Rusty's Blog

I don’t buy everything Kimberly wrote about on this list of how social media is ruining your life, but there is some truth to some of it, like any good piece of link bait.

I’m not really interested in fisking it, I just want to focus on one part. For a while I was becoming one of those obnoxious people she mentions who constantly texts/reads and takes photos during times when I should have just been enjoying other people’s company. I’ve been working on not doing that as much, with varying degrees of success.

I think it was around the first Sex 2.0 that I realized I was spending too much time documenting my life and not enough time living it. I guess it was ironic to learn I was abusing social media at a social media conference. The event was a lot more fun than other events I’d been to because people didn’t sit around and live blog and post their photos to Flickr in real time much. They, and I, were too engaged in conversation to bother with any of that, and the experience was richer for it.

A lot has happened in my life I haven’t been writing about here. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to come back and read this years from now and wish I’d written more about one thing or another. And I very well might.

I didn’t write much about our house-hunting process. I didn’t write about our house warming party at all. I didn’t write about going to Six Flags last Saturday with some friends, other than a brief Twitter message or two.

At one point in high school when I was going to a lot of concerts I realized I was fixated on getting concert t-shirts so people would know, by golly, that I was at Nine Inch Nails or Aerosmith or whatever other band I was seeing that week that seems a little lame now. Then I realized I would have more money to go to more concerts if I didn’t spend money on souvenir t-shirts. So I left subsequent concerts with nothing but my memories to show for it, and the funny thing is I think I enjoyed the concerts more knowing ahead of time that’s all I would leave with.

Blogging about all the positive things in my life feels like that sometimes; like I’m fixated on taking a souvenir away from my good memories instead of just enjoying them as they happen and then leaving them in the past when I’m done.

I also am realizing my life probably won’t take the sweeping arch that a lot of people’s lives take, and I am at peace with this. That knowledge has caused me to focus on simple pleasures like hearing the birds chirp on my back deck, the smells of food cooked on my grill, or mowing the grass with a slight beer buzz on a Saturday afternoon. I spent four hours the other night making five tablespoons of tomato paste from scratch. None of this would make for exciting blog fodder, but it’s what I’ve come to enjoy lately.

My complaints feel trivial compared to other people’s and to my own from a few years ago, so I don’t want to weigh myself down focusing on those either.

If you’re not hearing as much from me about my life on here, that’s probably why. And I may need to point my future self back to this post if I find myself wondering why I didn’t write more.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

This is the last of my high school jobs, unless I’ve killed the brains cells responsible for storing the memories of another one. Which is possible. Last one I’m writing about, that is, not the last one chronologically. I can’t remember where in the timeline it falls exactly.

A guy I’d known since the fifth grade worked in a factory that actually made widgets, or items that most closely resemble what I always imagined widgets would look like: little back-scratchers with wood balls that you’d buy at a mall and other similar trinkets. His uncle (or maybe cousin) ran the place, so he was able to get me and a buddy of mine a job.

I started out working Saturdays doing assembly, which consisted of taking metal dowels that had already been cut, bent, welded together, and painted and gluing and hammering the wood balls with holes drilled in them on the end of the dowels. It was somewhat of a family business. The father of the guy I’d known since fifth grade would come in to help on some Saturdays, walking around puffing his pipe, the smoke wafting in the air.

The uncle/cousin who owned the place was a strange dude who wore glasses and spoke with a lisp that made him sound sort of like Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. Several of us would make fun of him when he wasn’t around. I guess that was mean, but he had a way of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time that made him seem unappreciative of people’s work. He also spent a lot of time telling us things we already knew.

Despite not getting along with him, my buddy and I were two of the most efficient workers in the place, especially after we started working weeknight shifts. We not only did assembly, but got to work with some serious industrial tools in pre-assembly as well. I remember being warned about how quickly I’d lose a finger if I got lackadaisical around the machine that bent metal dowels.

I also remember carrying in deliveries of those dowels in at night from the loading dock, which was quite a workout.

My least favorite part of the work was preparing the dowels to be sawed, because it involved working closely with the boss. We had to wrap bunches of them tightly with duct tape. It was tedious and he always complained about how we did it.

Only three or four months passed before mine and the boss’ personalities collided one too many times, and I was fired from a job for the first time in my life.

“It’s not your work, it’s your attitude mee-an,” he said in his lispy Cable Guy voice.

My attitude was probably as much to blame as him being an idiot was, as I didn’t (and still don’t) suffer fools well. Passive aggression was once again my method of protest when I had to deal with an unpleasant person. We would stuff big wads of Red Man Golden Blend in our cheeks and spit in cups because we knew he thought this was disgusting. Like at the car dealership, he’d tell me not to, I’d stop for a little while, and then start again.

I may or may not have turned it into a “you can’t fire me because I quit” scene at the end. I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter.

