Decisions, Decisions

(This part was written on Monday. I had more, but decided not to post the rest of it, but I might save it for later.)

I managed to survive another five day stretch at work. Believe it or not, I hate slow nights almost as much as I do two-truck nights. Our truck for Thursday was only 300 pieces, very small. I'm sure they expected us to get it done in an hour, but it took a little longer than that seeing as that the room wasn't set up for us like it's normally supposed to be. And of course, as soon as the truck was unloaded, we had to go do some other task despite the fact that there was more that could've been done in our area. I hate the slow days because that's when we have to do "bitch work", and I'm not really comfortable going outside my regular duties, and the days tend to drag. Friday was a ridiculous two-truck night, totaling up to about 5500 pieces. Those morons still expect us to get each truck done in two hours, whether it's a 1500 piece or a 2500+ piece. Three hours is a much more realistic amount of time for anything over 2000 pieces.

(Now for the new stuff.)

I'm freaking out, again, over the whole work/school thing. Here's what I might possibly have going on.:

• I applied for a major employer a couple of months ago. So many other people applied for those jobs that I doubt I'll get it.
• I mentioned recently that I had an interview with another major employer. It could be a few months before they actually do any hiring, and I'm not sure if I did well enough on the interview to be considered.
• One of the people at Vocational Rehab tried to put in a good word for me at another employer, who isn't doing any immediate hiring yet either. She couldn't guarantee me an interview, but she did say that when they start hiring again, they'll definitely give my application a look.
• I figured that if I didn't hear from any of these jobs by the time "Main ex-Employer" started hiring for the holiday peak season, that I'd try to get on there (because I'll be damned if I was going to work at my current job during the holidays), work there until the end of the year, all while working on getting into school for the Spring semester. I found out that "Main ex-Employer" was using a temp agency this year for the seasonal temps, and ironically it's the same agency I was working for when I decided to try getting back on at "Main ex-Employer" in 2009, so I was worried that the agency wouldn't let me back in. When I did try to apply online, there was a question asking if I had worked either full time or part time for "Main ex-Employer" before, to which I answered "Yes." When I hit the "Next" button, I got a message saying that I'd get an e-mail saying something about my eligibility. The e-mail that I got just said that my information would be carefully reviewed, and that I'd be contacted directly if I were chosen. I can't say I'm too confident about it.
• The financial aid processing deadline date for the Spring semester is October 15th, so I guess I'm going to have to decide if I'm going to school or not before the end of September. But what if I hear from one of the prospective employers after I enroll? What if I suck at the school thing? What if going to school does absolutely nothing for me in the job market, seeing as that lots of other college grads can't find work either? And what if we get someone like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann for President next year, thus ensuring the destruction of the U.S., making it all pointless?

Decisions, decisions. How the hell do you people keep from freaking out?

On another note, this is one of those weekends where I wish I still had a "second home" in Louisville since there is so much going on there this weekend. One thing I intend to do is go to Borders for their "Going Out Of Business" sale. I really hate that they're going out of business, but at least I'll be able to buy more than one or two books. While I'm on the subject of book stores, I have a friend who works at Barnes & Noble. The store is a little out of my way to shop at on a regular basis, but I really hope they stick around for my friend's sake.

Metallica's "Black Album": 20 Years Later

Back in 1987, one of my brother's friends gave him a copy of Metallica's "Master Of Puppets". I didn't bother trying to listen to it until a year later. I didn't hear any "real" Metal during most of the 1980s, or any Punk/Hardcore either. By the Summer of 1988, I think the heaviest bands I heard were Whitesnake and Van Halen. I'm not even talking the good old Van Halen either, I'm talking 1984/Van Hagar era! So needless to say, I wasn't really prepared for hearing Metallica. I had never heard a guitar tone like that, nor had I heard anything that was as fast or had as many tempo changes! It seemed so skull crushingly heavy at the time that my brother and I would listen to it for a bit, and then put it away for a couple of months. It was hard to believe that there were people that could listen to this stuff all the time!

Fast forward to Summer 1991: I finally start getting into Thrash Metal, buying Anthrax's "Persistence Of Time" and Suicidal Tendencies' "Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Deja Vu." Most of the harder rock I had been listening to before just wasn't aggressive enough to help me deal with all the crap I had gone through during that previous year of school, so Thrash seemed like the next logical step up. Anyway, I remember hearing a song coming out of the upstairs bathroom at home one night (we had a boombox in there), and I was like, "What is that? It kind of sounds like Metallica, but then again it kind of doesn't." Then my brother came to tell me that a new Metallica song was on the radio. All I can say was that it was different. I wasn't 100% sure that I liked it. After hearing a few more songs, I still wasn't sure that I wanted to buy the album. During my freshman year of high school, a friend made a copy of it for me. It was on one side of a 90 minute tape, and it fit all but the last three tracks. He put a Thrash compilation called "Rising Metal" on the other side. Much like the opening track/first single, I didn't know whether I liked the Black Album or not either. It took me until 2007 to say, "Eh, what the hell, I'll buy it." And you know what? After all these years, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that album. I decided that it would be a good topic for a blog entry, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to sit down and listen to the whole thing. With this year being the 20th anniversary, I figured now would be the best time to do it.

