What I do when I'm not really with it

So, for anyone who hasn't been keeping up on my goings-on over the last -- oops, six months now -- I moved into a fairly tall building downtown.

Now, I don't know if ALL buildings do this, but this one occasionally decides it wants to dance a little, and I get that "I'm on a boat" feeling. Which, now that I've been here for a few weeks, is either happening less frequently, or I'm getting used to it.

In possibly related news, last night I had a dream.

In this dream, I had a bunch of people over to visit the new apartment. That part was unremarkable until the building decided it was going to collapse. So, I'm looking out my window (in the real world, I'm 11 floors up.. I don't know how high up my apartment in Inception-land was, really) as the entire top half of the building starts to lean, and eventually dive (strangely gracefully) into the pavement far below, with everyone standing in it. This was a calmer experience than one might imagine from being in a giant tangle of concrete and steel and glass that has decided to turn itself into rubble instead of eco-friendly housing.

At any rate, shortly after that, we'd all escaped one way or another -- clearly, this part was unimportant -- and were standing in another building some distance away, looking at the remains of my apartment building, which was mostly reduced to a concrete pancake. I was considering how to get back to the apartment, figuring that if I could get back over there, I could see if my apartment was still intact in there somewhere. While considering this very sensible idea, I discovered that the problem was not simply my building, but that some sort of apocalyptic Akira-esque disaster was brewing. The ground tore asunder in curvy swaths of chaos, buildings all over downtown shredded as though they were being kicked by an invisible Godzilla, and we all just stood there watching. Again, this was not even bothersome, it was just there. No one was concerned about things like "oh no, what is going on," or "oh no, what if there are people trapped," or anything of the sort. Just a day in the life.

So, then I woke up.

But just before I woke up, I figured out what the entire theme of this dream was, as it was summarized right as my alarm brought me back into the land of the living:

"Shit! Where is my iPhone?"

#dreamworldproblems

(My apartment was still here when I got back from work and seems to have not fallen over, just in case anyone felt the need to read too much into this post. And I promise that if you come visit, that it will not, in fact, fall over and crush you under millions of tons of steel and concrete and glass. Well, I promise that the odds are relatively slim, anyway. Unless I fall asleep. Then you're on your own, apparently.)

College Wars, Episode II: Bet You Wish You Hadn't Given Up, Stupid!

When we last left our intrepid hero, he had, as a mere boy, dropped out of college.

Insert a whole bunch of years of being an all-purpose nerd. Building computers, tech supporting technical things, and cultivating a healthy fear of telephones and Baptists. Blah blah blah. I'm a badass. Or whatever.

After misadventuring my way through a lot of things that I will probably tell embarrassing stories about later, I ended up working for a giant evil empire who will remain nameless because I will probably spout something that could be construed as rude about them at one point or another, and they have a phalanx of lawyers who will send me angry letters and/or envelopes of white powder.

If my life was a movie, this would be the boring part if I left out the office romances and corporate espionage and all that. Which I am going to do, because it's not really relevant. Maybe later. So, fast forwarding more.

Starting in technical support, I worked my way up the food chain a few rungs, where I discovered something new. Contrary to my previous experiences, once you made it up a certain distance, you hit some sort of magical invisible ceiling. Okay, it wasn't invisible, and it wasn't magical, but it was totally a ceiling. They'd let me poke my head up through the ceiling and see what was there, but the HR Manager monsters had weaved some sort of impenetrable barrier. Turns out, the name of this spell is Corporate Policy. This casting of Corporate Policy enforced limitations on my paychecks; namely, I was unable to be promoted to a position whose title had the word "Engineer" in it unless I could produce a counter-spell known as a Degree.

[Flashback: Velociraptor in a dress, laughing like a mad scientist, while I dangled impaled from Indiana Jones style spikes protruding from the wall.]

Here's how it went down.

Manager who wanted to hire me into the Software QA department as an engineer: "Hey, I have a job opening in QA, you should apply for it."

