Overdue for a rant...

Hopefully, all of you had a good holiday. I was off for three days, worked Sunday and Monday, and have spent the last two days catching up on Hulu during the day and tearing through Smallville Season 9 with Shelly at night.

So much of my life is and has been dedicated to escapism. I love novels, comic books, film, television, video games-virtually anything that allows me to not think about my life for a while. I had a rough year or two, but my life hasn't been all that rough, overall.

I did well enough in school, had both parents during my formative years, enjoyed several long-term (but ultimately doomed) relationships, graduated college, and even worked in an aspect of my preferred field off and on for seven years.

For no reason whatsoever, I was on the edge of having a full-fledged panic attack all afternoon. I was watching British sketch comedy, so I don't know what might have triggered the feeling, but it was unmistakable.

I work a minimum of fifty hours a week, with a variable schedule. I don't have time to think about the details of my life while I'm there. Instead, I wait until I'm off work to worry about it.

A lot of people are fortunate in that they've never had a panic attack. These same people are typically always assholes if you try to explain living with an anxiety disorder to them. They've never had the pleasure of worrying so much that they wonder if they're having a heart attack, then have to worry about that on top of whatever made them anxious in the first place.

I spent nearly 5 years taking medication to help my anxiety, but various people told me that it turned me into an emotionless asshole. A nurse I once dated referred to it as a "blunted affect." One day, I decided to not refill a prescription, and in that instance, I was rewarded with the best laugh I'd had in years. The lows hit lower, but the highs hit so much higher.

Recently, I've been a downward trend, a slump or rut, if you will. I've got a lot of things for which I should be thankful, I have a hard time keeping my spirits high. I truly felt I'd hit rock bottom last year (end of a long relationship, a return to my parents' home, the loss of my job) but this year's main success (getting engaged to a good woman) is basically the only good news I've gotten all year.

I feel like the human equivalent of livestock right now.

The Threadbare Throne

I spent several hours sitting in my chair today, my first day off since starting back on last Tuesday. Since moving to Fort Smith, I've spent at least two hours a day sitting in my chair, but for the past week, I've barely had any spare time to just sit. From here, I applied for jobs, watched far too many hours of television via Hulu, listened to podcasts-basically spent entirely too much time online with nothing to show for it.

This was (and technically still is) Shelly's chair, and her various cats had already given it a delightfully shredded look, a tradition that our kitten Loki continues with great enthusiasm.

As per my usual routine, I visited a few of my favorite sites, caught up on a few shows via Hulu, and even checked the classifieds. There were a total of NINE jobs listed on the Times Record's online employment want ads. I guess I got snatched up at just the right time.

Shelly and I made a trip to the Cracker Barrel in Alma, followed by a stop at the Target on Phoenix. A stop in their book section made me realize that the first step in getting a book franchise up and running is not skimping on the cover art. I really don't think I'd like most things Rick Riordan has written, but they do look neat...

Today seemed to last a great deal longer than when I was unemployed. Work days don't fly by, but neither do they crawl. They are long and suitably fast paced. I expected today to pass rather quickly, but Shelly and I drove two towns over, ate breakfast, walked around Target for an hour, and I still had time to sit around and enjoy doing almost nothing for about three hours.

I even made split pea soup from scratch after that, and still had time to sit in my chair while I write this post (though I don't think the soup agreed with my, and I fear I may have to vacate this throne for one even less glorious).

-Andrew

Angry Robot Time Machine

I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts for a fresh post, but luckily for you, I still have some leftover thoughts-on-paper from the steno pad I found in my trunk. Enjoy!

I just got back from Tulsa, where I did some clothes shopping. Always kind of depressing.

Even when I lose weight, I can't just buy something off the regular rack. I've got to the "Big & Tall" section. I want to know, if most of the people in America are as fat as studies say we are, why don't stores carry more fat people clothes?

Even when I was thinner, it was hard to find clothes. I've got odd proportions. A regular 2X on me is basically a belly shirt.

