely strong bonds with each other. Guys get involved too as referees and it all ends up being a very strong social experience, lots of going to bars/pubs together and such. I also mentioned it to a female co-worker of mine who moved here from elsewhere and it's been a huge thing for her, almost life-changing. Her wedding was full of friends she'd met there.

 

I personally never got on with it as I'm just not a skating kind of person, but that's the kind of thing you should seek out to form strong bonds with people. I guess you can meet friends anywhere, but when there's a need to work with people on a common goal that's when things tend to blossom. I've met some great friends through work too, so maybe it's worth finding somewhere better to work if all your co-workers aren't really the kind of people you could share an evening out with. Life's too short to waste your working hours with assholes.

[Merus]

Aaaaaand the creepy guy won.

[Henroid]

Woo so I'm moving back to the Bay Area sometime soon. I was supposed to be there already this week but some foreseen shenanigans put it on hold.

 

A cousin in the family has been setting me up to meet with some union folks across multiple unions across the bay (operation engineers, mechanics, and electricians specifically) since he's some sort of state liason with union leaders and knows them personally and such. So sweet deal. It's all five-year program stuff where you do a mix of working and class room stuff specifically for the job, $17 an hour to start (minus benefits factored in, but you get them along with the pay) and at the end of the five years you get like $50/hour in pay and benefits combined. I should've looked into this years ago when I was in Oregon a short time but that's the way it rolls.

 

It'll be nice being back in the BA. Aside from the familiarity I won't be in rural hell, and the weather kicks ass over there compared to here.

[SecretAsianMan]

Hearing you guys talk about moving reminds me that I really want to move, but can't.  For personal reasons I'm not going to get into, I'm stuck where I am for the foreseeable future.  I don't really have any friends outside of work, and the few I do have at work are work friends that I don't really have anything in common with except for the fact that we work together.  I would love to get away from where I am and go somewhere fun.  But my life is kind of a mess right now so that isn't likely to happen.

[syntheticgerbil]

My girlfriends' office mates are cool, two of them are nerdy, one a gamer, so we hang out with them occasionally. But they already have their own existing social circles, and they're both heavy into Trance music and that whole scene, which kinda leaves us out of it. 

What you need to do is exile all of their friends to another country, prison, or dimension, then delete all the trance music from their computers and ipods.

[Twig]

While nostalgia'ing it up in my Flickr account to find a few photos for the photos thread, I found some photos of ME from Japan. Which was four years ago. I remember feeling like a lazy, unhealthily large piece of butt back then. I saw those photos and thought "what the hell I was so skinny".

 

I need to start working out or something.

[Sententia]

I tend not to post here even though a lot has been happening, not sure why.  This might have one of the largest impacts in my life though, so I think it's appropriate!

 

Ever since elementary school all the way through middle and high school I had a severe rejection of homework.  The source of it was childish, simply an aversion to increasing my workload, though at the time I occaisonally attempted to rationalize it or just wallowed in guilt.  In the meanwhile though I was mostly capable of getting As, Bs, or Cs without doing any homework off the back of test scores.  I was able to do this and pass all my classes in elementary and middle school but in high school I started failing a few, it was simply not feasible to get a D or better with only test scores, and I ended up being half a credit short of graduating.  By the way if you're wondering what I spent all that free time on: I was on the varsity tennis team, the robotics team, took a martial arts class and a fencing class, and I organized the weekly parties with my other nerd friends where we'd play games and eat pizza all night and into the next day.  Anyways, back to the story: at the time I wanted to enjoy as much of summer as I could with my friends, so I hid my failure to graduate from my dad (mom and dad had gotten divorced by then, and she wasn't mentally together enough to really talk to me).  In that time he kept wanting me to move out and get a job and I have a real problem saying no to my dad, I have so much love and respect for him.  When he finally found out he just wanted me to move out even more and take an online class to finish graduation, both of which I did.

