Waiting for an Assignment: A Purdue 1st Week

As you probably guessed, I am an impatient sort. Waiting is not something I do well - it leaves me too much time to think, to mull, or otherwise, to wish things otherwise. (Can't imagine why.) Living in the moment is something I am still discovering anew without my mom's presence in this world.

That said, I have been relatively patient at the start of my first semester in 16 years. While I do the readings, and work better to do note-taking this time, I have been pressing to do something more active.

So I did.

I wrote a 3,000+ word research paper on mortgage-backed securities and the impending cycle of recession to hit China soon over the last few days. I explain the history of the American growth in housing, the hurricane that swallowed a few investment banks (Lehman, Bear, Merrill Lynch) and the investment boom that will shatter China's economic dreams very soon. The parallels are there - shadow banking, overconfidence, a need to make numbers (profits) - but the differences are present too: top-down China edicts and local corruption versus bottom-up hyper-driven consumerism in the USA with politicians buying votes; a growing and flexing of the muscles in China versus the stagnating perils of middle-class America. The long cultural desire to renew the power of traditional China versus the America whining that we were once (a very short while ago) number one, but now, are reaching for mediocrity.

This is a very informal analysis of the paper. I will post the link to the actual one later, after the prof offers a grade, or tells me to cut 1,000 words so she will not have to read too much. Or reorganize the thesis to be a very specific instance - which is a part of writing to satisfy a college template. Not much can be said in 1,500 words where you cannot delve into the back history. (Which I did exceedingly too much of, I presume in this paper, but cutting is easier than adding too.)

For my bet, pros and cons or for-against papers can be sliced and diced anyway you want them. Whether you take an economic, social norms, or ethical path, the audience can ignore it, no matter how fluidly you frame the argument. Long papers give you challenges of finding more data, supporting a pronged argument, and the quest for what is to come. Because, really, if you cannot surmise, or give an example of the destiny of humanity via the present problem discussed, what does it matter?

I write this too to satisfy the requirement of blogging. Not that it has ever been hard to put something down for me. Life misadventures, book reviews, movies, sports, economics, history, and whatever catches my wandering eye shows up in the blog over the past six to seven years.

But the real assignments will come soon enough. And I'll ferret out the details; flush out the crap I suppose still lives inside my ho-hum life; and determine what angle is appropriate given the templates that are a college writing.

Just be patient...

The 2012 New Year: Advice for the Young at Heart

Chapter 16 of My Life and Times at Purdue University

A friend on Google+ posted this as a call to action, or resolution, or escape from that worn path:

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I'd like to change about my life, and what steps I can take to implement those changes. I generally do this anyway, whenever I start feeling like I'm unhappy a little too much. One thing that I do not do is wait until January 1st to implement these changes. I just don't get that mentality--this is my last cigarette ever! I'm gonna eat another pig in a blanket, and tomorrow we diet!--and I think that if you genuinely crave change, your excitement will keep you from procrastinating.

But of course, excitement is a fleet-footed creature. It's one thing to say "I'm going to get a new job" and another to subject yourself to the indignities of the process--online applications that make you manually type in all the information from the resume you just uploaded; leadership personality tests that ask you the same question six different ways; receiving a phone call, as you iron the blouse you agonized over choosing, that the position has been filled and your interview has been canceled--but why do I give up so easily? A new job would probably make me happier than anything else right now, so why do I allow myself to shrug my shoulders and continue clockwatching?

Perhaps I should set a resolution after all. I clearly need to kick through this wall.

If you need me, I'll either be thinking about why I procrastinate, or trying to decide whether I'm Very Somewhat or Somewhat Very on yet another personality test.

My uneducated response:

I can understand it all too well. I've work at about 20-25 different places in my 25 years of punching a clock, or showing up to do projects for people I know do not want to be there either. I've taken personality tests offered by the US Navy (scholarship app), Lear Corporation (cool printout), and two other places.

Since I scarcely know you, or what is the bothersome feature in your work (besides work), I suspect you'll change careers another 4.7 times during the next 20.2 years. You might conceive 2.1 kids, or forego that route, and put $151,578 more dollars in your pocket over that same time span.

The resolution is just another dream. But dreams have payment options. You must pay plenty into them, sacrifice some other route, and know that your sunk costs may infuriate someone you tend to say you love/like, but obviously they don't get what you are after and don't love/like you quite the way you want them to back.

At a younger adult age, with an IE degree, I had four goals: nice car, nice home/condo, good job that met the lifestyle, and a well, a smoking hot wife was what I wanted, but would have settle for a B- looker with DD boobs. (Hey, I'm a guy.) That said, I have no real estate, no car now (head gasket on one, repoed my moms), a freelance writing gig with FREE being the op word, and absolutely, not even the slightest tickle of a woman wanting me for a steady eddy, or a fuck buddy to soothe either her woe-beggotten trek, or the damn-good-n-rich living large existence.

