Life is a dish best served awesome

I was watching an episode of Scrubs the other day. This episode was just as hilarious as the rest in season 1 through 8, but what set this one apart was the fact that this episode featured a thing called the Epiphany toilet which was located on the roof. The basic concept for this roof toilet was simple: The person sitting on it would go on to have an epiphany. The episode stuck with me not because of interest of roof toilets, although they are intriguing. It wasn’t the fact that they had Michael J. Fox, even though he is awesome. No, the reason is way more exciting. I had an epiphany myself.

It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining ever so bright and the birds had rarely sounded so beautiful. Of course I couldn’t enjoy any of that since I was working at one of my two summer jobs. It was during a rather repetitive job assignment that I made a life decision, after this summer, I am done with these kinds of jobs.

Next year I’ll be 25 going on 26 and I don’t think I should be doing jobs that feel beneath me. I owe it to myself to find an occupation that I can be proud of, something I feel happy about telling people I do. A job is a part of your identity, and you must always strive to make your identity a proud and notable phenomenon. You should focus on your career as much as you focus on your outer appearance. These things go together like bacon and more bacon.

So far I have no idea what next summer will have in store. The fall and spring will be focused on school, and the fall and spring after next summer on school and getting that diploma. Once that has happened, move to another country and get a job that I love

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Have you noticed how your mental state can improve significantly from small changes like acquiring a new item of clothing, getting a new haircut or simply be driving a freshly waxed car.

My mental psyche has been on a roller coaster ride recently. Things have happened recently, things that I won’t be mentioning here as they are irrelevant, things that have left me feeling rather crappy. It’s not a good feeling, it makes you feel like someone’s got an iron grip on your stomach and is in the process of twisting it vigorously.

Growing my personality to fit my new hairstyle is proving effective, and a great night out on the town last night was the ultimate proof of that, so as of now I’m ascending to the top of the roller coaster and it is a good feeling. You appreciate the warmth of the sun like never before, the flowers seem more beautiful and all that. Simply, you go to bed at night with a big fat smile on your face. Who doesn’t love that feeling?

I leave you with a song that shares the message of this blog entry

Working class hero

Who knew working two jobs could make you this exhausted? I had an idea that it would, but when I reach the end of my 5-6 day work week I am seriously finding it difficult to get in the party gear. But I prevail, I am awesome.

It does feel weird though, going from having no jobs one day to having 2 the next, especially after having spent the last 8 or so months as an unemployed bum living with his parents. It’s a good sense of weird though, kinda like sticking your finger in the change slot on a vending machine and finding money there. A liberating and magnificent feeling it is. It’s nice having something to do everyday, a reason to wake up early and getting a chance to make some of that cash money.

Other than that life’s been going by so-so. Got the bill for my grad school tuition, the day that I get that paid off will be a happy day, a happy day which is coming by in the next few days. Yay! I’t's going to take some adjusting to be back in school, have homework and be a part of the class scene again but I welcome it, I have to. Failure is not a factory installed option. I am really looking forward to it though, I’ve finally found a field to study in that really excites me. It would have been even more sweet if they had a major or a minor in Creative Writing, but at least I get one class like that in my schedule, so it’s something at least.

Haven’t really been as dedicated to my gym/nutrition routine as I should be, but I am slowly but surely getting myself back on track. I owe it to the most important person in my life, me (duh!) I am on track to reach my goal though, under 10% body fat before I go back to the U.S. (whenever that might be, so just in case I’m going to say February-ish to reach it). Difficult? Perhaps. Impossible? Hell no.

Finally a little shout out to my good friend Valli who’s getting married this weekend, good job son and see you in the north on Saturday

He is the only man to ace a Roarschach test

I got some pleasant news the other day. My application for my graduate studies proved successful. Come this fall I will be studying journalism at the University of Iceland. It’s been a year since I graduated and got my Bachelor’s degree and I have missed school. Part of the reason might stem from the fact that I’ve been unemployed for the bigger part of that year.

It’s gonna be nice to have a purpose again, something new and solid to aim for. As of today I have one solid goal that I can put a timeline on, although I don’t really have a determined deadline as of yet. I’ve been skinny, I’ve been close to being fat, now I’m going to be fit. I’ve been working on that goal since late January, getting good results so far, about 8% body fat gone with 9.6% aimed to be lost in the next few months.

Now I have another one. Graduate with a Masters degree in 2 years. Get a job as a columnist at a magazine/newspaper and work on  writing screenplays and novels, preferably while living someplace where it’s hot and beautiful like Spain or Italy or someplace equivalent to that. Sounds simple enough, yet at the same time a bit out of my reach which in turn gives that added incentive to make it happen.

School will be great, future will be great, and as the most interesting man in the world once said, it’s never too early to beef up your obituary.

Freedom

A few days ago as I was innocently walking back from the gas station down the street, I was approached by two men wearing a shirt-tie-jacket combo, each of them carrying a backpack. And as I could tell from their name tags, these men were members of the Mormon church and were going around the neighborhood spreading the words of God. I tried on a few occasions to politely turn them down and walk away, but they kept pushing to continue, asking if they could come by my place on some occasion to speak more to me about God (they both had a rather stunned look on their faces when I told them I didn’t believe in God). These men were desperately trying to convert my to their religion, which is something that does not sit well by me. That, however, is not the subject of my blog post today.