 

When I moved to the city I really thought it would be a chance to change my behaviour, but in the end nothing changed.  I lazed around for 9 months, and during that time I watched an enormous amount of pro SC2, but also spent an enormous amount of time considering philosophy, studying aspects of biology, neurology, sociology, math and programming, physics, downloaded interesting books off piratebay, I learned more about space and rural farming and all sorts of things.  Looking back it was like a self-inflicted college crash course.  Still I just didn't want to work, I didn't want to give up my free time for no benefit.  I'm an extremely unambitious person, there's never really been a difficult dream or goal to achieve, I only want to do the things I like doing: competitive sports, competitive gaming, learning about the world, eating food, reading trashy crime novels... I actually really love a lot of activities in life so eventually that money ran out (it wasn't a huge amount in the first place, I spend frugally) and I chose to move in with my mom, dad having moved to detroit with his then girlfriend, now wife.

 

Then began my life in Kenosha, where I am now.  When I started living with my mom she wanted to build the basement into a livable space to rent it out, so she enlisted my help as I have construction experience from Kentucky, the unspoken agreement being my free labor as payment instead of rent until I got a job.  To be clear I'm not a lazy or poor worker: when I have a job I want to do it gets done quickly and effectively.  I still avoided looking for work while deceiving others into thinking I was.  Around ~6 months after the move though I happened across something that applied the sharp, attractive clarity of philosophical writing styles to the reality of the world and how we should act; I found ethics!  I then searched out and educated myself on the scope of problems in the world, both natural and man-made, and what I learned eventually led me to decide to completely change the route of my life.

 

Which leads to the mental state I'm in now: many of the issues in the world already have organizations matched against them whose goal is to fix them.  The simple fact is because I live in such a wealthy nation my dollars can go very far in the poorest parts of the world, which is why I'm going to give every drop of my extra income away.  I don't need money anyways, I don't drink or smoke or buy drugs, my pleasures are all cheap, my taste in food is cheap, I don't own a car and plan to never do so, and I don't care to own a house.  My life and habits are perfectly suited to become a vehicle for philanthropy without even being to the detriment to my happiness!  And so I've found the motivation to begin my working life versus my historical sedentary nature: the difference is not what changes in my life, it's what changes in others' lives.  If I imagine an alternate future where I continue to do the bare minimum and get by with as much free time as possible, I see someone else having whatever job I would have and them spending the money on stupid excess that I never would, instead of good causes.  I recently took the pledge and set up donations to Against Malaria and Water, though I don't plan on fully giving everything until I've paid off college and created an emergency fund for myself.  There are other changes, I'm now a vegetarian to combat animal mistreatment, I've begun voting at every opportunity, I've become a bit more confrontational about religion (going from ignoring or deflecting all conversations about religion to arguing my case for atheism).

 

In conclusion, the lessons to draw: dabble in philosophy? Fuck I don't know, think about shit. Then do things. Bam.

[Roderick]

A beautiful and inspiring tale, Sententia. Wonderful to hear you figuring it out and taking steps towards a life you think is worthwhile. For what it's worth, I wouldn't consider the time you spent not plowing your way through the organs of society, but rather learning all sorts of probably useful and interesting things wasted time. That has probably done more for you than any formal education would, if only to allow you the time to mature and find out who you are.

Bold steps, congrats!

[SecretAsianMan]

That is extremely honorable Sententia.  It makes me feel even worse about this post.

 

So I'm 30 today.  I feel old.  And like I've accomplished nothing with my life.  Especially when you compare it to people around here.  To make matters worse, I'm kind of trapped in a rut not entirely of my own doing.  I don't know how I'm going to get out of it, if I can at all.  Or even if I should.  It's unbelievably complicated.  I seriously envy those of you whose life is exciting and the changes you're making.  I wish I could do those kinds of things too, but I'm burdened with responsibility at the moment.

 

Sorry to be depressing after an extremely inspiring post.  You guys can feel free to ignore this and focus on the good stuff above me.

[Sententia]

Thank you both looking back it seems a bit self-congratulatory, I meant it as a sort of honest mental release though.  My life's changed faster in the past year or two than the 18 before.

[Nachimir]

Aaaaaand the creepy guy won.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY-xI6zgfk

[Thrik]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY-xI6zgfk

 

...what?! That is bizarre.

