The Times, They Are A Changin'... and so is this blog.

NOTE: The text of this article was originally set to publish September 30^th, but I couldn't publicly announce a few things until after a phone call I had just last night. I've changed some dates and updated a few events to reflect the change in publication date, but this is the article that should have gone here. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy for me, but I've managed to keep to my rigorous 5-day a week publication schedule here. This past weekend, I took the Foreign Service Officer Test, and next week I recertify to return to work with troubled kids in a therapeutic day school. I will be shortly rejoining the workforce, while I go through the process of trying to get a government job. This would normally be the place where I announce that this blog will be shuttering its doors and joining the many, many sites that don't make it a full year once life gets in the way. I promised way back here that I wouldn't be doing that, and I meant it. My studies and responsibilities have limited my time to read and comment on other blogs, and for that, I'd like to apologize to longtime supporters and faithful readers. I hope to make some time real soon, but things are going to get worse before they get better.

My XBox Live Avatar, inpiration for this site's FavIcon.

I have to make a few changes. For one, I'll be swapping to a different template for the blog to make it look a little different. Bloggers who have played with the new "Dynamic Views" have a pretty good idea of what this page will look like in the near future. The title "Unemployed Geek" will be kind of inaccurate by next week, so I'll be keeping "What's Next?" but changing the rest shortly, and I'm open to suggestions, though I'll muddle through if I don't get anything that really grabs me. I also will have to adjust my self-imposed publication schedule, as five days a week while holding down a day job and preparing to transition to a new career isn't realistic. I've had a few articles where I felt I kind of "phoned it in," and I don't want that dip in quality to become the new norm. I'll be shooting for Monday-Wednesday-Friday as of 10/10 and will see how that works, and if I absolutely have to, I'll move instead to Tuesday/Thursday, but I'd like to avoid that if I can.

I started this blog on a very personal note, nearly all text, before I figured out that pictures break up walls of words nicely and that my writing was at its best when it was about a subject with wider appeal than...well, me. In the last seven months I've had two guest posters, 165 articles and almost 100,000 pageviews, and I learned a lot from working on a project that was originally something I thought no one would read. I started it to, as the URL says, "Get my head on straight" and maintain some sort of schedule and preserve my sanity while figuring out what to do next. This post feels like a goodbye, and in a way, it is. I've figured out what I want to do, I've started doing it, and this blog has to change along with me if I intend to make good on my promise to keep doing it. I've also recently started putting up shorter articles as a writer over at Technorati.com (my first published one is here,) but writing for another site doesn't affect this blog in any significant way. Eventually, I plan to add a custom domain address, but continue to host and publish through Blogger.

I imagine the site will look something like this sometime next week.

Starting over this coming weekend, October 8-9, I'll start rolling out visual changes to the blog. (Safety Tip, this site looks weird in a few of the dynamic views, but I think it looks AWESOME in "Magazine".) I may not officially change the title until I go in for my first day of gainful employment to give myself the longest possible time to get it right. I also will likely do something I haven't done at all since starting this site back in February. I may take a week off. Then, content-wise, we're back to business as usual with tabletop roleplaying, board games, video gaming, fantasy novels, comic book, tech and science fiction/fantasy/horror TV and film reviews all turning up, just a few less times per week. To not risk offending anyone by leaving them out, I won't be too specific in my thanks, but I'd like to thank everyone who has turned up to read this blog since the start, and hope you'll bear with me as things shake up a bit.

Sincerely,

Josh "Docstout" Brown – The Unemployed Geek, October 2011.

The current "classic" layout for the site, for posterity. Let me know if you prefer this to the
slick site redesign. It may not change anything, but I'd like to know.

Tomorrow, I Test. Tonight, I study.