If you have been finding these posts interesting, be sure to also check out similar posts from Sara and Garrett.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

Much as the timeline has become hazy for some of the jobs I had in college, the timeline is also hazy for my jobs in high school. In the last post I wrote about having jobs at car dealerships over the summer after junior and senior year, and I believe that to be right. However, there were a couple of jobs I had at various points before and after those other jobs, and the exact timeline is lost to the ether. This is one of them.

I had responded to a classified ad from someone who said they had part-time work to offer. That someone turned out to be a chiropractor. What he wanted was someone to hand out pamphlets advertising his services to joggers in a park. You know, since they might throw out their back jogging. The idea sounded as bad to me then as it probably sounds to you now, but I needed to make some money, so I figured I’d try it.

My first day, he took the business van over to the park and I drove my SUV. He handed me a box of pamphlets, and told me a line I should say to people as I tried to hand them out. Almost as soon as I got there, I noticed two attractive girls from my high school class were also jogging there and started to feel embarrassed.

I put in my best effort to walk around the trail for about an hour, handing out pamphlets to people, and was summarily rejected by every one of them. He was jogging in the park while I worked, so I spent the next half hour trying to find him.

When I did, I handed the rest of the fliers back to him and told him this line of work wasn’t for me. He asked how I wanted to be paid, since we hadn’t worked that detail out yet. I told him not to worry about it and left.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

For the first month or two of the summer after my junior year of high school, I was able to mostly just drift aimlessly. I was no longer trying to play anything resembling serious baseball, but somehow had managed to go without getting a job.

My friends and I would try to find activities that didn’t cost us much money, which involved a lot of mostly driving around since the one thing we could pay for was gas. In my case, I still had the gas card given to me the summer before when there was a legitimate reason to give me one.

I was able to go on that way until I got into some trouble late in the summer, which seemed inevitable in retrospect. Suburban teenagers with cars and free gas and not much else to do is a recipe for something to go terribly wrong. Sure enough it did, and I ended up owing my parents a good chunk of money. That’s a subject for another time. My point in mentioning it is it was time to get another job.

More after the jump…

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I’ve been in a reflective/nostalgic mood lately, so I’ve come up with an idea to write a series of posts about jobs I’ve had. Hopefully I will follow through on this and actually write about most of them instead of calling one post a series.

Some of these posts may be interesting to you, and some of them may not. I’m going to write them mostly chronologically, starting near the beginning with my job as a ride attendant at American Adventures when I was 16, the summer after my sophomore year of high school.

Technically I guess that wasn’t my first job as I did get paid to help stuff envelopes for my mom’s office before that (I’m sure there’s a joke about child labor in there somewhere). But I’m skipping that for now since a blog post about stuffing envelopes would be almost as tedious as stuffing envelopes was.

Read more after the jump…

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My senior year of high school, close to the time I turned 18, my classmates and I filled out a survey. A lot of it was the sort of thing people fill out in MySpace surveys now: favorite bands, favorite animal, favorite activity. Some of it was about The Future.

There were people who took the survey very seriously and put in an effort to sound cheerful and as hopeful about The Future as possible. After all, their children and their children’s children would read this record of their thoughts, frozen in place for posterity.

Others used the questionnaire as an outlet for their hostility toward the high school experience, packing as much cynicism and sarcasm into their answers as possible. The Future as these folks imagined it was a bleak place, even at its best full of black humor where they were the center of the jokes.

The answers were ultimately printed in the yearbook in little sidebars, typically with the contrasting attitudes juxtaposed next to each other. You can probably guess which approach I took when I filled out my survey. I made frequent appearances in the ‘cynical/sarcastic/pessimistic/bitter’ column.

One such sidebar was titled “Happily Ever After,” where answers to the question “what are your goals in life?” or something similar were printed. The answers were as follows:

Cheerful, hopeful person: “Major in biology, go to med school, and have a career in ER.”

Bitter, cynical me: “Live to 30.”

That answer carried extra resonance because there were people I went to school with who genuinely believed I wouldn’t live to 30.

By my junior year or so, I had picked up a reputation as someone who drank heavily. While I certainly got drunk from time-to-time, this reputation was largely an exaggeration. For whatever reason, I never tried to dispell that myth, and even perpetuated it a few times.

There were also people who thought I wasn’t right in the head. I was a weird, insecure, often angry kid and there were a lot of things I did then that I still can’t logically explain. The committee in charge of a senior awards ceremony wanted to name me “Most Likely to Appear on America’s Most Wanted,” but I asked them not to. So I can’t argue much there.

While I always believed there was mostly no truth to the “Live to 30″ answer, my older, slightly less cynical self knows that tempting fate just for the sake of doing it isn’t always a great idea. I’m agnostic, but I also think if there was a God, He or She would have to enjoy gallows humor, and would pick people like me off just for saying things like that.

So, I’m breathing a little sigh of relief to have outlived my cynical high school survey answer today. And I’m pleasantly surprised to report that if I were filling out a similar survey about The Future now, that at least some of the time I’d be the dorky kid who wrote cheerful things for posterity.