Thursday, January 31, 2008
So, today I had my interview for another position at the University of Phoenix. The interview went well enough and given the position, it doesn't really take much to be qualified for it.
As I left that interview, I got a phone call from one of the other places that I had submitted a resume to. I decided to wait to call them back until I got home and could read up on them again so that I would be able to sound informed if they wanted to interview me on the spot.
So, after I get home and read up on them, I try to call them back but get no answer. Then, 2.5 hours after my interview with UoP, I get a call saying I passed the interview and can I come in tomorrow to fill out new hire paperwork.
I then call back the other place again since it is a job that I would rather do. It would involve deeply researching a specific political issue and then basically coordinating lobbying efforts and media relations. The earliest they could get in an initial interview is Friday. If I pass that, I'd be expected to then do an in person interview.
So, because I can't really afford to pass on the crappy job on the hopes that this other one would work out better and because the other one pays less, I'm going to have to just accept the UoP one. I'm still going to do the interview Friday with the other people though and then if they tell me I pass then I'll tell them that I've taken a position for someone else, but could they keep me on file in case this one doesn't work out.
So what, you may ask, will I be doing. Well, I'll be trying to meet my quota of 650 outbound calls a day. No, that's not a typo.... six fucking hundred fucking fifty calls per day. Now given, not all of them will answer, some may be wrong numbers, etc., but I am expected to make that many calls each day. With each of them that actually answers and is the right person I will be expected to read them questions from a script and try to overcome any basic objections (e.g. I don't have time to talk right now or I'm not interested anymore). If they give the right answers to all of the questions, I transfer them to what is called a conference. My quota is to get 28 of those each day. Depending on who you talk to, I have to put in 6-9 months of doing that before I can consider transferring to another post in the company.
So is this good news? I don't really know. It's a job so it's money so it will provide some stability and so in that sense, it is good. On the other hand, it pays just over half of what the top paying job I've applied for would pay and is miserable work. It'll let me develop phone and customer service experience though. In theory, I could also pursue a masters degree for nearly free with this job, but I'm not sure if I will since none of the programs they offer excite me in the least bit. Also, by taking this job, I am automatically cutting off the possibility that I might come across something better.
Ah well, I'll just take it day by day and let it come dollar by dollar. It'll stabilize me and very slowly move me toward less debt. It'll be a ways yet before I have cut the debt back enough to feel free or move out or invest in any new projects, but at least I'll have halted the slide toward oblivion.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Okay, this is the last post to flush from my mental queue for the night.
I was at dinner with a family in my mum's church group last week and I had some interesting discussions with the father.
One small one left me depressed the rest of the night. We were discussing my situation and how directionless I feel. He was quick to blame this on my having had a "classic liberal education." I looked up liberal education and it is characterized by wikipedia as such: "Usually global and pluralistic in scope, it includes a general education curriculum which provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and learning strategies in addition to in-depth study in at least one academic area." He feels that this type of education does not prepare people for the real world and makes people quite adept at finding the problems in things and why they cannot work rather than finding and exploiting opportunities. Furthermore, he said that he has seen hundreds of people in my type of situation of hopelessness, directionlessness, and passions repeatedly blunted into despair. I figured that if he has seen that many people in this type of situation then clearly he must know techniques to help me recover from it, so I asked him how those people usually get out. His answer: "they usually don't." Fuck.
We also had a conversation on mormonism which rather intrigued me. He straightforwardly admitted to me that he thinks that agnosticism is the most honest belief in religion and that those who claim to know various religious facts are stupid. He admitted that he doesn't know if much of the mormon mythology about Joseph Smith and such is true. He is, however, a fully practicing mormon and teaches all of these stories to his family and endorses them in church and doesn't feel the slightest bit of dissonance about it. How can this be you might ask and indeed I wondered myself. The way he approaches it is that he looks at the groups of people who are overrepresented in large corporations, government, finance, etc. To him, these groups include mormons, jews, arabs, and one other that I can't remember. He also examines systems and what results they produce. So, he sees that mormons are so overrepresented in these fields and he sees the happy families and such and then believes that regardless of whether all of the things taught in the system are true or not, they bring good results and therefore are worth following. Because he lives in the western United States, mormonism is a fairly dominant culture in some areas and so therefore to him, it makes the most logical sense that if one wants to be successful in these areas, they should follow mormonism. They shouldn't care if the teachings have any basis in reality or not, but simply accept that following them will generally lead to the results they want. He believes that his beautiful wife and his good children are a direct result of having bought into the mormon social structure and going on a mission and such. Had he been born into a jewish or muslim area, I think he would have followed those systems with equal vigour.