I've had trouble like that since I was a kid. Do you know how weird it is to be too big for Chuck E. Cheese by the time you're six?

It was kind of traumatic, but not all bad. I got to ride the good rides at carnivals much sooner than everyone else, and got into R-rated films without getting carded when I was fourteen.

As I recall, the first movie I saw on my own while underage was Kevin Smith's Mallrats. I went with Matt Hickman, a neighbor kid who turned out to be distant relation. I recall that I didn't get much sleep that night, because a) I'd eaten an entire packet of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and b) I had successfully tossed some sort of candy into one of the wall sconces in the theater on a dare, and was terrified that it might overheat and start a fire.

Ah, to be young and afflicted with irrational anxieties again....

Here's a little something that turned out to be rather prophetic.

You know you've been working in an office too long when you have a favorite type of pen.

Pilot G-2 07's. I love them. Any time the receptionist goes to the office supply store, I have her buy me a pack on the company card, even if I don't need them. I think I have three unopened packs in my drawer right now...

Does anyone here think busy work will help save your job? If the bean counters come in, I don't care how many spreadsheets you've made in your spare time, your ass is GONE.

I'm actually hoping to get laid off soon. I haven't had a proper vacation in three years. I work in advertising. I figure I can take a pay cut to be on unemployment and still sit on my hands about the same amount each day.

You know what? I wasn't wrong. Aside from my three-month stint at 5 News, I spent almost a year to the day on unemployment. It was glorious. Work is and shall continue to be kicking the shit out of me, but I'm pretty good at it. For those of you wondering what I'm doing: stop asking. If I wanted you to know, I'd have already told you. It's a mundane job that pays the bills, and I hope to never see any of you while on shift.

The fact that I live in a city of relative strangers makes it easier than if I was in my hometown, but the math finally beat me. If your only choice is to apply for jobs outside your preferred field, and you must make three such applications each week (in order to receive unemployment benefits) eventually, someone is going to offer you a job, and at that point you have to take the offer.

I guess I did have time to compose a few thoughts after all...and I still have leftover pens.

-Andrew

From the Vault

During my brief lunch break today, I went out to my car and looked for a notepad in the trunk. I found a couple yellowed pads that had some pretty obvious water damage, but the real find was a blue steno book with A TON of good stuff from the days when I was newly-unengaged (don't worry, my current engagement is going great, so don't get confused), freshly unemployed, and for the first time since leaving home at age eighteen, living with my parents.

Here are a few selections, that certainly took me back:

If I had a time machine, there are two things in my life that I would change:

1. I'd stop myself from breaking up with my girlfriend in junior year of high school because I thought I was going to lose my virginity to her (thank you, church).

2. Skip College, and get a trade.

Do plumbers or x-ray techs have twenty-year structured payment plans to pay off their schooling? Fuck no. And unlike videography, editing, and copy writing skills, people will always need someone to unclog their drains, or take pictures of their broken bones.

I'm still pretty sure on the first time-travel mission, but I've revised the second part to convincing myself to pick something a little more marketable, like a teaching degree. Here's some commentary on romance:

My parents have been married over thirty years, almost half of which, my dad has worked nights. This, I think may actually be one of the keys to their success. Relationships are so hard these days. Most women I meet, I don't want to spend thirty minutes with them, let alone thirty years. Even when you do meet someone you like, that doesn't mean the feeling is mutual...

I was definitely going through a temporary bout of misogyny there, but luckily, I got better, and when I did, I found the right one.

This next piece was probably written during a sales meeting. It's always curious where my mind wanders during anything corporate. I once spent the better part of an hour-long training session plotting scenes for a sci-fi erotica story that seemed creepy even to me by the time the donuts wore off.

Who doesn't like a night on at the strip club, right? Cheap beer? Check. Topless women? Check. I tried to come up with more reasons, but that seemed to be enough.

I didn't go inside a "gentleman's club" until I was twenty-six. I want to know who decided to call them gentleman's club. I have never seen anyone remotely resembling a gentleman (or lady) in a strip club. "Creepy guy club?" Maybe. "Douchebag's Club?" Definitely.

