Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been on a quest to find the world’s perfect job. Most of you thought I’d found it when I was working from home in a beautiful small town on the west coast.
So, yeah, it’s fun to work in your underwear all day long. Or not. That’s fun too. But come on. I was sitting in front of a computer all day long. I didn’t have any coworkers to tease. And in the end, I just wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a fundraiser.
And here I was thinking about settling down in the near future: tricking some poor dame into marrying me, starting a family, buying a doublewide.
It seemed wise to explore alternate careers ASAP, before all of that got started.
I’m still doing that. But, let’s face it, unemployment is not exactly lucrative, and I’ve got to EAT, dagnabit.
So here in DC, while I continue to search for an answer to “what do I really want to do when I grow up?” I’ve found a short-term home with Experience Corps.
Experience Corps is a national organization, and is the key partner of the place I used to work for in Boston, Generations Incorporated. Experience Corps is building a nation-wide network of projects that recruit retirees to meet their communities’ most pressing challenges. Right now they focus on engaging retirees to serve as mentors and tutors to elementary school children. The basic idea is perfect, their programs are awesome, and - like Generations Incorporated - they’re filled to the brim with good people.
I’ve signed on to work for them through the end of August.
It’s perfect for lots of different reasons. For one thing, it’s going to help me pay the bills. Plus, the short-term contract allows me to settle into DC and explore my full-time options. Moreover, it won’t take me long to get up to speed in the organization since I’ve worked in the Experience Corps network for 5 years and I know almost all of their staffers. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve got me working on some really interesting projects: working with their in-house fundraising experts to develop/refine their sustainability plans, creating content for a website, yada yada yada.
I’m stoked.
I started on Friday, and it went smoothly. Nicole even baked a “thanks for hiring me” present for me to take in on my first day. I forget what it’s official name is, but it was basically a strawberry/cheese Danish the size of a football. They all had the same reaction to it that I did, which was to say: “holy crap, that Danish is as big as a football!” It was gone in an hour.
Now Nicole is talking about making éclairs for me to take to work on Monday. This girl. I’m telling you.
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Employed! |
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I know, I know, I know |
I know I should have been updating this more often, but listen: I've had a lot on my plate lately. I've been looking for a job, settling into a new city, and dealing with this one girl who won't leave me the heck alone. So cut me some slack already.
:)
Expect a flurry of posts over the next couple days, and then about 2 posts a week after that.
Go Red Wings.
Go Pistons.
Go Tigers.
Go Sox.
Go MATT MILLEN!!!!!!! (idiot)
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SOS: Send Recipes |
People, I need help.
I'm getting cooked INTO. THE. GROUND. Just getting totally dominated in the kitchen.
It's not fair:
a) Nicole LIKES to cook
b) She was scarfing up recipes the whole time she was traveling in Africa and the Middle East.
Me? I once spent a month eating nothing but hot dogs for both lunch AND dinner. 36 hot dogs per week on average. I'm not kidding. And that was one of the most satisfying months of my life. I LOVED it. Hot dogs with salsa, hot dogs with pasta sauce, hot dogs with ketchup, hot dogs with a different type of salsa... all washed down by an endless fount of Creme Soda. It was awesome. My mouth is watering now just thinking about it...
...which is the problem. My whole life I've been satisfied by whatever stupid morsel of food I accidentally created in the kitchen. If it's warm and cheesy I love it, so why bother working to create something fancier?
So now I'm stuck with the cooking repertoire of a 12-year-old latch-key kid.
She's all, "I was thinking about cooking up some (insert some foreign word here) chicken in a reduction sauce and a curry for supper," And my best counter punch is, "yeah, or I could do up some hot pockets..."
There's just no contest here.
So far, we've worked through this OK. She understands that I'm a nincompoop in the kitchen, and she has agreed to teach me (or, rather, agreed not to prevent me from watching her work her magic spells) and is fine with letting me eat the proceeds if I take care of all clean-up activities. She kindly claims to like cooking all the time.
But I'd like to also contribute in the kitchen in some meaningful way. So, help me. Send me recipes. Easy ones. Involving hot dogs if possible.
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West to East Via Photos and Captions |
From whence I came.
About 6 seconds into the trip we started taking "cool dudes" shots. Like, here we are, 2 cool dudes on the road, living the dream, completely free, totally untethered...
...except for that one huge metallic tether.
Eastern Oregon
Smitty: "You know what this place needs? Statues. Really, really big statues. Like the ones they have in The Lord of the Rings."
Me: "Yup."