He is convinced that part of my situation of being kind of drifting is the fact that I separated myself from that treadmill system and did not replace it with something else. While I did concede that this idea may have some merit, I also explained that I require a basis in truth and that my moral system dictates that I must, if necessary, reduce efficiency or success in order to maintain truth. His belief was that the fact that the mormon system works to produce the results he wants makes the system "true" in the only way that really matters in the end, in a pragmatic rather than theoretical sense.
So, while I found the discussion fascinating as this was a point of view I'd never heard before, I simply can't justify it to myself. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on it and how his point of view may relate to other philosophies since I don't suppose he came up with it on his own.
So, some of you may wonder why I have had the mini-epiphany described in my last post about marriage and why I have even bothered to reconsider whether it is possible for me. The answer is that I found out that I may need it.
As many of you know, one of my primary goals in life, if not the primary goal in my life, is to travel the world and live in different places including foreign countries to experience as many cultures and settings as possible.
That is one reason the idea of the foreign service officer job appeals to me. It would give me an automatic job in a capacity that I would enjoy in various places around the world and would provide training including language training. The downsides being that you have to tout the party line even where you don't agree with it and that you don't get to pick the locations yourself.
So I was looking into other options and by chance I came across some pages describing how to get citizenship in other countries. I discovered that in several countries in the European Union it is possible to get citizenship by living in the country for 5 years straight and learning the language and culture. Two of the countries that have this sort of requirement that interest me are Sweden and the Netherlands, though we'll take the latter for the sake of discussion. If I were to acquire dutch citizenship, I could live and work in any country in the EU without having to get special visas and work permits. It would require that I learn the language(s) and skills for jobs myself, but would give me freedom to choose my location, at least within the EU. It seems like the hardest part would be actually getting the residential visa and work permit to begin with and then all you have to do is last out the time and learn along the way.
So, that all sounds straightforward, but there is a catch. In order to take dutch citizenship, I would be required to renounce my US citizenship. While I might consider that for a brief moment, I don't think I could actually do it. There is definitely advantage to having citizenship in the most powerful country in the world and besides, it is my home country. It would be terribly bizarre to have to get visas or green cards or something to live/work in the US if I came back to visit or to live. So, I discovered that there is a list of exceptions to the renunciation requirement, but I could only theoretically meet one of them. If I were to marry a dutch citizen then after 3 years of being married to them (and meeting the other requirements), I could apply for dutch citizenship and be permitted to keep my US citizenship as well.
So, that would require I get married which brings in a whole host of questions, some of which I addressed in my last post. In addition to that, I'd need to make sure to end up with someone that liked to travel and move around as well. I'd also have to deal with the question of children.... which I have absolutely zero desire for at the moment and would require some convincing to ever change.
There is another catch as well. While the US does permit a US citizen to hold dual citizenship, if a person voluntarily obtains a second citizenship (as opposed to being granted it due to birth, etc.), they are automatically disqualified for security clearances due to foreign interest. This would effectively disqualify me from the foreign service officer job. My thoughts are that if I were to pursue the dual citizenship route then it'd be a minimum of 5 years from when I started and by that time I'd probably have some career already worked out and I'd already have a way to live and work in most of Europe so I may not need the FSO job.
So, I'm a little torn between which path would be ideal and I don't know that I can make either work, but at least either way would be interesting. And besides, wouldn't it be freakin' cool if I had an EU passport? I'd love to have some legitimate claim to call myself european.
Although Jeremy likes to blame himself for my complete lack of any sort of love life, I've come to the conclusion recently that in fact, Freud was more right. I now blame my mother.