I had a whole post ready to go, formatted and with pictures and links, etc. (If you happened to check the site in the right 10-minute window, you may even have seen it.) Unfortunately, in that post I made an announcement that I can't safely talk about in this space just yet. I hate being vague and cryptic, and hate even more having to substitute a paragraph and a picture for an actual article today, but I really cannot make the time to write another one tonight, so I felt this deserved an explanation.  I anticipate that I'll repost today's scheduled article in a few days or weeks time, edited for context once I've been cleared to make announcements.  I'm not in any legal trouble, not in any medical danger and much as I would wish it, I didn't sign a book or other media deal.  I am also probably not dating a celebrity, as my wife won't let me.  I'll be back to normal posting Monday, presuming I survive the test.

The moon is also probably not crashing into my house tomorrow, I'm just
taking a very important test.

So... What *is* Next, Anyway? - This Blog, and Other Projects To Help Me Not Starve.

I've been thinking a lot about the question posed by the title of this blog... What's Next? For anyone who hasn't been with me from the beginning, I started this project not really expecting anyone besides me would ever read it. I wanted to sharpen my writing through daily practice and cope with losing a job that had meant a lot to me. The URL “Getting My Head On Straight”, referred to my original first post, the text-heavy biographical introduction in those days before I learned how to include images and links. Don't worry, this article won't be me whining about my situation in a desperate play for sympathy. I'm happy with where I am, but I posed a question to myself about where I'm going... and that one isn't quite answered yet, so bear with me as I talk about upcoming possible projects, the future of this blog, and I'll be back to writing about specific bits of geek culture tomorrow.

Traditional wisdom says not to blog about yourself very often, as you aren't the most interesting
person to the average person in your audience, they are.  I do this rarely, so here's a picture of the man behind the blog, and the wife behind that man... smushing my face into an unusual shape.

When traffic and readership started to grow quickly (I've only really been doing this since late February, though it feels like longer) a question I was asked quite a bit was “So how long can you keep this up?” and the corollary “That's neat, but what are you going to do with it?” I've got plenty of ideas left in me for articles, I don't see that becoming an issue anytime soon. If I got a traditional job tomorrow, I'd no longer be "The Unemployed Geek", so what would happen to this site? Someone suggested that my new career could be “blogger”, and I joked that if this became my job, I'd no longer be unemployed, so I'd put myself out of work... Then I'd be eligible to start again in a never-ending recursive cycle.

I plan to keep this blog going indefinitely, regardless of what my situation is. I might post less frequently if I had less free time, but I'd like to believe that I have the discipline to continue regardless at near my current pace. As for making a living writing for my own site five times a week... it is a pleasant dream, but one that I'll only believe in once I have evidence that it is possible. Once daily traffic gets to a certain point, I'm not above adding a PayPal donation box, but until I'm satisfied that I provide sufficient value to a large enough audience to justify it, I'm holding off on that. If I bring in a few dollars here and there from this someday, that'd be nice, but it really isn't about the money.

Credit to Blaugh.com on this comic, hits close to home(less.)

So... What is next, then? I have a few projects that I've been kicking around, and the last time I wrote something like this, (about being unemployed) I talked about non-traditional methods of income. I suspect that if I can finish one (or more) of these ongoing projects, I might be able to carve out something resembling an income before I've run out of unemployment benefits. Here's what is currently on my plate:

No fewer than three longer form writing projects, one a collaborative effort with my wife. In no particular order, they are:

• A fantasy novel told from the perspective of an elite squad of investigators called in by royalty to handle crimes that the typical City Watch strategy of holding a torch aloft and yelling “Who goes there?” can't solve. (Think: modern investigative crime show a la CSI meets Lord of the Rings.)
• A horror/fantasy novel set in a world with industrial/steampunk elements (though most of the technology runs on toxic fuels with nasty side effects) featuring an agent of the Council Government who specializes in dealing with religious cults who stumbles down a path that has already claimed the lives of thirteen individuals trying to stop an ancient horror before him.
• A tongue-in-cheek semi-autobiographical work talking about how, when I was a single man, I learned to talk to and attract members of the opposite sex using ideas similar to those “pick up artists” use, only translated into gaming concepts and a lot less sleazy. (Think: Neil Strauss' The Game meets World of Warcraft.)

