Join Death in a Final Dance

I'm falling behind in my blogging here. Mostly because by the time I get home from work I am sick of being on the computer and the last couple of days I haven't got up early enough to do it in the morning. But I fell asleep watching Law and Order around 8:30 last night, so I am wide awake now.

This weekend is going to screw up my sleep schedule, I am quite sure of that. Next week is going to be me trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour all over again.

I was working on a project at work and reading about volunteer retention with AmeriCorps Vista members. These social scientists tried to figure out what sort of factors actually kept the members at their posts for the time the pledged to do. Apparently I have a good 50/50 chance, according to the study, of not leaving before the end of my term. The thing with AmeriCorps is that you don't really sign a contract or anything saying you are going to stay with it. Part of their hypothesis was that people with higher self-esteem (the study was from the nineties by the way) would stay with the job longer because they felt it was more rewarding. They found out, though, that self-esteem actually worked in the other direction for it. The lower yours was the better chance you had to stay with AmeriCorps. That is sort of tricky, because I was driving home from work tonight and thinking about how I could already probably do the jobs of about half the other people there, and I've already started just doing whatever the hell I feel like doing there most of the time. I have fairly high self-esteem when it comes to working. I always feel that I can do whatever other people around me are doing better than they are doing it. However, my social self-esteem is usually fairly low. I don't feel super confident in my ability to go out and pick up chicks, for example.

Whatever, though. I'm going to muddle through. So far my biggest problem is that there are a fair amount of older volunteers that have claimed to have good computer skills that actually don't. I wish that people would make it more clear to people that if all you know how to do on the computer is check email and get on the internet for a few minutes at a time you are not computer literate. I get so damned impatiant with people who can't just sit down and figure out how to work the computer themselves once they say they know what they are doing. When I was a kid I went down to Mexico with my Grandpa and we built a chicken coop for this orphanage for a few days. I would not, however, say that I have excellent construction skills based on that. I think I could help to put up a house, but I wouldn't just show up at a construction site and try to do it all myself then get frustrated when I had no idea how to reinforce the header or use a table saw.

I have a feeling that I am going to have to try to bend that place to my will. The first thing I did when I got home was through on my cut off shorts and a tattered t-shirt and my coat that is falling apart. Then I went out in the freezing cold to go to the store. I realized that I looked like a total bum, and it felt good. I don't dress like a vagrant because I'm too lazy to go about trying to shop for halfway decent clothes, I dress like that because I like to. I apparently locked myself into the grunge look when I was a kid and have never really bothered to update. And why should I? Grunge isn't like most other styles. It's philosophy is all about not trying to look any particular way. It's about saving money on needless excesses of clothes. And, for those same reasons, it is actually the greenest way to dress. Imagine how much less Carbon would be realeased everyone dressed like that. There would be substantially less need to ship clothes and materials from third-world contries back to us.

The hipster look is sort of green, I suppose, as they often appear to have just walked into a thrift store and rolled around in the aisles until enough clothes fell on them. Granted, they look like the "special" kid in your classes growing up that had a color blind mother and a father that worked the late shift so he never saw what they wore to school. To be fair, though, I suppose many parents would prefer a horribly color coordinated outfit to one that was tattered to the point of nearly attaining rag-hood.

Cheb called me disreputable. I pretended to be offended for a moment when I first read that, but he's got a point.

It is closing in on the Winter Solstice, and if my knowledge of seasons is correct this means that the days will start to get a little bit longer past that point. And the snow is finally starting to melt. Hopefully that will be the last of the snow storms 'round these here parts. I doubt it though. My guess is that I am going to have to smack someone before the end of winter because they insist that global warming is a sham because it continues to snow in winter. Man that pisses me off. For fucks sake, learn a small amount about the thing you so completely dismiss as untrue before assuming that the word "Warming" means only that it is getting hotter. You do not get to debunk decades of scientific research because you misunderstand what the hell they are talking about. Not yours.

I have to drive to Fallon in about an hour for a client intake. I wish that I was meeting my partner there instead of picking her up at her house to drive her there. Mostly so that I could go and hang out at the card shop for a while then put up a flyer or two around town and just call it a day. Although, now that I think about it, school might be out for them teenagers by now, and they will likely be all up in my business. Well, Chuck's business.

I guess I'm gonna have to go christmas shopping this weekend. That is going to suck this close to christmas. Stupid people and there want to buy stuff for other stupid people.

Apparently I have been typing for a while as it is about time for me to start getting ready to go, so I bid you ado.

Cheb: 39
Mor: 36