horns1912 on Xanga

Weblog

Thursday, 08 October 2009

No longer a stand up comic?

I graduated from college in 2005. And promptly became one of the few people I knew to actually enter the workforce. I had some friends that were a year or two younger. I had friends that went straight to law school. But, at the time of graduation, I had very few friends that chose the path of employment.

I mention this, because it delayed by four years a realization I just recently happened upon--working people are dull. A typical exchange I might have with a guy in my office might go a little something like this:

Zack: Hey Ben how's it going.
Ben: Just livin the dream man. Livin the dream. (apparently, the dream is a suburban home 2 toddlers, an infant, and an Excel addiction)
Zack: That's right who isn't living the dream. So nothing new going on?
Ben: Nope. Just workin. And going home to the fam. You know how it goes.

I don't blame Ben. I just feel sad, because now, four years removed from school, most of my friends are graduated uninteresting office drones because work has started to suck the life out of them.

I think the problem is that when we start working, we lose the chance to have those fun, crazy experiences, conversations, and events in life. Starting around the age of 25 it is all to easy to fall into a conversation rut. What's new? Nothing. I go to work. I stare at numbers in little boxes on a screen. I check out some TV once I get home. Same as yesterday. Same as last month. But 2 months ago, I did go on a friend's wedding cruise.

This phenomenon is like being married to a standup comic--He's only got so much material; if you keep going to the same performance, the routine is bound to get boring. Sure he has a fresh bit every now and again, but by and large there's nothing new.

Which is why it can be so refreshing to meet somebody new that you really enjoy talking to. It's like you are starting from scratch. You are the stand-up comic and all your material is new. Now it may sound sad to think that people have "material" for every day conversations, but we are creatures of habit and pattern and I think the truly successful communicators among us have go-to A+ material to fall back on when first meeting a person. Perhaps they are stories that illustrate something about us or it's an endearing way to greet a new possible friend, but we all have that "material."

For example, I was friendly with a partner at EY during internship recruiting. He was a business development partner, which is to say he didn't do any accounting; he just went to presentations and got people to sign EY up as an auditor. He was the smoothest talker I've ever met and I am pretty sure I considered him my best friend after a three minute conversation. Two years later, I am working full time at EY and I run into him at the hall and we start talking. I greet him by name, but he clearly doesn't remember mine, so I reintroduce myself after which he proceeds to initiate the exact conversation we held two years ago. Same topics. Same words. Even the same way he says things and chuckles. I guess that is the problem with material, it only works once.

As refreshing as meeting a new person is, it is even better when you meet somebody who challenges your typical get-to-know-you material by asking you a question outside the box. This recently happened to me and it's given me cause to think a bit. Cause to step out of my conversation/writing/uninspiring rut for at least the quickest of moments to consider: "Do you believe in God?" (more on that next post).

I feel inspired to reignite my previously wilting curiosity to see just what might come of it. I've written my first post in about 9 months, so that's a good start.

With time, maybe I can even be that guy people are excited to see at work because when they ask what's up he's got a new answer every time. But for now, I’ll settle for just one more piece of material.

Monday, 23 March 2009

The beginning of a fantastical journey

I have a dry sense of humor. I first grasped just what this means during my senior year of college just before an intramural soccer game. It was the playoffs and my team had gone undefeated through the regular season (a feat we accomplished 3 separate times only to lose our first playoff game each season).

Pre-game, I walked up to our opponents and in as offhand a manner as I could manage, I mentioned that as they had probably heard, my team was comprised largely of MLS players but not to worry, because we certainly wouldn't be playing all out. We had, only, accidentally been placed into the B division. Sorry for your misfortune, my look said, but we won't make you look too bad.

Their team looked up from lacing their cleats and stared at me with horrified looks on their faces. I held the gaze of the team captain for ten minutes or two seconds before breaking out into a shit-eating grin as I am wont to do. An extraordinary look of relief crossed his face just before he let out a brief cackle.

"You have a really dry sense of humor don't you?" he asked.

I said, "I couldn't say. I'm not really sure what that means."

"Trust me. You do." He responded.

And then it hit me. A dry sense of humor means you enjoy telling a good lie. Or a bad lie. Just any lie really. So long as what you are saying isn't the truth, it'll do just fine. To use an analogy, if lying were journalism, a dry sense of humor would be like blogging. As you can see from my chosen medium, I clearly have a dry sense of humor.

But why does this matter? How does this effect you, my readers?

Well allow me to retort. Up until this point, everything I have written has been held to the high level of veracity of at least 65% truth and certainly no greater than 93%. But I will allow the shackles of the semblance of authenticity to encumber me no more.

From here out, I will continue chronicling my relatively uneventful life with what I hope will be a slightly humorous take. But from this entry on, I will do my best James Frey impersonation. Enjoy the ride.

Oh, and by the way, the team captain I mentioned earlier--he most certainly did not laugh at my "joke."