When any of these are finished, I'd like to release them as e-books for the Kindle store, taking advantage of generous royalty options. I figure talking about my ideas publicly gains me more in gauging which ones are legitimately interesting, over the typical new author's fears that letting the ideas out subjects them to possible theft. I'd be disappointed to learn someone stole one of my ideas and made a fortune off of it, but I have confidence in myself to continue to come up with and develop creative concepts.

I also have a three-quarters finished design for a board game where each player hires a team of mercenaries and equips them, and competes to be the first team to establish a base of operations and take down a Warlord in a Banana Republic. I'd need to start a Kickstart project for funding to complete this one, at least to get it to the prototype stage, with rewards for supporters including naming a Merc after someone who donates a certain amount. The concept is most like “Jagged Alliance meets Arkham Horror.”

One of my favorite games of all time, and I think hiring mercenaries in a "Questing"
style boardgame is one I'd like to play, so I'll have to make it.

Regardless of what I pursue to completion, I'll also be quietly working on a redesign for this site, as I have enough articles that people keep coming back for to justify a magazine-style layout someday, maybe making the jump to a custom domain name at the same time. Anyone find one of the things I'm working on to be of particular interest? Someone think I made a horrible mistake by putting unfinished concepts out there where someone could steal them? This is one I'll be eagerly watching the comments on. If there is enough interest in one or more of these projects, I could post status updates here, or in a second blog expressly for that purpose. Your input, please.

Thinking Outside the Maze – A Rat's Perspective on the Race.

When you are out of work for more than a few weeks, thinking about the system and its implicit promise of a stable place in society in exchange for hard work and a willingness to follow the society's rules is natural. As population swells, technology modernizes and eliminates certain jobs and people live and work a greater number of years in developed countries, the system strains a bit. Rather than play the blame game, or fish for “hang in there's” that I don't really feel I need at the moment, I want to talk about what some other people have done in trying to “opt out” of the traditional school-work-retire-die plan that society tells us to expect. Let's try to understand that plan first.

A cliché image, maybe. An appropriate visual metaphor for sure.

Some of the criticism of the system here in the United States comes from the feeling that choosing a “default” path leads to massive debt which requires repayment in such strict terms that most people are forced to take whatever work they come by that is enough to keep themselves solvent. These careers are often taken independent of personal goals, individual aptitude, skills or training; leading to job dissatisfaction, lack of personal growth and stagnancy. The people trapped by this “gotta pay the bills” mentality represent well over half of the American workforce, and low morale keeps productivity only high enough to not lose jobs that workers need, but don't want. The critics of this system have termed it “wageslavery.”

For many positions that pay what American society would call a “living wage”, individuals are expected to have a college degree, as competition for jobs makes secondary education as a condition to “thin the herd” of applicants seeking a particular job. In the United States, this means that young adults are likely to start with significant debts to pay back through educational loans, without any guarantee of a career capable of doing so. As jobs become more scarce due to the inevitable march of technology, homes also become more scarce due to an increase in global population. More private loans are needed to finance homes whose prices are driven higher by supply and demand. Well before getting into any of the economic problems with credit or the recent mortgage crisis and housing bubble that caused an economic recession, it is little surprise that some people want to look for alternatives to the path society assumes adults will take.

Moments before head explosion from financial worries.

Some people have dedicated themselves to the concept of sustainable living, popularized as far back as 1978 along the fringe of American culture. The book “Possum Living” by Dolly Freed (18 at the time of writing) talks about her experiences living for five years with her father on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia without traditional sources of income. The book describes a life of living off the land, raising rabbits and chickens for meat and growing produce, making much of what is necessary for life, and trading for a lot of little luxuries that cannot be self-produced. Despite some unusually bad (and illegal) advice concerning resolution of disputes with “city folk”, the book, and the philosophy that followed it make for an interesting read. The life presented is very similar to, and some ways better than, a typical middle class lifestyle, providing that one is willing to eschew technology beyond trips to the local library for internet access. Perhaps not the best choice for the modern geek.