Me, unusually excited but probably showing no actual emotion: "Yeah?"

Manager: "Yeah, it'll be posted today sometime, keep an eye on the internal job postings."

Me: "Cool. Will do!"

[Quick time-lapse montage of me doing boring looking things and occasionally poking at a website]

Me, thinking out loud: "Ah ha!"

[I then fill out an excruciatingly complicated internal job application, which takes a hilarious amount of time.]

Me: "Done! Oh, this is awesome! Okay. Time to go home."

[I drove home. I then played video games, went to sleep at four in the morning, then woke up at 7 and bolted to the car in a panic, possibly without any pants on.]

Me, thinking out loud because I can't afford a narrator because I am blogging and it doesn't pay anything: "I wonder if I'll hear anything about that job today?"

[Time-lapse montage of me doing boring looking things to the tune of cricket sounds.]

Manager: "Hey, do you have a minute? I need to talk to you."

Me: "Sure, what's up?"

[At this point, the manager is abruptly dressed in a long, flowing black robe, his face mostly covered by an oversized hood. He's holding a bloodied sickle, the tip of which is dripping onto my shoe.]

Me, utterly breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly into the camera like a complete amateur: "Oh, not again. Why does this always happen to me? What did I ever do to you?"

Death/Manager, confused: "What? Who are you talking to?"

Me, still talking to the camera like an idiot: "This guy's about to tell me I'm screwed. It's like the raptor attack from the last episode. Can't I just, like, meet a pretty girl and do something romantic or say something funny or get a cool car?"

Cameraman: "No."

Me, storming off screen: "[expletive deleted]!"


Anyway, Death very sincerely apologized and told me that he wasn't allowed to hire me because I didn't have a four year degree yet. He asked how close I was -- how many years I had left to finish school. I answered honestly. Four years. He said I'd better get to work on that, then.

In the meantime, I was determined not to give up. Four years? That's a lot of juggling a full time job and full time school. Ugh.


So, at this point, if you are ever faced with this dilemma, let me give you a list of things that will NOT work to fool HR into letting you have a job for which you are clearly not qualified:

• Asking the HR manager if they can make an exception just this once, for meeee. No, they won't.
• Asking the HR manager if they actually check up on the validity of a degree that I claim to have. Yes, they will, and I will be fired if I lie about it. Damn.
• Asking the HR manager if the degree has to be from an accredited school. It does. Sorry for bothering you, crappy "life experience = degree" internet college. You won't be getting any money out of me because your degrees are utterly worthless.
• Asking the HR manager (on the advice of a different HR manager who said it was worth a try) if I can have the job, but if we could just name it something less impressive and pay me the same amount. Nope. Not even if you come up with something clever or self-deprecating.
• Asking the HR manager if I can have the job, but if we could just name it something less impressive and pay me slightly less. Bzzt.
• Asking the HR manager if I can have the job and keep my current pay and job title until I finish my degree, but just not do that job anymore and do this new one under a new manager. No dice. I thought this one was actually a pretty attractive offer, too, since I was being paid in peanuts at the time.

I'm sure that I came up with half a dozen more cockamamie ideas to try and interest this monster into giving me a chance, but I don't remember any others at this point.

Next on Observational Tragedy Theatre:

College Wars, Episode III: Deja Vu

College Wars, Episode I: How Not To Get Started

So, last year, I finally finished my undergraduate degree (leading to my current job search situation). While attending school, I realized something: I LOVE SCHOOL. Boy howdy, do I love school. Learning things is rad.

(Kids: Rad is one of those words that old people say. It's short for radical. In this case, I am using it synonymously with 'good and/or enjoyable.' Don't say it at your school. Someone will accuse you of being old. Unless that's cool these days. In which case, feel free to say it at your school. You will become the most popular kid in the whole place, and you have my permission to use 'rad' as some sort of Bart Simpson catch phrase. ...Bart Simpson is still relevant, right? Right?!)

