Specifically, I finally graduated, and now I’m getting ready to embark on a more serious career, which is actually what sparked my interest in firing up WordPress again and putting down my thoughts. (Hi, HR people!) I won’t name names of places I’m applying for now, for various reasons, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the responses I’ve received, and the salary offerings so far — as a journalism major, I thought my life path was pretty well set: do what I love, but be broke as hell doing it. I will say that there are specific areas I’m interested in (Boston, NYC, Seattle), and the most promising responses are out of Boston and NYC so far. No matter what career path I choose, I feel a bit like I’m delaying our dreams of making it to France eventually (which I think I mentioned in my last post), but I’m excited to take my first steps toward a meaningful career, and I think for now the benefits outweigh the negatives.

Last October, Ivona and I were on our honeymoon in Antalya, Turkey, sitting in a faux Parisian café in our resort, and we made the decision to move to France. We busted out the laptop, spent hours looking into everything from the cost of housing in Aix-en-Provence (the city I used to live in) to claiming my French citizenship. We had just had our second wedding in Bulgaria, and our first honeymoon now that we could finally afford one, and it seemed fitting that we made the decision to go there together, something we had talked about as early as our first date. It was a definite motivator to finish up this year and get my degree, and it was one of the things keeping me from shooting myself at the though of another 80-100 hours a week driving a cab this summer, but as we got closer to leaving Northampton to head to the Vineyard, and looked at the costs of going to France, I realized that working another menial labor job for three intense months with no semblance of a life was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Besides, with the US immigration process being the beast that it is, things will be easier later on for us anyway.

We’re coming up on our two year anniversary, which means that aside from the horrors of just dating me, she’s endured two years of matrimonial unbliss, including my video gaming habit and constant dick jokes (not really — I’m highbrow! No, really). I know everyone says it, but I really can’t believe it has been this long. Luckily for us, we still have the same opinion of marriage that we started out with: our relationship really hasn’t changed because of the rings on our fingers, and we don’t “feel” any more married than when it first happened — which is to say we still think getting married makes more of a difference to everyone around us than it does to us. Hell, we still sometimes feel weird referring to “my wife,” or “my husband.”

Anyway, sorry to make such a rambling, newsy update with not much substance, but I had to break back into it and I’m sure some family and friends who read this will want to get an update on what’s going on. Hopefully I’ll be back on a more regular update schedule, so keep checking.

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).

Anyway, between the smell and mess that came with the job, I was sure I wasn’t going to last, but I managed to deal with it. When people say “Oh, man, that must have been terrible,” I often just shrug and say “Yeah, but it was great writing material,” which is largely true, but I never really did anything with it. I do have some notes and images I jotted down while I worked there that I’m particularly fond of that I’ve always wanted to turn into something worthwhile, so in the next few days or weeks I’ll turn those into little vignettes to be posted here, so at least I have them in one place. Some of the characters I worked with there are too good and three-dimensional not to write about, and I had some pretty scary and life-changing experiences as well that warrant attention.

The most prominent image I have of that time and the one I tell most people about is picking up the dumpster of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was one of the most depressing experiences of my life, repeated every other week.

The first week, I didn’t realize what the ashes were. The next, the cremator came out with his big gloves and tongs carrying a plastic bag. He had a look about him as of pure misery that made me not feel so bad about my limited contact with the co-mingled remains of Spike and Mittens.

On a rainy day, the ashes became wet and sludgy, like a kitty-ash Slushy. It would slide down the metal sides of the dumpster and slop into the soup that had been building up in the hopper.

On windy days, it was like that scene in The Big Lebowski, when they’re spreading the ashes on the cliff and they all blow into his face. After blowing my nose into the shop towels in the truck, I wondered if I could figure out what part of Fluffy I had just gotten a little more intimate than I ever would have liked to with.

As bad as those were, probably the worst was when a corner of the dumpster, which was a small little two-yarder (it was right next to a veterinary clinic I also picked up on alternate weeks – one week was cat and dog shit from the vet clinic, the other the ashes from the MSPCA) got caught on a tree branch when I wasn’t paying attention and dumped ashes all over the ground. The shovel that was pinned to the side of the truck had been broken for a long time, since a dumpster had been knocked out of the truck and almost killed me when it hit the side and shattered it, so I had to scoop up the ashes by hand and put them into the truck.

And that’s when I decided to go back to college!

Stay in school, kids.

(Oh, I remembered just now in my last post I promised kittens and rainbows. Well, I got the kittens, but I owe you some rainbows. My bad.)

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.)

So, anyway, I met Ivona and her co-workers at the Toasted Owl in Northampton. I’ll admit I can be pretty bad with names, and the ones I remember I won’t attempt to spell (have I mentioned I’ve had more than a few drinks tonight?). We got some wings and I had a couple Blue Moons. A girl from another Smith office just got engaged, and I felt a little insecure about the size of her engagement ring compared to Ivona’s (non-existant) diamond, but oh well. At least I can take solace in the practicality of our marriage.

Another of her co-workers just bought a house with her boyfriend, and it made me realize how much I really don’t want to be where she is right now; I don’t want to be buying a house and settling down. I want to live out of a backpack and travel. I want to spend a year in a country where I don’t speak the language and make the most out of it. I want to do whatever the hell I want without having to worry about a rent or mortgage payment or an electric bill. I want to join the Peace Corps and spend two years helping people and learning about a different culture. And if nothing else, I want to do that because I have no idea what I can do for a living with a journalism degree in a dying newspaper industry. I want to do all that with Ivona, and I’m grateful for the fact that if I decided to do all this tomorrow, she’d support me.

After the after-work happy hour, Ivona and I returned home. I did some work on this site and Ivona took a nap, and Alex called and said he wanted me to come out. I was hesitant at first; when I get into the habit of not being social it’s hard to break out of it, but he worked out a ride for me and given that he’s moving soon I didn’t feel like I could say no, and I’m glad I didn’t. When he moves, it’ll be only the second time we’ve lived in different time zones. I guess this isn’t a huge deal to regular siblings, but for identical twins it’s different. We’ve had our differences in the past few years, and gone in different directions with our lives, but he’s still my twin brother and I’m going to miss him. I’m determined to actually get this screenplay we talk about writing at least underway, and I’m hoping my Hollywood contacts will get us somewhere once it’s done.

(Note: Finished this post today, 1/17/09.)

The rest of the night wasn’t terribly eventful, so I’ll skip the details, but I beat the wingman role like a dead horse played wingman for Alex and Greg perfectly enough that I ended up stuck in conversation with one of the girls long after Alex and Greg had aborted the mission. It’s probably just as well that she’s engaged, because she was much hotter from across the bar than up close.

Even though it wasn’t much of a night out, it felt great to get out and do something, and I’m looking forward to the wine and cheese party tonight. With most of my friends gone from Amherst already, I’ve settled into an almost agoraphobic lifestyle. It’s not that I’m afraid of going out, just that I sort of feel like, hey, what’s the point, you know? But then when I finally do it, I’m glad I did. I’ll probably go out even less once Alex is gone, though, so I should get in that quality bar time while I can.

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.