The life of the entrepreneur calls to others who want to drop out of the “rat race”, and starting personal businesses, making money online and developing as many streams of income as a person is able defines this strategy. Many, many books have been written on this subject and more than a few blogs are dedicated to nothing but this. It is difficult to separate the true success stories from wishful thinking and those who want to make this life a reality by selling promises of how to achieve success. Professional bloggers would fit into the category of the modern entrepreneur, as would those lucky few artists able to make a reasonable standard of living from their creative endeavors. The downside to this approach is easily apparent, with a lot of competition and great personal discipline required for any measure of success. It takes a lot more than writing a few hours a week and tossing around buzzwords like “SEO Optimization” and “Online Content Marketing” to make income capable of supporting a family like this.

No offense to the legit SEO/Marketing bloggers out there, but some people
seem to think that there are magic words you put on a webpage, and people give you money. 

Science Fiction titan Robert Heinlein wrote “There Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch” in his 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and criticism of those who write in dissatisfaction of the current state of the world says that people expect something for nothing. Libertarian sci-fi from the 1960s aside, I think that application of the Law of Unintended Consequences producing a large disaffected working public is more likely than a majority of people harboring an unrealistic set of expectations. People in general seem to be willing, even eager, to put in effort and time in exchange for financial security, but a complex set of problems denies many that opportunity, and even more are denied the opportunity of a career that is fulfilling in addition to “just paying the bills.”

I've done a lot of reading and thinking about this, one really interesting article from a professional blogger (who falls into the “entrepreneur” category, naturally) named Steve Pavlina way back in 2006 discusses the merits of a non-traditional income here. I wonder how many different ways there really are to be 'unemployed' but capable of living without collecting unemployment or any other sort of financial assistance, and if one of these ways is right for me. Is anyone out there making a living using one of these, or a method like it? Maybe you know someone who does or did. If nothing else, it is something to ponder and dream about while looking for a new place back on the traditional mouse wheel.

Monday Potpourri, or How I Spent My Geeky Weekend.

Today's post may be a little more unfocused than my usual articles. I have a lot to talk about today, and about the only theme I can come up that links the varied topics is that they are all about things that happened this weekend. A few events relevant to this blog happened in the course of a few days, I had the opportunity to follow up on and am prepared to revisit two topics I've covered before, and I got to experience a major world news event through a uniquely geeky lens.

Throwing chronology completely to the wind, I'll start with one of the very last things that happened this weekend. Weeks before the first episode came out, I wrote a bit on HBO's Game of Thrones, and how excited I was about it. Right before bed last night, I caught the third episode and I'm about due for an update on how I feel about the show. There is a LOT of material to cover to tell the story laid out in the first book, and so far, I feel the show is doing a good job of telling the story without losing too much of the detail that gives the world its depth and unique feel. Many favorite characters have been presented at this point, and the casting choices have been uniformly good. Any changes from the books have been tiny things, needed to improve the flow of story, and I think the show is comprehensible to people who haven't already spent years discussing the books.

Arya Stark learning "dancing" from Master Syrio Forel. Great casting.

I've also had a full week, and much of the weekend to try out the new content I touched on in World of Warcraft, the “update” of classic raid dungeons initially designed for between 10 and 25 players, re-imagined as longer than usual 5 man adventures. Zul'Aman is virtually unchanged from its initial release aside from the same monsters being tuned a bit for fighting groups of 5 level 85 characters as opposed to 10 level 70s. Still frustrating in the same places, still easy in the same spots. More interesting to me is Zul'Gurub, which kept the original environments, but completely rethought the monsters and bosses, including a clever encounter that is only accessible if someone in the group has sufficient archaeology skill to mess with a cache of cursed artifacts. Both of these new 5-man dungeons are like running 2 heroic dungeons back to back, all gear drops are purple (Epic) quality and they take, typically 2-3 hours to finish unless you have a very good group that knows all the fights already. We got to figure out the bosses in ZG for ourselves, no guides or YouTube strategy videos to help us along, and that was great fun, and a refreshing change of pace.