Wednesday, 25 June 2008

So, I got an email from Xanga saying that my site would be deleted if I didn't post something soon. So, here I am posting.
What do I have to talk about? Not too much. I suppose an update is in order since it's been a while.
I am still trying to get all my CPA paperwork together to send in and officially become certified. For some reason, something always comes up to stop me. It's as if some force is determined that I not obtain this certification. Recently as I was about to mail the completed package, my boss mentioned offhand, "oh, by the way, I haven't paid my dues or completed my CPE requirements, so I don't think my license is active right now." Nice. He's got a ridiculously good reason for that to be the case, but for something that I should have done two years ago and that I've been actively pursuing for about a 7 months, it's just one more roadblock.
Anyway, July 19th, I take the GMAT for the second time. My first score is expired, but I'm hoping to improve upon that score anyway.
That's in for now. Work to be done.

Thursday, 10 April 2008

Today, I have a story for you that goes a little ways back into my past. It starts a little something like this...
The day I turned 16 years old, my dad woke me with his customary awaken-zack-chant, "Z-Bob Zachary Junior, it's tiiiiiime to get up." Given my expectations for the day, he was surprised to find I actually heeded this call the very first time he bellowed if forth. I walked out of my bedroom wearing jeans and my favorite Dallas Cowboys t-shirt and followed my Dad out to the driveway wear a newly purchased, 8 year old, 1991, White, four-door, Honda Accord sat waiting for me. To say the least, I was excited.
After taking the requisite first-car photos, we took a drive down to the DPS to get my license. On the way back, my Dad informed me that I should probably look into getting a job so I could pay off the loan I'd taken from him to buy the car. Say what??? To my knowledge, I hadn't purchased the car. I am never one to complain about a gift, but apparently my only gift was the no interest financing. But the impetus was placed squarely on my shoulders to pay the loan off, so as we neared my house I pulled quickly off the road and into the parking lot of our neighborhood Pizza Hut where I promptly secured my first job as a Customer Service Representative.
A few months and several paychecks down the road, the car started having problems and I took it to a mechanic who looked it over and after several hours was able to tell me a story about a major crash, the car being rebuilt, and how cheap fixes led to my using kitchen potholders to unscrew the brake lights every time I parked the car.
After the crash, rather than actually fix the electrical system of the car, the previous owner had simply installed a larger circuit breaker so that the electrical pulses that were tripping the previous circuits could be managed. And several months after that, as other circuit breakers began to trip, the previous owner continued to put ever larger circuit breakers into the car's electrical system so that, by the time I owned the car, electricity was just flowing full force all the time and was destroying the car’s electrical system. Awesome. Thanks dude.

So, why bring this story up? Oddly enough, it's because of the current financial crisis that the US faces.

The stock market is in the throes of a correction or bear market or whatever your preferred terminology might be. The point is it's down. And has been down since October of last year. Looking at trends, you might notice that it goes down and then jumps right back up, only to go down again and then jump right back up.
So how does this apply to my first car? Well, just like my first car, the stock market has some problems right now. In the late 90's the market experienced a giant tech bubble that when popped, did not fully deflate. Thanks to quick action from the Fed, interest rates were reduced to historical lows and the bubble was transferred from tech stocks to housing, keeping the stock market from fully deflating. This is similar to the very first time that the previous owner stuck a too-large circuit breaker into the electrical system of my car.
It took some time, but eventually, because all that the Fed had done was give the economy a bigger circuit breaker, the flow of bad electricity (massive amounts of debt) began eating away at the system again. And we are now in a situation where the Fed and the US government are searching for bigger and bigger circuit breakers to keep the stock market and the economy going. Interest rates are trending lower at a rate faster than ever before. George Bush is offering us all the tax breaks we can handle and oh, by the way here’s 600 dollars each to jump start the economy. Never mind that Bush is simply paying us today with dollars we’ll have to pay back in the future. After all, what could be more American than that?
The problem is that all the measures the Fed and the US Government take are just extending the inevitable. There are major problems with the US economy, with the dollar, with the way the financial system works, with the national debt. And until we actually face these problems and stop putting in ever larger circuit breakers, all we do is increase the damage.
When I got the report back from the mechanic that I’d be dropping 500 bucks to fix the car, I wasn’t happy. But I also didn’t stand there and ask if he had any larger circuit breakers.
As US tax citizens and taxpayers, it’s about time we did the same. We may not be responsible for the mess we are in, but it’s time to stand up and say “Here’s my payment. Fix things up and for goodness sake, don’t put in a bigger circuit breaker.”
So, it's been a while since I wrote in the blog and it took me a good five minutes to figure out exactly which button to click so I could actually begin writing. It was terrible.
Now, if you are like me, you are probably thinking, "what's the deal with the whole woe is me act? So he spent five minutes getting acclimated to the new features and layout of a website. Doesn't sound so bad to me." And generally you'd be right. But let me explain to you the conditions under which I write today by writing just one word:
Sweatshop. Literally. The power is out in the entire building. The bank on the ground floor is closed. There are fewer than one parking garage level of cars still in the vicinity and yet, I work. I really do have to give some credit to our IT guys. They wired this office so we can keep working if aliens invade, which is all well and good except they left the AC off of the backup generator. Thus sweatshop.
Anyway, in other news the power is back on. Hooray.