Day 27: Moral Is Dropping and Doom Is Pending

As I said in my intro I am very unemployed. To a certain degree this was initially cool. I had time to read and generally f%ck around but the sad truth is that I am running out of money and I am hella bored.

There is a bit of a paradox to life in northern California: it is a wealthy area (housing prices indicate that, I guess?) but it has a crappy economy and job market. Like me, for example, I am a college grad with a BA in irrelevancy and some work experience and I can get another job after being fired from the one that I got (which took an estimated 100 resumes being shipped across cyberspace via hotjobs and monster). Essentially, I feel like I wasted four years in college, on top of the various community college semesters I attended to transfer, and that I am some sort of leper that no one wants to hire. In many ways I feel like that awkward high school student that no one talks to and you wouldn't be surprised if he or she went on some sort of crime spree after graduation (kinda like Carrie) Of course I am being a bit melodramatic when I compare myself to a sociopath teenager but none the less my moral is low and I only leave my room to do a few minimal things.



But I must digress on the overall negative tone of this post and begin to focus on the positive aspects of what I have accomplished since being terminated (or discharged, which is a term I will refrain from using since it brings up connotations of bodily fluid). I am at day 27 of my sabbatical and I have done a few things:

• I watched all six Star Wars movies. I almost watched them in a linear manner but I absolutely hate Episode One: The Phantom Menace so I ended up watching it last. In hindsight that wasn't the smartest thing I've done because it made any notions of continuity irrelevant. Not that continuity or linear progress is the strong suit of Star Wars, I mean they were released as trilogies in the wrong order. I believe my main beef with the Phantom Menace is that George Lucas tried to hard to appeal to all audiences and alienated me (and my 18-40 male counterparts) by gearing a lot of the flick to the kids while also trying to satisfy those that were raised by the trilogy. You can't please everyone and in the process Lucas made a crappy movie. I hadn't watched it since I was in college (about 4 years ago or so) and the movie is still garbage. I figured my post graduate sobriety could give me a different perception but it actually made my recent viewing worse. I have no beef with the next two in the series, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith are both entertaining and are occasionally re-watchable. My only beef with the aforementioned pair is the acting of Hayden Christensen. Everything seems forced and he comes across as robotic in his performance. That and his mildly lazy eye doesn't help.

• I caught up on my reading, sort of. I had the chance to renew my library card and grab a few books. Next Man Up by John Feinstein, which is another chapter of the HBO show Hard Knock and documents a season with the Baltimore Ravens. The book was interesting and as a football fan it did shine some light into the behind the scenes aspect of the NFL but it did raise the question of why a bunch of famous football players would let an overweight, Duke graduate follow them around for a year? I mean, I have no doubt that Feinstein is a nice enough fella and isn't a pushy and annoying journalist but one must wonder if the Ravens were annoyed by his perpetual presence and the simple fact that he is an outsider?

Actually after 27 days I have accomplished nothing and apparently keeping a digital diary is not an accomplishment either.