When one of the two men asked me if I believed in something, I got a little offended at first because he sounded like he was talking down to me for not believing what he believed. I answered that I believed in life. What he said next caught my attention. He mentioned that he believed in life because here we were, and that the lord had a plan for all of us, a path that we were all meant to take.

A few days later, I am still thinking about this, and I honestly find it sad that people believe that. To me it feels like they are taking away the credit they should be giving themselves and handing it over to an imaginary being. It also feels like you’re giving up on the fact that you are in charge of your own life, and therefore decide to settle on something that has accidentally fallen into your lap for the single purpose that you believe it to be a part of some plan organized by someone above. If I believed in that I could just stop searching for a job because my path currently points in the unemployment direction.

We need to be able to trust in ourselves, believe that we are in total control of our lives and that if we want to do a complete 180° turn in live, we can. That is why I want to travel the world. So I can be in control of my destiny, my destination and means of transportation. I could get a fresh start where ever I end up. Be whoever I want to be, live like I want to live and do what I want to do. When you really dig deep and think about it you see that that is the true meaning of life. We are born into this world helpless, scared and unable to take care of ourselves. Along the way we slowly but surely learn to be self sufficient and be strong so we can make it in the big world that awaits us. Man is a creature that needs to be free and should not be caged, and by caged I don’t mean married but rather that man should not rot away in the same small town all his life, only to venture a short distance away from his house. Man needs to be free, he needs to explore and experience new and different things so he can truly appreciate what he has in his own back yard.

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.
Albert Einstein

When the big wheels forcibly stop turning

I’m back on the hunt for work. Had a small stint working in a store, until I got laid off because they wanted to hire someone else, someone who had worked there previously and had just become available. After consulting with the fine people at my Union, I found out that this behavior was sadly legal. It really stings me to think that as long as you give people the required notice when firing them, you can legally pretty much chose what ever lame reason you can think of, our job security isn’t more secure than that.

So it’s back on unemployments for me. Super! (insertsarcasticsmileyhere). The only good part is that I have much more free time on my hands now to focus on the gym, reading, writing, getting a decent tan for the summer. The bad thing of course is being unemployed again and getting a smaller income each month, which kinda blows considering that I have car insurance/apartment/gym/food/internet payments to consider every month. So please think all kinds of happy thoughts in my direction to help me get a job again.

The apartment is great though, and will be even greater once we finish the proposed constructions so my flatmate can properly move in. Right now we have some boxes lying around because of no access yet to the storage room, but the fridge is full of yummy goodness, plus it takes like 5 minutes to walk down town, which is pretty awesome right there.

In life, when your dealt a major blow to your plans, you have all the right in the world to be pissed off angry, get wasted and curse the ones who put you in that place. After a short period of that ( day or two), I think that it is time to look over your life, find the positives, and if they outweigh the negatives then you’re pretty much golden. That means you have all the capacity to tackle those freshly laid out obstacles.

What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at 26?

If there’s one thing I truly enjoy, it’s seeing the positive parts of life over-weigh the negatives on the scale of life. Job, CHECK!, apartment at a kick ass location, CHECK!, school, still no check mark there but that day will come.

I really missed living on my own, well I am renting with a friend of mine, but I am out of the parental nest. It’s such a liberating feeling being on your own two feet in life, I’m still eagerly awaiting my first trip to Ikea so I can pick up some things to make the crib look a bit nicer, even though it looks pretty bad ass as is. A man who has a place of his own, a car of his own, and a job to boot is a rich man. Although it wouldn’t hurt if you have some form of currency to your name.

The title of this entry is a line from an awesome song, Drinking in LA by Bran Van 3000. I place it there to announce a new goal, at some point during my 26th year on this planet, I will be drinking in LA, California. I haven’t decided yet if I will be living there during that time, or if I’m simply scoping the town for potential hangouts for when I will live there, as I do see that occurring in the not so distant future, I also see myself settling down with Amanda Bynes, but that’s another story.

Job, car, bachelor pad. What’s got two thumbs and is on top of the world? This guy (2 thumbs pointing in my direction)

“We don’t wanna sit around and eat salad”

Jamie Oliver is in the news these days, have you seen this, have you heard about this? He was in Huntington, West Virginia, in order to help the people there get off their asses and start eating healthier food. This program of his has caught my interest for a couple of reasons, I used to live in that town and secondly, I’m going through the same thing these days.

According to a recent survey, the WV Tri-State Area was listed as the unhealthiest area in the US. People don’t eat right, get really obese and die at a young age. In his show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, you can see that a lot of the people there welcome him with open arms and it is evident that they have recognized their problem. Other people seem to want him out of their town and seem angry that he’s trying to force certain food down their throats. Does that mean that they want to be fat and contract diabetes and other diseases at an early age? Of course not.

