I sometimes think about splitting this blog into two blogs, one for music/entertainment type stuff, and one for personal stuff. But it's not unusual for the two to intersect, so I guess I'll keep it as it is, and call it "Gonzo blogging". I apologize ahead of time if you come here to read stuff about the Loudness War, and find someone who is on the verge of a breakdown.
When I started this blog five years ago, I came up with the word "overwhelmedness", which is basically being so overwhelmed that escape seems impossible. I've essentially been going through a quarter-life crisis since my late teens. Now that I'm almost 40 years old, I guess I've graduated to midlife crisis status. I was actually okay with the idea of turning 40 up until a couple of weeks ago.
Most of my frustration stems from my roommate not bringing in any income. My thinking when we moved in here was that I could handle the rent and bills for the first month, and hoped that my being there would motivate my roommate to get up and hopefully get a job by the end of October or mid-November. It's June, and she's still not working. The best I can say is that she's at least making an effort now to not be a total zombie, so hopefully she'll be working by the end of June. (I know, good luck with that.) But with her not bringing in any income, I've given up on organizing this place, since I haven't had the money for a bookcase for my room, or for a sturdy stand for my turntable and cassette deck.
On the other hand, I can't blame her for not trying harder to get a job, considering how much I bitch about my job. That place just keeps getting worse and worse. The only things that have kept me there are that I kind of like my department, and having unpaid personal time to go along with paid personal and vacation time, even though the amount of paid personal time we get is a joke. I've been getting outsourced to other departments anywhere from one to three days out of the work week, mostly to do order picking. One of the reasons I left Picking was because I'm slow, and I knew I wouldn't last long with the way "Steel Johnson" ran things. (To recap, Steel Johnson is my current employer and the owner of the company that I've worked at off and on since 2004, who I refer to as "Main ex-Employer". Main ex-Employer handed operation of their warehouses over to Steel Johnson in 2012.) The worst part of working at Steel Johnson is that they'll give you a verbal coaching or written warning for being less than 100% productive, even if you're working in a department other than your own. So, they expect you to be a master of all trades, and you can get fired for underachieving in another department. I was just told today that I was on my second written warning, and needed to be retrained. The guy who retrained me said I pick just like he does, so I'm not really even doing anything wrong. My only real problems are being out of shape, having bad eyesight, and the company being too strict. I'm afraid that I'll end up getting fired for this bullshit, but I'm not gonna kill myself for them.
One thing I hate about working is that it gives me eight to ten hours to think about every stupid thing I've ever done. As bad as that is, remembering better times can sometimes be worse. For example, one day while at work, I'm 99.9% sure it was one of my days in Picking, I got to thinking about the Gnarls Barkley song, "Crazy", which was a big hit ten years ago, and one of my favorite songs from that time. That led me to thinking that it was around this time ten years ago when I started working in the Photo department at Main ex-Employer. During those few months where I got to work from 10:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., that was like the greatest job ever. My life all around at the time wasn't all fun and games, but it sucks to think about how much better my life was at that time compared to now. My mind was spiraling downward that day, but then I heard a Slipknot song coming out of the "Inbound" department, which got me to thinking about something a friend on Facebook posted that very day about Slipknot, as to whether they were actually "heavy" or not. Distraction is nice sometimes.