One of the Tiki-themed Minibosses in Zul'Gurub.

On to blog business, this weekend, two things of note happened, my post “Can't Stick The Landing – RPGs and Poor Endings” was a featured article in this month's Carnival of Video Game Bloggers here at GamingMyWay, and I got another award! This site received the “Stylish Blogger Award” from The Angry Lurker, many thanks to him, and this is another “with rules attached” award, so here they are.

Now the rules of this award are to:

1. A thank you and link back to the nominating blog.
2. Share seven things about yourself.
3. Pass this award on to 10 or so other deserving blogs.
4. Let them know of your nominating them for the award.
   
   

Rather than fill the rest of this post with links to blogs, I'm going to comply with rule 3 in my own way. Throughout the coming weeks, one or two at a time I'll add my nominations. A lot of my favorite blogs already have this award, so I'll get the time I need to figure out who to pass it on to (no begging in emails or comments please) and the deserving sites won't get lost in a long list.

As for seven facts about myself... Well, here goes.

1. I grew up in a particularly dangerous neighborhood, the only Irish-American kid in an area that became a gang-controlled barrio just outside Chicago.
2. I was the initial designer of the Town Project in the RPGA's Living Greyhawk Campaign, which allowed players to write, develop and spend in-game resources on the management of their D&D character's home towns and villages in a global campaign. The towns could build structures to defend themselves, harvest resources and grow population, adding a lot of “Civilization/SimCity” elements to a shared-world campaign.
3. While working in the hobby game industry, I also pursued a performing career, working as a concert tenor, improv comedian and actor.
4. The band I've seen more often in concert than any other is They Might Be Giants.
5. I've taken classes in and since forgotten how to speak or read almost anything in the following languages: Spanish, French, German, Russian and Japanese.
6. I didn't have a driver's license until I was 21, and took the test to get one my 2^nd time ever behind the wheel. (Nearly passed, nailed it on the next try.)
7. I've been to the mayan ruins of Chichen Itza four times, and got to see the Throne of the Red Jaguar inside the central chamber of El Castillo.

El Castillo, the famous temple to Kukulcan in Chichen Itza.

Last, but not least, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the announcement last night of the confirmed death of Osama bin Laden in an American operation. My wife and I were online in our Sunday night raid, working on killing Heroic Maloriak with our WoW guild when the news broke. We have several active duty military personnel in the game who claimed to have known already, but were under strict orders to keep quiet on the subject until DNA testing confirmed the news. We alt-tabbed from game to news sites and social media outlets for details or confirmation that the news wasn't a hoax in between boss attempts. Eventually, the news became so distracting that we broke for the night so all the players could watch the televised speech.  Rather than cynically insist that this news changes nothing, or hop up and down chanting “USA, USA!” I find my reaction rather more complex, but a blog I read this morning put it more succinctly than I feel I could. That link is here.  

Bonus Post Wednesday: Many thanks, The Liebster Award, and post #50!

This is the 50th post since I started this blog eight weeks ago tomorrow, and I wanted to thank the people who have followed me and helped this site grow fairly rapidly in a short time.  I wouldn't want a post of this nature to replace the normal weekday article, so I'll be back with normal geeky stuff tomorrow afternoon!

First up, I want to thank G over at Bar Science for being the first blogger to ever feature this site in a post, which made me feel good and helped some people find the blog.  Many thanks also to PekkaK from Finland, home of Poets of the Fall (one of my favorite bands), very nice people, and the blog God I Hate My Job for additional exposure just today.