I started my return to school while I was still working full-time, so I took the vast majority of my classes online, so while I didn't really get the full experience of college life, I did have a few interesting little episodes. You know, those experiences that textbooks just can't capture or convey. Usually, these are conveyed instead in facepalm-inducing photographs or snippets of conversations posted to a blog that is dedicated to a certain sort of schadenfreude.

In this case, I will attempt to retell some of my more memorable college stories. If you're getting excited and hoping that they will be stories of debauchery, or touching commentaries on the human condition, or something else that they make top-grossing films based on best selling novels out of, you're in for a major disappointment. But, try and keep an open mind, alright? Some of these are better than others, some of them might have morals, most of them have me in it.

Unlike George Lucas, I have no idea how many of these I can come up with, so I'm going to just start with the first one. As for the prequels, where I tell stories from grade school and I start including ridiculous computer generated characters, I'll just number those with negative integers. Also, I might not post those for 20 years or so.

College Wars
Episode I: How Not To Get Started


Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away.. wait, no. Okay, Portland, there was.. me. And something something.. anyway, I was probably wearing normal clothes, and I was a (relatively) normal teenage boy, and I went to a normal community college to take a placement test. Now, if you've never done this dance before, the first thing that the college wants you to do is to show them how awesome you are. I mean, they want to know at what level your basic education is. Reading comprehension, writing, vocabulary, math, flying, and how much damage your psychic fireballs can do.

So, I sat down with a booklet (yes, I'm that old, we used pencils and paper and Scantron forms at that point. They still use them now, if your teacher is over the age of nine thousand.) Now, I've got a booklet of questions and a timer and a form to put my answers into. All multiple choice. Probably for ease of grading and not for accuracy.

Blah, blah, read a paragraph, this word in this context means this. Yawn. Math problems. In this equation, x equals this. Double yawn. I've only been through a year of high school and this stuff is making me doze.

Oh. What's this math problem? Hell, I don't even know what that symbol means. Well, I've always been told it's better to guess in a multiple choice test than to leave it blank because at least you've got a solid percentage chance of it being wrong.

GO GO GADGET ANALYTICAL BRAIN! PROCESS OF ELIMINATION CIRCUITS, ACTIVATE!


I ran into all sorts of problems that I totally didn't even understand, but was able to make good, solid educated guesses on. I felt a little stupid, not actually understanding some of the stuff, but hey, I'm 16 years old, and this is college stuff, right?

So, I have them grade my tests. Long story short, they say I don't need to take any reading classes, I should start with WR 121 (as if I were a regular ol' college student and not a high school dropout with a GED), and I start with Math 95. 95, huh? Aren't college classes starting with 100? Hmm. Well, okay, I can live with that. I did, after all, drop out of high school and get my GED.

Fast forward a little: I register for classes, there's math 95, there's a fascinating Hindu Mythology course, there's writing 121, and there's a computer class of some sort -- whatever class I could take without prior instructor approval. Turns out that class is dumb, and the teacher suggests I drop it and take something more my speed, since I have been tinkering with computers for years. Okay.

Fast forward a little more: Math 95 isn't so bad. I took some algebra in high school, and destroyed geometry. But one day, I ride my ten-speed to school at the-sun-isn't-even-up-yet-A.M., I sit down dutifully in the desk I always sit in, surrounded by people who are all several years older than I am, and the teacher starts up with her lecture. Blah blah, math, blah blah, this thing, blah whatever, she's explaining things very meticulously and going over special cases and why we do it this way and not that way, and it all makes sense, and I'm getting very good grades.

And then, this happens:


Teacher: "And then, we factor this out. Everybody knows how to do factoring, right?"