The weirdest people spend the most money, and ninety-percent of the time, they're wearing suspenders or overalls. It's as if whenever the farm subsidies check rolls in, Farmer John leaves the sheep alone and comes to town.

And on that horrifying mental image, I bid you all sweet dreams-but don't worry, I've got a few more tidbits from this treasure trove to share with you later.

-Andrew

Behold, the Horror that is...SHOULDER-CAT!

Rather than go downstairs and type, I decided to sit in our rather large closet (my friend, John Carter, likened it to Harry Potter's room under the stairs at the Dursley house).

Loki, the younger of our two cats, started clawing the door, so I let him inside. He's recently developed a habit of jumping on Shelly's head while she brushes her teeth. He prefers a variant with me: attempting (mostly successfully) to jump on my (usually shirtless) stomach and bounce onto my shoulder.

I was and am sitting Indian-style (no, I will not call it "crisscross-applesauce"), and he is now perched in the shelf above my clothes, having employed my organic trampoline-gut in his ascension.

While I was unemployed, he and I spent nearly every day together.

Shelly rescued him from almost certain death. Loki's mother had most likely been put down by a maintenance worker at her school, and he was left to fend for himself.

She called me and said, "I've got a surprise for you, and it's not my fault." I knew then that it was either a cat, or someone had given her a bunch of clothes for me. We weren't yet living together, and she did most of the work, bottle-feeding the barely month-old kitten, even when she was working a band camp.

When I moved in, Loki officially became "our" cat, but I like to think of him as mine. Shelly already had Cleo, her obese tabby, but I hadn't had a cat in nearly ten years. During my most recent period of unemployment, he and I spent most of our days together.

Now that I'm going back to work, I feel sad that I won't have as much time to enjoy his company.

I'm especially concerned for what hell he'll unleash on Cleo (and the furniture), now that he'll see fifty hours less of me each week.

For now, I face a more immediate dilemma: how am I going to get out of here, now that my legs have gone to sleep?

On the Precipice

My last day of freedom is winding down. I got up as Shelly was leaving, good practice for the run of 7a-5p shifts I'll be working as my training schedule progresses. I made cheese grits for breakfast, watched an episode of The League on Hulu, then fell deep into the world of Red Dead Redemption. I may be returning to the real world and planning to write with some regularity, but it is going to be hard now that I know I can get $2 for skunk meat at a general store in a video game.

This time last year, I was preparing to leave on a journey across the country. Now, I'm preparing to begin another kind of journey, but one that was long overdue.

When I was in college, my psychology professor said that people who went into business doing things that they loved could eventually learn to hate those things. I love television and movies, and for about six years, that's what I did. I don't know if I had enough time to learn to hate it, but there are definitely things I don't miss about the business.

The research my professor was quoting found that most people do better finding something for which they have a knack, and then simply doing it well. I did alright working in TV, but I can't say I ever really felt like I was consistently good at it. Fortune smiled on my career, and I was lucky to work with some good people in the right place at the right time.

My best skill is basically being clever. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I have a way with words, and a way with people. My new job will actually let me put that skill to use, though not in a way that I'd really allowed myself to consider until now. There are a lot of people out there who are truly smarter and better qualified than me that are in far more dire economic straits.

I've been given a chance to get back out there, and while I won't be making much more money than I was on unemployment, I now have the potential to work my way up a ladder, something I never truly had when I was working "in my field."

I love some things in this world, but I now realize that work doesn't have to be one of them. I love good books, good stories, and good people, things you can still find, even here in Fort Smith.

-Andrew

Return to Reality

I've had two really cool vacations in the last year, both in the wake of trying circumstances. I had taken long weekends, and enjoyed quite a few paid holidays every year, but I hadn't taken a proper vacation since my trip to Memphis in 2004.





My fiancee and I went to the Fort Smith Historic Site today. Despite living here for nearly three years, she'd never been, and I had only made the trip from Springdale with my family once, when I was about twelve.