I was talking to someone about my lack of romance and all of the reasons why I don't think I'd ever want to get married. The reasons actually boil down to a few key items like privacy, independence, control over my resources, and sex.
Now the sex thing I attribute more to church beliefs in how I was raised though some very awkward conversations about masturbation and condoms with my mother growing up and the shame implied in those couldn't have helped me much.
The others, however, I feel my mother was a large contributor in. She is very assertive and very often does not know that no means no. If I say no to her about something and she thinks it is in my best interest, she will still go behind my back to do it. Oftentimes this involves invading my room or my car or in other ways violating my privacy and property. This clearly leads to a lot of trust issues since I cannot trust her to respect my space at all. She also never maintains any kind of balance of control. She also feels compelled to express her opinion on literally everything and she presents her opinion as fact and then on many topics proceeds to judge the hell out of anyone who believes differently. She often holds family meetings or discussions under the pretense of them being democratic and then she proceeds to disregard anything anyone else says and implements her own plan. When we are put in charge of other tasks like cleaning the pool, she constantly interferes with it behind our backs to get it done the way she wants. Now in a parent-child relationship some of this is to be expected, though it should be less so with me as an adult offspring of hers, but it isn't. But disregarding even this is the fact that she has treated both husbands of hers in very similar ways.
So, I guess my fear is that if I were ever in a dating relationship with someone or married to someone, I'd have to deal with all of this again. I'd have to worry over the security of my possessions and my money. I'd have to worry about who I am and what my dreams are. I'd have to worry that my entire life would be micromanaged to the point that I am powerless. If all of this happened, then what the fuck would be the point of the relationship? I'd be insane to willingly enter into that.
So, I got to thinking, if I met someone that I could actually trust and who would actually accept me for who I am without judging me, maybe it might work. Then I might feel safe to let my guard down about my things and myself. My privacy would be a little less important because I wouldn't have to feel defensive about as much. It could then actually be a safe and relaxing place to be to escape from the world rather than being a burden of yet another thing I just have to work to maintain exhausting myself. Now, I have my doubts about whether I could actually find someone like that that I was actually attracted to and even if I did, I'd have the whole physical intimacy hurdle to get over, but Samantha assures me that my mental blocks on that would melt away if I got into the type of relationship just described.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Well, I discovered another of my gerbils dead tonight. Now I'm down to 3. Strangely, the two original gerbils, who are parents to the rest, are among the survivors. My sister has one of the original litter and I don't know what ever happened to the other two that passed from my brother to a friend to god knows where.
It's strange to watch as they die. My original plan, so full of hope, was to move to the northeast, to experience New York City, Boston, etc. I wanted to see a new england autumn. I wanted to see the historical sights. My plan was, however, only to stay up there for a few years until my gerbils had died off which would then free me to lead an adventurous life.
Now their numbers have dwindled in the past year from 8 to 3 and rather than excitedly taking in the northeast, I am now in the southwest mired in so much financial difficulty that I can't even do much to experience this area and what it has to offer. I fear that when the last one drops, I will only be able to bury my head in grief at life rather than soar into grand adventures.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Shit, I didn't get the UoP job. My mom got a lead on another job possibility while at a new years party. It pays less, it would be pretty boring, and it would do nothing for my short or long-term career ambitions, but at least it'd keep me afloat.... assuming I have any better luck getting that job than the others I've applied for.
Oh, yeah, and on new years, my mom called and said that she didn't think we'd like the party she was at. She's usually the type to try to talk us into something no matter what so the fact that she would even admit that we wouldn't like it meant we definitely wouldn't. So, my brother, little sister, and I stayed home watching TV. Eventually my brother fell asleep on the couch, my sister was looking at clothes on the computer, and nothing good was on TV so at 11:30PM I just said fuck it and went to sleep. I woke up at 12:03, saw the clock, and went back to sleep. My brother apparently woke up at 11:55 only to discover that we don't even get the channel with the ball drop, so he just went back to sleep too. Aren't our lives great?
Fuck 2008.