Everybody: *generally bored nods and grunts of agreement*

[The lights in the room shut off, and the teacher swivels the overhead projector around so it points directly at me like a makeshift spotlight. The entire class vanishes and the walls -- which now have giant dusty, spider-covered spikes which are clearly tipped with deadly poison manufactured by the ancient Mayans -- start to close in like I've either been caught in a space trash compactor or an Indiana Jones movie. Not sure which, but this totally happened exactly like I am describing it. EXACTLY.]


I stared at the board and the teacher awkwardly as my stomach tied itself into one of those knots that your headphone cords turn into every time you put them into a pocket or container for longer than six seconds, and raised my hand. Probably imperceptibly. Thanks, however, to the spotlight and the shrinking room and the fact that I was now the ONLY student in the classroom, or maybe just because she could smell my fear, my terrified gesticulation was noticed immediately.


Bloodthirsty scaly monster with ten inch blood-dripping claws: "Oh, dear. Let's talk after class."

Me: "Okay."


I spent the rest of the class alternately trying to will myself to spontaneously combust and dredging every conversation I had ever heard in my entire life in the vain hope that I had even heard someone say 'factoring' in the context of math before. Neither scheme worked. I was doomed.

The students filtered out of the classroom after all the talking that I didn't hear a word of was done with, and the monster approached like the queen from Alien, or maybe like I was that dude in the outhouse in Jurassic Park, right before he was chewed into mulch.


Monster: "Okay, so, you're sure you don't remember how to do factoring?"

Me: "I don't even know what that means."


The monster demonstrated quickly on a piece of paper for me in the hopes that I could rescue myself from embarrassment by going "OH! Oh, ha ha, I was just kidding! Silly me. Of course, who doesn't know how to do THAT?" Nothing of the sort happened, of course, so she then gave me A Choice.

If you have ever been given A Choice by an authority figure or a slavering bloodthirsty monster or a serial killer, or have ever at least overheard a discussion where a person must make a choice, you are aware that it often involves two things that are both horrible.

In this case, my things were as follows:

1. Go to the bookstore, and purchase a $100+ textbook for Math 65, then review two chapters of it that cover factoring in depth, do the exercises for those chapters, and then do the week's Math 95 homework before the next class session in two days.
2. Drop the class with a "W."

When the phrase "textbook for Math 65" escaped the monster's lips, my ego, which had already been severely battered by a golf-club-to-the-temple in the form of me not understanding a concept that was clearly simple to all of the other students, started bleeding from its eyes. If I chose option 1, the bookstore staff would certainly notice that I Was A Moron. Also, the bleeding eyes probably would have sent me to the emergency room or the Vatican, depending on how I dressed that day. So, I chose option 2. I quit.

In fact, I didn't just quit. I really, really quit. I dropped everything but writing, which I only didn't drop because the teacher said I was doing fine. End of term? My grades in four classes amounted to: Nothing from that class I dropped right off, a W from that class that I dropped out of terror, an I from the Hindu Mythology class because I refused to go out to eat at an Indian restaurant and write a paper about it (nope, not kidding, I consciously decided to suck at the class because they wanted me to go eat dinner out somewhere and I didn't want to do it at all) and the crown jewel of my collection, a C in writing. WIC. Isn't that a government cheese program? I, the boy who was too smart for high school, was doomed.

I went to school for one more term after that, but I was demoralized. College was a horrible place, full of giant monsters hungry for my blood and/or soul, and college kids. I think I got some more grades that term, but had lost my appetite for it, and that was as far as I went.

Fred Savage: "Wow, Grandpa. You've babbled an awful lot and I don't even know what you were getting at there. What's the point? Does the princess get married or not?"

Old Me: "Now, now, don't get ahead of yourself. The point I was trying to make is that when you are taking a placement exam for college, you should just leave the damned answer blank if you really don't know how to do the math problem. Otherwise, they put you in the wrong class, where you are impaled on poisoned spikes and fed to a slavering velociraptor wearing a very conservative dress."

Fred Savage: "That's pretty fucked up."

Old Me: "Tell me about it."