After stamping my National Parks Passport, we watched a short video about the site's history, as a military installation, trade post and eventual courthouse. The building's interior had received a major overhaul since my childhood visit. I was slightly underwhelmed by the current restoration of Judge Isaac Parker's courtroom, but I enjoyed the view from the barred windows of the basement prison. The walking trails that wind down to the Arkansas River made me want to start jogging again (I miss Lake Fayetteville).





Going back to work means I'll get to take vacations again someday. I'd initially thought of my unemployment of a vacation, but without the benefit travel, it quickly wore thin. Even the word "vacation" seems a little hollow. Europeans go on "holiday," while we Americans simply "vacate" our lives for a while.

The next trip I take will likely be our honeymoon. Shelly doesn't have any particular demands about where we go. I wonder if she'd be up for Denali...

Motivation

Finding something to do is hard enough, but finding a reason to do it has been infinitely harder for me. When all your momentum is stolen from you by factors outside your control, you find ways to cope, but until you get moving again, you're basically just spinning your wheels.

You quickly learn cheap or free ways to entertain yourself, or at the very least, ways to keep yourself occupied. Until I moved to Fort Smith, I visited the public library at least once a week, partly because it was free entertainment, and partly because Mom worked there. I applied for a library card as soon as I had the mail to prove I was a resident of my new town (though red tape has kept me from actually receiving my card).

Since I'll be re-entering the workforce, I'm faced with the opposite problem. I've spent nearly a year finding things to fill my time, and now that I'll have at least fifty fewer hours to myself each week, I have to decide what activities to prune away.

The economics of my time will ideally add more weight to the activities I focus on moving forward. I spent a great deal of time playing Halo: Reach over the past two months, something I'd never have done before I got laid off.

I need to stock up on notepads and good pens. I'm about to be surrounded by people again, so I might as well take notes.

Where's a Tommy gun when you need one...

I've been putting some very serious thought into becoming a bank robber, or at the very least, some sort of costumed bandit. Something as simple a nice suit and the right Halloween mask would do it (or some facepaint, as this photo from last New Year's shows), but first I'd need to figure out my trademark. Every decent villain has some motif that is their calling-card, some taken to a level of true madness.





I'm not obsessed with any one thing enough to form the basis for a villainous persona. I go through phases of short, intense interest in particular hobbies, and while I don't discard them, they eventually just fall into the background as a new interest comes along.





My skill set would never work as an actual bandit. I'm out of shape, not skilled with bladed weapons, firearms, or martial arts. I'm more of an idea man.





I need henchmen.

The Evolution of Inter-Lankford Communication

I just spent twenty minutes talking on the phone with my dad. We didn't really do that before Mom died. If I called the house, I'd quickly segue from polite greetings to my usual question: "Is Mom around?"





Eventually, it got to the point where he'd occasionally beat me to the punch, informing me (after a brief hello) that she was or wasn't around, or simply saying "Here's your mom," as he handed the phone to her.





Let me clarify that while we didn't talk much, I've never felt that anything was lacking in the arrangement Dad and I had. He always worked long hours, but he made sure I had the quintessential father-son dynamic that television established long before I was born (and perhaps even before him).





I remember him letting me sit in his lap and "steer" his truck when I was three or four years old, an old flatbed with a hydraulic lift at the very back. I wasn't very good at sports, but he taught me what he knew, and never made me feel bad for not doing much with it. I remember going to the movies with him alone twice, seeing Robocop 2 and The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition, both at the old Malco Razorback Six in Fayetteville.

I remember spending a weekend cleaning up at Camp Orr with him and a few other guys from my scout troop, and I'm reasonably certain he was on an Alanis Morrisette kick at the time (Jagged Little Pill had just recently hit the airwaves and we spent some time debating the lyrics to Hand in My Pocket).




When I was a teenager, we'd both get Nerf dart guns for Christmas, and would spend the rest of the morning trying to pelt each other in the face. Until last year, if my car broke down, Dad fixed it. He once drove to Mena to replace parts on a car I'd borrowed from my girlfriend's parents in east Texas.


