Archive for the ‘jobs’ tag
Changes
To say I’ve fallen off an update schedule would be a gross understatement at this point: the last time I posted I was sitting at Espresso Love in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, home for the summer to work and save money for my last year of college. Now, it’s something like 11 months later, and some things are changing, and others are way too much the same for my tastes. I’ve been starting my mornings at Espresso Love again, which is a great way to start them, after driving Ivona to work, and I have my first shift driving a cab tomorrow morning. And while some of these things are painfully too familiar, it feels like one era has ended and another is beginning.
As far as I know, I didn’t work for the Mafia, but…
I took last year off from school and worked as a garbage man to help out the family. I drove a commercial garbage truck, which means I dealt with dumpsters and commercial trash (as opposed to residential, though I did do that once a week). I was up at 4 am or so every morning to don my blue Dickies and bright yellow shirts, stumble into Ivona’s sister’s Jeep that she let me borrow for the winter (man I miss that car, even though it was falling apart), and drive a couple towns over to start my route.
When people ask me about driving a garbage truck, I usually tell them it’s as bad as it sounds, only worse, and then I pause for a minute as if to think reflectively and tell them “well, once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.” Maybe I’m just a fake motherfucker, but I get sick of answering the same questions all the time, so I at least have fun trying to perfect the same responses, or make up ridiculous answers (“No man, I loved that job! I found so many cool things in the trash, and I never had to bring my own lunch, if you know what I mean!”). For the first week, I was miserable and convinced I would quit. During training I was riding around in a residential truck with a Brazilian kid named Ramon who drove like a psychopath and would pretend to be a stupid, uneducated foreigner when dealing with some of the customers (“Yes boss! Sorry boss! Next time better boss!”) while I tried to hold back laughter (he and I had actually gone to high school together and his English was pretty good).
Social life (revised: first drunk post wooo!)
I’ll preface this post with the disclaimer that I’m just a little drunk, and I blame Alex for that entirely.
Tonight I got out of my rut of social inactvity – my buddy T.J. was supposed to do that last weekend with his wine and cheese party, but it was delayed until tomorrow due to snow, so my only human contact for the last week was Ivona. Don’t get me wrong, that’s pretty ok with me, and I’ve enjoyed watching episode after episode of The Office while she’s been at work, but I realized today how much I’ve missed varied social interaction this past month; it was great to meet new people in a new environment, although I’ll admit it takes some warming up to new surroundings for me. Alex has probably noticed this more than anyone, but I think in the past couple years I’ve become increasingly uptight, and it really helps me unwind to go out and have a few drinks and relax a little bit. I don’t mean to say I need a couple drinks to relax and talk with people, but it helps. (I’M NOT AN ALCOHOLIC I SWEAR.)
Kicking things off
Well, what can I say. Yet another blog.
I’m a little uninspired right now, probably due to the fact that I’m between semesters at UMass and I’ve been sitting around doing absolutely nothing lately, except for looking at job listings for writers for a half hour at a time before becoming hopelessly depressed and writing death threats to the high school teacher who encouraged me to become a writer. At least the death threats will be well-written?
Anyway, I’m planning on forcing myself to write at least a little bit each day, preferably more than one post. One of the results of that plan will inevitably be that not all of the posts will be A+ material. I plan on writing about everything going on in my life and making this a sort of public journal, but I’m digging out some old notebooks with material I’ve put together over the years and I’m hoping to go back to some of my inspired notes and expanding on them and putting them up here. So there might be some short pieces of fiction, or vignettes, or little portraits of some random thought I had. A sentence I come across might send me off in a new direction or tangent, and I’m looking forward to tapping into my creative juices again. I always call myself a writer, but the reality is I just don’t write enough.
I’ll probably start tomorrow with a review of what’s been happening with Ivona and me lately to get any friends and family who are behind on the news caught up. Since I don’t expect this blog to be packed with people any time soon, welcome to those of you I’ve sent the link to to check it out. Thanks for stopping by.