Many thanks to Bard at The Clash of Spear on Shield for this blog's first award, The Liebster Blog Award.  Like many other blogging awards, this one asks you to "pay it forward" by passing it on in turn to deserving blogs, particularly 3-5 blogs with less than 300 followers.

This Award will be displayed from here on out on the right side of this page, barring a site redesign.

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In the spirit of the award, I'd like to honor the following 3 blogs and present them with the Liebster Award:

• PSYCHO CARNIVAL by Kelly
  This blog is pure madness. Kelly has a unique perspective, strong opinions, and he isn't afraid to share them. He also regularly connects with his audience (better than I connect with mine) by directly responding to nearly every comment left on every post. Always entertaining.
• a momentary lapse, with joel by Joel
  This is a movie review blog with a truly obscene number of updates which has been criminally overlooked. I'm biased, as I've known Joel for years, he's done a guest post here (and I've returned the favor) and back in college, we were mistaken for each other frequently. (A few weeks back, Kelly continued this tradition by calling me Joel in the comments!)
• The Hopeless Gamer by Paul
  I love RPGs. I could make every other blog post bounce between tabletop RPGs and video games, except I promised myself that I wouldn't, and there are plenty of RPG bloggers out there who write regularly about the subject, and better than I ever could. Paul at The Hopeless Gamer is one of these. His site design is also spectacular.

Congratulations on the well-deserved awards, Kelly, Joel and Paul!

Two months, 50 posts, almost 70 subscribers and nearly 4000 pageviews. I can't wait to see what the coming months and years will bring, and would like to thank anyone who reads these pages for making it easier to come back and write every weekday.

P.S. - Special thanks to Maui for his promotion of this blog online and the first ever “live shout out” for What's Next – The Unemployed Geek, at a karaoke event.

A Momentary Lapse, with The Unemployed Geek.... and Joel, another unemployed geek.

Good day to you all, my name is Joel.... I'm a distant cousin of Doc Stout, the proud author of 'What's Next? The Unemployed Geek'. I'm also a long time friend of his and former roomate.... I'm a fellow blogger and you can find my blog at: http://amomentarylapsewithjoel.blogspot.com/ . I've been writing it for just over a year and it's basically a blog on movies, music and life.... but mostly movies. It's a labor of love and something that I've attempted several times over the years, but with no success. Anyway, with that out of the way.... I'm also unemployed and a geek as well. I probably fall in a different category of geekdom, but that makes me no less of a geek. I'm proud of that label and relish in all its splendor and love to converse with others who are like-minded. That brings me up to this point where I was asked to be a guest blogger on this site. I was honored that I was asked and was happy to oblige. If I can direct people this way and vice versa, all the better. God knows why I was asked, but I'll do my best to try and be entertaining or somewhat helpful with some words of wisdom.


I'm currently 36 years old and have spent the majority of my life trying to find out where I fit in as far as the workforce was concerned. I started working as a parking lot cleaner when I was 12. I was paid under the table and did that until I could start legally working at age 14. Since then, I've worked steadily at all kinds of jobs and for several years at multiple jobs at the same time. The last 5 years of my life were spent working in a call center and I was damn good at it. Sadly, it slowly began to eat away at my sanity and after two nervous breakdowns and two trips to the mental hospital, my work started to slip. After about a year of trying to regain myself and retain my job (god knows why?), they gave me an ultimatum, “Improve in a month or we'll be seperating you from the company.” A month passed and I didn't improve, so I was let go. Deep down, I think I sabotaged myself on purpose. However, I didn't do it knowing that's what I was doing.... it was all under my brains radar. Right before this all went down, I started going back to school. It was suggested to me that I try and find something that I love and to pursue it. That's exactly what I did. Here I am now in school, jobless, but happy. I've started on my path towards a degree in Medical Assisting and I couldn't be happier. I was never a good student back in the day, but now I'm on the Dean's List, making straight A's and am getting high praise from my superiors on a weekly basis. I knew that I wanted to help people, and that's probably why I kept ending up in customer service, but I was never really in a position to truly help people.... now I am. I'm happy with my choices for the first time in my life. Granted, it may not be the right thing for everyone to go back to school for something.... however, I think that life is too damn short to do something you hate. I used to say, “I do what I have to do, to do what I want to do.” That was a line of crap. It was true in some ways, but in hindsight it wasn't the right thing to do. We spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week at our jobs. It basically fills the majority of our day and keeps us away from the ones we love and the things we love. I think if we're going to be married to our jobs like that, we should at least like the person we're married to, right? Well, I'm engaged now to the right career and I can't wait to spend the rest of our lives together.