Judging the songs: Only the first nine tracks of the album made it onto the tape that my friend made, and I've heard all of them on the radio at some point. I don't really have an opinion on a couple of the most overplayed songs, "Enter Sandman" and "Nothing Else Matters", because I've heard them so much that I fail to register any feelings either way when hearing them, except maybe "Oh god, this again?". Compared to "Nothing Else Matters", "The Unforgiven" was definitely the better ballad of the two. "Sad But True" and "Wherever I May Roam" still jam, "Sad But True" especially has a good crunch to it reminiscent of songs like "The Thing That Should Not Be" or "Harvester Of Sorrow". "Don't Tread On Me" has a good riff, but the lyrics seem like a jingoistic apology for the criticisms on "Master Of Puppets" and "...And Justice For All". (Update 6-8-2012: Lars admitted on That Metal Show that he recently listened to "Don't Tread On Me", and thought, "What were we thinking?") I really dig "Holier Than Thou" and "Through The Never", they're about the fastest that Metallica get here. Check out the live version of "Through The Never", it's a little faster than the LP version. "Of Wolf And Man" is okay, I probably would've liked it better had my dumb ass realized sooner that they were saying "Shape shift" and not "Shake Shake". As for the three less familiar-to-me tracks, "The God That Failed" and "The Struggle Within" are sorta badass, the latter being a decent album closer. "My Friend Of Misery" is okay.

Regarding the sound quality, the Black Album is arguably Metallica's overall best sounding album.The first three albums were fairly crappy sounding, and the bass guitar was virtually nonexistent on "...And Justice For All", using the guitars to fill out the bottom end. While I do enjoy the sheer crunch of "...Justice", I do feel kind of bad about Jason Newsted getting the shaft. The guitars were turned down on the Black Album, but you can hear the bass guitar, especially if you have woofers that are at least 6.5 inches. This was in the age before dynamic range compression got out of hand, and this also has the best dynamic range of Metallica's earlier albums.

The story goes that they wanted to do some leaner songs to play live after touring so long with the workouts that were the tracks from "...And Justice For All", and they liked the sound that Bob Rock achieved on Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood", so they hired him to produce. I actually believe this story, as opposed to the simple "They went Pop!" accusations that most fans would probably throw out. While it was a decent attempt at streamlining, Slayer did the "slowing down" thing better on "South Of Heaven" and "Seasons In The Abyss", and Pantera, without even trying, pretty much did what Metallica were attempting to do with the Black Album, essentially becoming the new Kings Of Metal to most of the American Metal audience while Metallica gained mainstream acceptance. I was needing something heavier at the time, and this album surely didn't do it for me. But when you get right down to it, I'd still rather listen to most of the Black Album before I'd listen to most of what passes for modern Metal. Despite "Death Magnetic"'s shitty sound quality, I still feel like DM is the album they should have made after "...Justice", then the transition to the "Black Album" style probably wouldn't have felt like such a shock.

One last thing: "Load" and "Reload" are the only Metallica studio albums I don't own, and I don't plan on owning them anytime in the near future. Most of the stuff I've heard from them, especially "Load", just seems like a bad mix of an even more watered down Black Album and too much '70s Hard Rock influence. "Reload" seems a little more inspired, like "Load" was the side of the band on "Garage Inc." that covered Bob Seger, while "Reload" was the side that covered Nick Cave. "St. Anger" was majorly flawed, possibly even crappy, but at least it was more metallic than the Loads.

I wanna go home...

With the exception of Saturday, this was almost a good week at work. From Tuesday through Thursday, Dragon Lady was supposedly on vacation, even though she just got back from vacation last week. Despite all the dumb changes that I mentioned in my previous post, it didn't feel quite as stressful due to Dragon Lady's absence. On Friday, she was fired, for multiple reasons. I didn't find out until Saturday that her biggest offense was stealing. Before that, I actually did hope that she would have better luck finding another job than I have, but I lost any sympathy I might have had for her when I found out about the stealing. Despite being a two-truck night, everybody was in a good mood, and we managed to get stuff done. It was a pretty good night.

On my way to work on Saturday, I heard "Sloop John B" by The Beach Boys, you probably know it better as the "I wanna go home" song. I went in hoping it was going to be a good day, but it turned out to be one of the most frustrating nights since July 4th. Yes, even worse than last Saturday. And I think I'll leave it at that.