So, zero for four. I should be miserable.

But, not really. Of those, only the woman would be a plus factor to the current course setting I have. Sure, I will work soon enough. But if I get so desperate...I'll find a way again to do something menial and relatively worthless to survive. Since any a-hole can entertain with words, a song, or a cool new app put up for the world at $5.99 per download, my current skill sets probably won't make a dent into my dream of being a writer that gets to do projects around the world. Why I came back for college, part deux.

So, no losses are insurmountable. The fucking existence we lead generally does not end with or begin with a job, a car, a big screen hi-def, or a semi-steady sexual encounter that you do taxes with yearly and claim kids, if you want, separately. I yearn for when I could play baseball all day, eat spaghetti dinner with my mom, and watch the Wonder Years hoping shit would be better for me in my then dream pursuit of a cheerleader I fell for in high school. Alas, the damnest thing: I wasn't popular, or a stud enough athlete, too short, also, and I talked funny too (as a hillbilly from Tennessee tends to do).

The moral is: do you. Whatever the fuck that is to you - be it. Write, build cabinets, play music, fix cars, entrepreneur something, watch Captain Kangaroo and make it a game too, I don't care. The time we got is short. You got plenty more on me because you are smart, know the story, and don't have a pecker that leads you astray like I have been led to the cliff, and fallen to a presumed death by ejaculation/masturbation. I keep on climbing back up, but I don't have a killer plan either. 

 

I write - editorialize, I'd say - my whole life. Shakespeare at least (if we believe he wrote EVERY thing) was productive. Sonnets, plays, fucking crap no one seriously could duplicate, even now. We just steal his ideas over and over and over until generation get-over-yourself forgets whomever came up with it in the first place. As you've noted, in your posting Andrew's take of The Police song When The World Keeps Running Down, that's a talent too - pirate and innovate. Do that if it doesn't land you in the fucked-in-the-ass prison. (Oh yeah, did a tour of duty in the pokey too. Didn't have Notorious B.I.G.'s legal team to get a "not guilty." I was stupid, not criminally minded. A much much longer story, if you can believe me so far.)

2012 Resolution: try for that dream and build it one day at a time. Might take 5-10 years but you will be better off, you will have really learned how you do you, and likely, will not know fuckers like me exist. The truest test of your payments to your dreams...someone else will really notice, support it, and that dream becomes a fucking reality I hear about on CNBC with Jim Cramer screaming, "Buy! Buy! Buy!" And your now-snobby ass can give me the advice.

Happy New Year! 

 

And Keep At It!

 

 

That's my advice to all of you out there between 1 and 92.

Again, Happy New Year to all of you.

I'm Back!!!: Resistance was futile and March Madness Set In

I do like to blog. Yes, I get tired of writing the same old stuff that others do. Picking out f-ed up situations, and trying to find some silver lining, or otherwise, putting my spin on the mess as if 1,000,000 others are not doing the same.

It's hard to be original. Some will likely tell you, "I've heard that before, somewhere else." Or, "you have to have readership too."

I really don't know what works best - I just write anything for no one.

I went back to researching for the baseball book, and I changed the title to keep with the time frame I'll be covering. I've written a few blogs at my other sites: Bringin' Gas and Anything Written. The last one is about March Madness and a friendship.

Excerpt:

I used to be a total addict at tourney time. When younger, and free of
things like work and with a desire to spend money I really didn’t have, watching
basketball at a watering hole was just natural. Spending Thursday-Sunday that
1st week meant I could sluff off and kill time with friends.

My then best friend was a Minneapolis native, and we killed a few
March Madnesses off at the Mall of America. Patriotic to celebrate sport inside this
lasting monument to American consumerism. We’d go to the top floor where all the bars were, eat plenty of greasy food, drinking all of the world’s favorite
pints.

The games always seemed exciting. We’d have our brackets worked
out five different ways, with $10,$20 or $50 in the mix for a bet. The buzz
after a game-ending miracle shot, or a David smacking around a Goliath for 39
minutes, only to fall short, was a pleasure to be apart of.

The last picture is just a gratuitous shot of cheerleaders that will be cheering their bobby socks off for 6'1"-7'1" muscular athletes trying to put an orange ball through a hole. They (the athletes) will wind up with one or two of these females as conquests after the fray of battle that is March Madness. And usually will forget about these happy lassies before the sheets dry. Yet, we give athletes such credit for their work, and sometimes forget, they can be every bit the morons we dislike on Wall Street. (Yet, I too wish I'd been one of these morons for a year...)

Though I am back to blogging, here, I will not devote too much time to posting. Likely a post or two every couple of weeks at most. Depends on my ambition.

Like friendships, athletic endeavors and women, I never really know the outcomes of my efforts. The conquests are few and far between. And my ambitions are usually scattered.