There is without a doubt nothing that frightens us more then the unknown. When you have lived your entire life doing something one way, chances are that you won’t be particularly open when an outsider comes barging in and tells you to do it another way. For people in Huntington, escaping obesity isn’t really an easy thing to do, although to be fair not all of the 50 thousand people population is fat. When you grow up eating processed food, greasy junk food that seems to start as early as elementary (even earlier with the parents giving that to their children), go on and eat the same thing in high school and quite frankly have a difficult time travelling a whole mile in your town without going passed a fast food franchise, it’s fairly obvious to say that it will affect your eating habits.

The first thing people tend to think of when they hear about changing their diets, they tend to think of salad, oats, wheat, flavorless, stale and disgusting looking food. I know that thought popped into my head on a few occasions before I started reading about it. They think of calories as something that needs to be covered with gravy, fat and greasy. The truth is the complete opposite. Healthy food is supposed to taste good, otherwise you won’t eat it. Protein, carbs and fruit and veggies is all you need, so a nice chicken breast, some rice along with salad on the side and you’ve got yourself a nice meal.

What I admire about Jamie is the fact that he’s standing up against this development. He’s going for the schools to change things as early as possible. The school lunch system is flawed, (there’s nothing right about counting french fries as a vegetable), and it needs to be changed. He pulled it off in England, got more money pumped into the system there and things got changed for the better. With a lot of persistence he will manage it in the U.S. as well, although it’s going to take a lot of hard work when giving the choice of processed, greasy food that is cheaper, or healthy food that is going to cost a bit more, greasy always wins.

Would you settle for Sprite Zero?

Life is a funny thing. We are born, we live and we die. Some people get to spend their lives doing what they love, others seem to settle with what falls in their laps. Settling for something is wrong and no good can come out of it. Feelings of regret creep in from time to time, anger and constant nostalgic thoughts about a previous life until the individual simply gives up and lives out his days as a grouch.

We settle way too much in our lives. We settle for a low salary and a low job position. We settle for a different path in life than what we had dreamed about following. Some people even settle when it comes to their love lives.

Yes, amazingly a lot of people are so afraid that they are going to end up alone that they get together with just about the next person that gives them the eye. That’s a long way backwards we have traveled from the strong and courageous caveman. Of course it was a lot simpler back then, if a man wanted to impress the fittest cavelady all he had to do was bring over a big dead animal that he had personally slain.

That’s no longer the case, dragging an animal carcass around and dropping it in front of  Megan Fox isn’t going to make her wet for you, unless she’s into that sort of thing? Today it takes skill, good grooming, the right attitude and what not to make Megan yours. Somewhere along the line some of us fell behind though, and when something doesn’t work the first time, we get so scared that we play it safe and settle.

I never want to settle for anything, I think I may have mentioned that in an earlier entry but it’s such a valid point that I feel like I need to repeat it to myself over and over. Settling for a job you hate, wages you know you can’t support your family with, a partner you’re not sure you really love. Not my idea of a good life. This is the reason why I find it so painful that I will need to settle for the next job offer I get. I see myself stuck in the position of having to apply to whatever position is being advertised, and actually feeling down when I don’t hear from them (which, in my opinion is the rudest thing I’ve witnessed)

The only thing I can do at this moment however is look at the positive things, if all goes well I’ll be moving out pretty soon and into a nice apartment, I’m doing good in the gym, 3rd measurements being taken tomorrow and I predict good numbers again. The other things will follow, but I’m getting impatient, but won’t be rushing into anything.

Don’t think there’s a more appropriate way to end this blog entry than with a special clip from the Life of Brian

Who’s the boss?

I hate being bossed around. It’s seriously my biggest pet peeve.  There’s just something about it when someone claims to have authority over you that gets to me, especially when the individual bossing around is on my age/work level.

I can tolerate it at work when my boss tells me to do something, I’m there to do a job and when I’m there I have a certain individual who is in charge. I don’t have a major problem with that, don’t necessarily love it but it’s not something I’m going to make a fuss about.

That’s probably one reason behind my distaste for the typical 9-5 type job scenes. I’m not really a fan of being forced to be somewhere at the early hours of the day and have to stay to a certain time in the afternoon, even though everything has been finished. I’ve always been more drawn towards jobs where I can pretty much control my hours myself, as long as I finish my workload on time.

Dream job scenario: I’m working as a freelance writer living somewhere on the coast of Spain or some other warm and sunny country. I get up when my internal clock wakes me up. Shower, get dressed and eat. Travel around the countryside for a bit, interact with people and get ideas and inspiration from the surrounding, come back, sit on the porch of my beach house with a bottle of wine, writing a column/chapter/scene/whatever I’m working on.

It’s obvious that I need to find wealth in life, I don’t like slaving away everyday for a few bucks, I don’t enjoy having bosses breathing down my neck or doing work that I find belittling, I love to travel and I don’t think I have done enough of that. Plus, I like nice and expensive things.

Worst part is though, that once I finally decided that I was going to strive towards becoming a rich man, my mind is having a long and powerful brain fart,  nothing’s popping up. I used to have ideas left and right but now it seems the think tank is running pretty low. Any advice on how I can refill that tank is well appreciated.