That's some pretty serious stuff there, eh? You know that we all spend a large part of our work days wishing that we could have more time to focus on the things we like to do. Isn't it funny that when we loose our jobs and finally have all of that time, we can't enjoy it. And what's funnier still, is that after an extended period of time we tend to get bored with doing the things we like. We crave that structure and 'big brother' environment that a job provides. I don't know why that is? I guess it has something to do with how we were raised. In school, things are hardcore.... we're told what to do and when to do it.... and in Catholic school it's even worse. That's probably why so many guys have eternal hard-on's for those damn uniforms. That makes me wonder why calling customer service doesn't get me horny? “Press 1 for an erection. Press 2 for a 'happy ending.' Press 3 for a spanking from the head of Human Resources.” If that was the case, I would call a whole helluva a lot more. Instead, I dread having to dial that 800 number because I know what it's like on the other end and it makes me flaccid just thinking about it. Thank goodness the internet has giving us a faceless way to get help instead of calling someone who's tied to a chair in a cubicle and is paid to make their company look good. Not too mention that there's porn to pass the time in case we get put on hold, luckily that never happens online. (But it's never a bad time to look at porn.... or 'Keyboard Cat'.... just don't masturbate to 'Keyboard Cat' or at least don't tell anyone about it.)


Right now you're asking yourself, “What do I do if I have a job I hate or have no job or can't afford to go back to school?” Well, I've been in those situations and something that I've learned is that I may not be able to find one job that I like that pays enough to cover the bills, but I have been able to find more than one job that I love and together they pay the rent. You may have to work out the scheduling with both employers, but in the end you'll be much better off. Perhaps one of the part time jobs will lead to a full time one and then you'll be all set. In the meantime, you'll be doing things that you love and getting paid. However, if you can't find those mythical jobs, you can always be your own boss. Granted, 'hooking' only pays well if you don't have a pimp taking most of your money and not getting you hooked on smack is also a good thing. However, the job has a couple of benefits.... it's nice because you can work lying down and the dental plan is fantastic. You can also open your own business. It helps to have a good idea that will get your business off the ground and it also helps if you don't start it up with someone who's mentally unstable. Trust me on that point. (note to self: re-usable condoms did not go over well in test marketing.... perhaps using bleach as the cleaning agent was not the best idea I've ever had. It burns.)


So what's next? Now we've all got decisions to make. Where do we want to go from here? I can't make that decision for you, but I think we all have to make our own ways. We all want different things in life, we all have different interests, we all have different expertise. Life has something in store for everyone. I know someone who's job it is to subtitle porn for god's sake! There is LITERALLY something for everyone out there, you just have to look a little and use some of your connections to find your way. In the meantime, relish the bonus time you have while you're out of work. Spend a certain percentage of your day looking for work and in the downtime pursue your passions. Write the great American novel, create the next 'Call of Duty', paint the new millennium's version of the Mona Lisa, direct a movie parody of 'The Grapes of Wrath'.... start your own blog. The sky's the limit! You have all the extra time that most of us dream about while we're strapped to our office chairs, take advantage of it. And on that note, I'm off to finish a painting, write an entry in my blog, study for school, look for work and take a nap. I'm not going to waste my time dwelling on the things I can't change, but rather focus on the things I can. Good day and good health.