Like the Magi, we were guided by a star. Unlike the Magi, we were also guided by a purple ball and some sort of fish. They kept telling us to go forward.
That lead to a nice riff on what the heck a goldfish could possibly be thinking in his tiny little brain."He's got to be just swimming around his little bowl thinking, 'Hey! There's a castle in here! When did they put that in here?
Hey guys, have you seen there's a castle in here? Gosh, I wonder what's inside. I bet there's a King and every...
...You know what I like? Swimming. You guys want to go for a swim? Cool. Let's all swim.
Counterclockwise, eh? Sweet. Yeah, clockwise is sweet too.
Holy crap, there's a castle in here! You guys want to swim through that castle? I wonder when they put that in here.
Swim swim swim! SUUUUUUWWWWWIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMMIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGG!
A castle! Man. I never thought I'd get to see one of those up close. Hey there, Mr. Castle, want to swim? No? Not a swimmer? Hey, have you heard they put a castle in here? Oh, right. Of course you have! Ha! So, how about a swim then?"
At some point Smitty said, "Boy, those colors are awesome." And I said, "WHAT colors?" That's when we realized that we had totally different views of the world, and the reason we had totally different views was because of our sunglasses.
Mine:
His.
No idea where this is.
Swim swim swim.
Castle!
Somewhere out west we encountered a herd of wild mules, which lead to the question: does it still count as being wild if no one wants to tame you? And that was kind of sad, thinking of those poor mules, living out in the middle of nowhere, and all they want is for someone to stop, throw open the back door of the sedan, and invite them home for a nice turkey dinner.
If they could only write, they'd be standing by the side of the road with placards that read, "Please Take Us Home. We'll Do Tricks.”
The moon rising as we approach Salt Lake City.
Ah... springtime in Wyoming. All the ashen trees are in bloom, and the mud birds are heralding the blossoming of the first sepia flowers. And the rains have come, transforming the barren land into a rippling cascade of khaki, russet, and taupe.
Get me the hell out of here.
Colorado!
Helen, meet the world. World, Helen. Helen was our host in Boulder, CO. She gave us wine and tacos. My friend Marcia was there too, and gave us a bag of G.O.R.P.
Eastern Colorado.
Way back when we left Oregon - all of 2.5 days ago - we shared a goodbye breakfast with two of my professors at the Oregon Extension. One thing Smitty and I took away from that morning's conversation: the song of this one sort of duck (maybe a Wood Duck?) is "Squeee! Squeee! Kip kip kip!"
So Smitty decided that it would be a barometer of our friendship during the trip. Whenever one of us yelled out, "Squeee! Squeee!" the other person had to answer with, "Kip kip kip!" As long as squeee was answered with kip, our friendship was secure. Failure to kip meant there was trouble in paradise.
Not a bad system, really.
It was somewhere in Iowa that we got to talking about the relative strength of Smitty's various body odors, and how if you looked hard enough you could actually see the smells wafting up from certain parts of his body like horrible genies.
Then we talked ourselves through a battle between his armpit odor-genie and his foot odor-genie, wherein his armpit genie was fighting with a big stick of salami, and his foot genie was armed with a rotting fish. I forget who won.
After a long day on the road, we were warmly welcomed in Des Moines by Nicole's parents, Mike and Kim, and their 8 cats. They gave us pizza! They also gave us a u-haul worth of things to DC.
One thing to think about on your next road trip: how much barbed wire is there in the US? My guess, shooting straight from the hip, is 500,000 miles of barbed wire.
Things to consider:
- The US is roughly 3,000 miles across and 1,200 miles from north to south (give or take.)
- The Northeast is not heavily fenced, nor are urban areas.
- Each fence usually consists of at least three strands.
Castle!
The cool dudes ride again. I think this was about the point in the trip where Smitty told me about his friend who was such a prude that his worst swearword was "dipcrap."
We met The Mellon (note the size of his head) in Chicago. While we ate pulled-pork sandwiches, he told us a great story about almost being arrested last month for stealing a car from the dealership he worked for. The title of the story is APB on the Mellon.
Sunset in the rear view mirror as we race towards Cleveland.
We got tired... and went a little loopy.
The next morning, we awoke to this. For a clue has to how I'm feeling about this situation, compare this photo to the photo at the top of this post.
All tuckered out.
Still, we arrived safely.
2,891 miles in 4.5 days.
Squeee! Squeee!
Kip kip kip!
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Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut |
One of our best writers, and one of my heroes, just died.
Thanks for everything, Mr. Vonnegut.
This excerpt is from Slaughterhouse-Five:
...It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.