I had an interview today, I think it went okay. The place I interviewed at is close to the area where I used to live a couple of years ago. This job pays enough for me to move out to that area, that is if I get the job. I kinda miss living there.

I'm so dreading coming in to work on Tuesday, mostly because I'm wondering if there will be repercussions from Saturday. I'm already ready for this week to be over. Next week is one of those odd weeks where I'm only scheduled to work three days. From a Sunday-through-Saturday perspective (as opposed to the Saturday-through-Friday pay period) I only work two nights next week. I hope I can actually get stuff accomplished.

Making a bad job even worse.

After the depressing three day weekend, I had an excruciating five days at work. Right after the remodel was finally done, the store got a new store manager, and some changes are being made, most of them for the worse. If we have two trucks, they can no longer start unloading the first truck before 4:00, when the unloaders (of which I'm one) come in. No matter how much is on the truck, the truck is expected to be completely unloaded by 6:00. This includes having the palletized freight off the truck, and having the breakpacks (reusable boxes that have assorted stuff) sorted. If we have a second truck, it is to be completed by 8:00. If we have an average size truck (somewhere from 1200 to 1800 pieces) then we might be able to get all the loose freight unloaded by 6:00, but the breakpacks probably won't be finished. But there's no way we can finish a truck larger than 2000 pieces in two hours. That many pieces is enough to fill up the usable portion of our small-ass room, and gods help us if we have a second truck because there will be no place to put the freight from it. So basically, in most cases there's no way we can finish two trucks in four hours, especially since we have to take a break after the first truck or we'll be likely to keel over from exhaustion before Lunch. But if we don't get these done on time, they'll start writing us up.

On Saturday, we had two trucks, one had about 2400 pieces, and the other had about 2200 pieces, adding up to a whopping 4600! It took us two and a half hours to do the first (and supposedly larger) truck, and it took us about three and a half hours to do the second truck! I stayed over for about an hour and ten minutes.

Dragon Lady had been on vacation, and she wasn't missed while she was gone. She returned on Wednesday, which was the first of the two two-truck nights that I worked this week. We only had one 1100 piece truck on Friday. We got all the loose freight done just after 6:00, but the palletized freight was still on there, and the breakpacks weren't finished. It should be noted that we had three new hires come in and work for the first time, so they weren't going to be too quick, and one of our guys was pulled off during the unloading to do something different. Dragon Lady stopped us on our way to the breakroom, and couldn't believe that we didn't quite have everything done, and spouted off a bunch of bullshit. Towards the end of her rant, she said to our acting lead, "These other guys are looking at me like I'm an idiot." You don't know how hard I had to repress the urge to say, "That's because you are!" Granted, she's just taking orders from higher up, but that doesn't mean I can't despise her way of dealing with it. Thankfully, we didn't have to deal with her on Saturday.

I can't help but feel that this is a shitty time to be living in the U.S., and I'm not even worried about the stock market! The stock market, especially the Dow Jones, never really seemed to reflect how me or the average American was doing financially. Or to quote Morrissey, "It speaks nothing to me about my life." I was just thinking that when Morrissey says "Hang the blessed D.J.", you can use D.J. to mean Dow Jones. :)

I'd rather be sailing...

I had three days off this past weekend, but it was ultimately kind of depressing. The fact that Monday would've been my sister's 42nd birthday certainly didn't help, but it wasn't just that. I think I was bummed out mostly because I felt relatively isolated. Saturday, I went to Louisville. Sunday, I only left the house to get dinner for my parents and I. Monday, I went to the Hillview area (northern Bullitt/southern Jefferson County) to stop by the cemetery and to go to the theater to see Captain America. I rarely go to this particular theater because I don't care for that area, but they had a 2-D screening of the movie, which my favorite theater in the Highlands area of Louisville doesn't, and I figured I didn't really have anything to do in Louisville anyway. My only stop after the movie was a quick trip to the grocery.

One of the stations I listened to on my way home was the oldies station. "Sailing" by Christopher Cross came on, and while I'm not a fan of Yacht Rock*, I felt compelled to listen to it anyway. Here were some thoughts I had while listening to it.

1.I'd much rather be out somewhere sailing than driving home. Sure, a lot of people find living in the country to be tranquil, but the ocean just seems cooler to me. And I've never sailed, but CC makes it sound awesome.

2.I can totally imagine Christopher Cross just chilling out in the ocean, but having a 50 caliber machine gun handy in case pirates try to mess with him. In my opinion, that would make him way more badass than Chuck Norris.

3.Smooth.

*In this case, I mean the genre Yacht Rock, and not the web series, which I love.