[Nachimir]

Yep. Actually happened. Then a load of people elected him a few years later.

 

Sententia, that is amazing.

[Twig]

Then a load of people elected him a few years later.

what

[Thrik]

I can't even figure out what he's thinking. Why would he just stand there and do that?! He'd have been better off just saying 'sorry mate' and walking away rather than standing there like he's having a seizure.

[Twig]

Yeah my first thought was that maybe he was having some serious medical thing. Like WHAT. But then he responded with a really dumb "I don't have to talk to you anymore" thing and DID IT SOME MORE. WHAT. AND THEN PEOPLE ELECTED HIM. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

[brkl]

Tony time woo.

Let's all stand still and shudder a bit.

[Zeusthecat]

So I'm 30 today.  I feel old.  And like I've accomplished nothing with my life.  Especially when you compare it to people around here.  To make matters worse, I'm kind of trapped in a rut not entirely of my own doing.  I don't know how I'm going to get out of it, if I can at all.  Or even if I should.  It's unbelievably complicated.  I seriously envy those of you whose life is exciting and the changes you're making.  I wish I could do those kinds of things too, but I'm burdened with responsibility at the moment.

 

I'm sorry to hear man. I can somewhat relate as I was completely miserable in my entry level job after college. I saw a dark and depressing road ahead of me and over the course of a year I slowly put all the pieces together to make a clean transition into something I love doing (and within the same company). It sounds like things are a lot more complicated for you right now though so that might not be an option. I hope you can find some way to make some meaningful change but I would at least say you have accomplished a lot in your life by just getting where you are now. It may not be as exciting as what other people around here are doing (and honestly, working on traffic management software isn't exactly exciting either) but I'm sure what you do has some sort of positive impact on people even if they aren't aware of it.

 

And remember, you can always blackmail your boss for a yearly salary and then get a carefree job at a fast food place. It worked for Kevin Spacey.

[Hermie]

Ugh, the right wing coalition won the Norwegian election. Hopefully they won't change the immigration policies for the worse, but I'm scared. It's gonna be hard enough to bring my girlfriend back into the country already, I can't imagine what will happen if the far-right get too much power about immigration.

[Twig]

I got really excited when I saw an email from Telltale about the position I applied for and then immediately really sad when I realized it was a "not interested".

[SecretAsianMan]

Sorry to hear that Twig.  Hope you can find something soon.

[dibs]

Happy birthday secretasianman. I had the worst funk before my 30th, but eventually I was convinced to have a small party and by the time it arrived I was cool again. Also, my guests ended up bringing around 12 cakes and tarts so that helped too.

Maybe eat down cake. I don't know how a man with a backpack torch could be down. I need to see some pix of that thing.

[SecretAsianMan]

Thanks guys.  Outside of the posts here, I was also contacted directly by a few forum members.  I'm still kind of in a funk and I don't see it going completely away anytime soon because the situation won't be changing in the near future.  But it's nice to feel like I have some support and be reminded how great this community really is.

 

And dibs, the specific bag I have is this one.  I also have one of the messenger style bags.  I find them to be comfortable and the battery works great.  The biggest downside is they're a little smaller than I'd like.  The compartments aren't very large so you won't be able to put a ton of stuff in it.  It's possible the backpack style bags solve this problem, but I can't say since I don't have one.  For my purposes, the sling bag held what I needed it to so I was satisfied.  And to make me into an even bigger nerd, I got them on sale at Woot.com.  They show up fairly often so if you really want one I'd check there every now and then.

[tegan]

My phone/internet provider says they're cutting off my service if I don't have at least $184 out of my bill paid by Friday. I just got done buying some groceries and now I'm $50 short of being able to do that.

 

dasfdsklnsdkl

[Twig]

Another rejection! I thought the phone interview this morning went well, except for NOT BEING ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE GUY ON THE PHONE AT ALL, WHICH PROBABLY MADE A POOR IMPRESSION, THANKS PHONE INTERVIEWS YOU'RE THE BEST FUCKING THING.

 

People tell me "just be confident". How the hell am I supposed to be confident if everyone keeps telling me I'm not good enough?