I broke my automotive man-cherry when I replaced a melted pulley on the tensioner arm of my reviled Buick LeSabre all on my own. I called the house, told Mom to make Dad aware of it, but that I would deal with the situation on my own. It was a nice feeling, as I had previously relied on his connections at various salvage yards, body shops and wrecker services, and had perpetually been he who holds the light. I suppose it's the closest thing a Gentile can experience to the Bar Mitzvah, though I was twenty-eight at the time.




Last year, two weeks after I'd been laid off from my job as a video producer of local commercials, he took me along on a trip "out West." We drove (or rather, he drove) well over three thousand miles in six days, round trip.




We visited:

State Park-Palo Duro Canyon
National Monument-Walnut Canyon
National Parks-Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and Mesa Verde.



Mom stayed home that week, as she didn't want to rush around the week of Thanksgiving to run around in the desert. It was hard enough at the time to know Dad bankrolled the trip, but knowing know that a week he could have (and normally would have) spent with her during her last year lifts me up and weighs me down at the same time. Even then, spending hours in the car, we didn't really ever get terribly chatty, but on a trip filled with so much grandeur, words would only go so far anyway.



When Mom passed, he took me and my sisters, Rebecca and Katy, to Panama City Beach, Florida. They had spent many fall vacations there, and the week Mom died, they had actually planned their vacation time so that if she felt well enough, they would head down. She took ill on a Tuesday, and passed on the Friday they had planned to depart. After the memorial service, we just got in the car, and drove straight down to the coast, partly to spread a portion of Mom's ashes, and partly to just get away. Florida was where Mom loved to spend her vacation, and Dad made sure a part of her would always be at the beach.



Writing Mom's eulogy was one of the most difficult things I ever did, but it made me realize it's never a bad idea to start examining who your parents are, so you can try to understand and appreciate them while you can still call them up.



Now, when I call Dad, we still pretty much get to the point, but we're still making progress in terms of just...talking.



-Andrew

1. Busboy
2. Waiter
3. Clerk at a comic book store
4. Fast food crew member (a few times)
5. Dishwasher
6. Telemarketer
7. Garden center crew member
8. Tire and battery crew member
9. Furniture warehouse worker
10. Retail cashier (several times)
11. Landscaping crew member
12. Morning news tape operator/studio crew member
13. Client service provider (babysat a kid with disabilities)
14. Cafe associate (snack bar at Sam's)
15. Production Assistant
16. Video Producer/Director
17. Doorman/Bouncer (twice)
18. Part-time Janitor
19. TV news photographer

These are all the jobs I've held over the course of my life. I've done many things, some very interesting, some rather boring, but I can't truly say that many of them ever contributed to my sense of identity. What I did was not who I was, even when I began my "career in media".

That path in my life has come to an end. I went to school for broadcast journalism because it sounded like a viable replacement for film school. Having spent 5 years behind the camera, I can tell you: I am not a visual artist. I don't have the patience or the skill to be a great videographer or video editor. Children half my age know how to do things I didn't learn during my entire college career or on the job.

I find myself in a tricky situation. I now live in a city that is a professional wasteland for someone with my skill set. I moved here for a number of reasons:

1. My roommate had kicked me out in the most polite way possible.
2. I crashed a news van and got fired (technically true, though far less catastrophic than it sounds, BUT how cool is it to be able to say that?)
3. My girl lives here.

Competition for media jobs may have been tough in northwest Arkansas, but at least they were available. I had some odd notion that I'd roll down the hill to Fort Smith and start fresh, but it seems like I'll have to settle for starting over.

I've never been a person who sees a job as being beneath him. I've spent the better part of a year on unemployment benefits, and I've managed to find a job, but one that I can't honestly say I truly want.

However, a job like that has always made it easy for me to focus creatively. I haven't even written a blog post in over a year, and the mere thought of working has me hammering the keys already.

I'm not sure what I'm going to write about on here. It may be simple blogging, or short stories. I just know I need to write. I don't know what will happen if I don't, but I know it won't be good.

-Andrew