July 31, 2007
Pardon My Glee
By this time next month, Rachel and I will be gone from Longview. We are moving away. Rachel interviewed over the phone for a teaching position on Sunday evening and they offered her the job the next day. She'll be teaching first grade in Waco, starting in just a few weeks. I'm drowning in details just at present, but I'm very excited about the change.
I gave notice at work this morning (August 20th will be my last day). That's one hurdle. We still have to break our lease, buy out our cable contract, leave a forwarding address, find a forwarding address, change everything to the new address, close out our bank account, pack up all of our junk, and haul it three hours away . . . and a hundred million other things I haven't thought of yet. And all of this must be done on a very precisely-timed but as-yet-undecided timetable. Rachel will have to be in Waco on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 17th, and then again from the 21st through the 24th (that's my birthday!) before the school year starts the following week. It's all kind of making my head spin, but in a good way.
After a few months of complete uncertainty about what the next few years were going to look like, it's great to have a direction that I'm happy with. Once things get settled, I'll start looking for a part-time job (there are 2 openings at the library there . . . that's a start), and I'll apply to Baylor's graduate program. With luck I can start working on a masters in English lit in the spring. I hadn't dared to hope that I might be within reach of a suitable program for maybe two more years, so I'm thrilled at the opportunity (to say the least). Now the hard part: Getting accepted and earning the degree.
Meanwhile, Waco is a pretty nice city with lots of stuff to do: scads of museums and historical sites, a zoo, a riverwalk, symphony, opera, and more live stage events than you can shake a stick at (I count 4 distinct theater groups with their own production seasons). And if that gets boring (ha!), Dallas is an hour and a half to the north and Austin is an hour and a half to the south. Plus, I keep threatening to try and get some papers published. Maybe I can get on that now. I'm almost out of time if I want to use it as CV padding for grad school applicationing.
Anyway . . . all that aside: Huzzah!
P.S. Nobody's happier about this than Rachel. She just called me from her "last day" at the hated Michael's job. She went in today determined to give them two weeks' notice, despite my misgivings as to whether they deserved it, and found that they had already cut half of her hours for this week and (sure enough) would now be withholding her hours from next week since she's leaving anyway. So this is her last day.
Turns out the money-grubbing, penny-pinching, brown-nosing, fat-cat, scum-sucking, puppy-drowning low-lifes over at corporate headquarters noticed that one of the managers gave out too many hours last week and they're making her pay them back by giving out fewer than the normal allotment this week. Fewer hours . . . and Rachel's already been given a paltry 5 or less for the past few weeks.
Oh, but she does get to keep the apron. Thanks for nothing and die in a fire, corporate f***ing America. That's right, capitalists are lousy, no-good bastards. I said it, and I'm not sorry. Drowning in raw sewage is too good for them and a napalm bath is too quick. The only reason they're still around is because no one's found a horrible enough way to kill them all off yet. Someday . . .
Posted by Jared at July 31, 2007 04:45 PM | TrackBackWoohoo! That's pretty darn cool man! Congrats, and all that good stuff. And, hey, you're no farther away than you were before, at least THAT didn't change. ;-p
Also, you big dork, capitalism is NOT the problem, it's like ANY other economic system, they're all flawed, cause humans are flawed. Sheesh, pick on them all, if you're going to pick on one. ;)
Posted by: Uncle Doug at July 31, 2007 08:09 PMTechnically, he criticized "capitalists" and "corporate f***ing America," not capitalism. Someday I will explain why this is a very important distinction.
Anyway ...
Whoa! Dude! Congratulations! That's perfect. The frantic rush to leave Longview aside -- a problem with a spectacular upside -- I couldn't have planned it better myself.
Posted by: Wilson at July 31, 2007 09:40 PMOoh, ooh, can this be someday? I wanna hear!
Posted by: Uncle Doug at August 1, 2007 12:17 AMHeh, heh. Sure. I don't want to hijack the celebration thread ... but I'm sure Jared won't mind a brief digression.
(Of course, I'm speaking for myself here, not for Jared.)
First, as I see it, questioning the morality of capitalists can be a lot like complaining about the ethics of politicians. It doesn't necessarily mean you deny the importance, convenience, or necessity of the system that puts those people in charge. It just means you think they're a bunch of lowlifes. (Put another way, you can distrust all used-car salesmen without wanting to abolish the sale of used cars.)
Now, attacking "corporate America" is a little more complicated. It could mean two different things. First, you could just be doing the same as with condemning capitalists -- impugning the character of the individuals involved. That would not be an attack on capitalism. But second, it could also mean that you hate the corporate system. That is a much more interesting position -- but it still isn't necessarily an attack on capitalism.
A corporation is an artificial individual created by the state. Unlike real individuals, it lives forever unless somebody on the inside kills it. And unlike real individuals, it rarely has a single human being in charge to hold accountable for the corporation's behavior. It is, in general, a bureaucracy or committee that has the legal rights of a single person.
Capitalism does not necessarily require corporations. Capitalism is just a system that allows private individuals to invest their wealth into getting more wealth. There can be several different ways of defining "private," "individual," "invest," and "wealth."
In America, our capitalism has been driven primarily by corporations since the 1800s. But in the early 1800s, a lot of people actually saw corporations as creatures of the state rather than as truly private entities. To those Americans, corporations looked like groups that had been given special privileges by the government so that they could run actual individuals out of business.
So I don't think that attacking "capitalists" or "corporate America" is always the same thing as attacking capitalism.
Posted by: Wilson at August 1, 2007 07:03 AMHuzzah and Congratulations, indeed!
If I weren't going to be in the middle of preparations for the start of classes and a job, I'd offer to come out and lend a hand. Between helping my uncle move last month and helping my church's new associate pastor move in this week, I'm getting pretty good at lugging boxes to and from U-haul trucks. :-p
Ah well, my thoughts and prayers are with you, anyway. May your moving go smoothly and your new endeavors succeed thoroughly!
Posted by: Martinez at August 1, 2007 01:00 PMWow, that's awesome! Waco sounds like a lot of fun, and the whole situation seems to have worked out admirably.
And yeah, all the details involved in just getting ready to move are pretty crazy. I, of course, say this with my last move having been all the way across town. At least moving from an apartment you get out of most of the phone the utilities/wait on hold/convince the person on the other end that you don't actually want 6 new expensive add-ons with your new account mess.
Posted by: Ardith at August 1, 2007 01:37 PMWhile I do acknowledge the fact that Wheeler was not attacking capitalism, but rather the people in it, I'm still going to take issue with his statement.
Frankly, it's overstated. I count myself a "capitalist", and am a member of "coporate America". It sounds less like "coporate America" is the problem, and the management at Michael's is.
As an example in my life context, I work at the company Embarq, which recently split from Sprint. Sprint has become infamous for it's many layoffs over the years. Embarq has yet to engage in such practices. Part of this probably comes from a greater use of contract work, but even then, they don't seem willing to terminate contract work mid-contract, unlike the Spring position I interviewed for said they were more than willing to do.
To sum up, like many things in life, it all depends on the people and the organization. I think your situation is likely clouding your perceptions a wee bit with emotion, building on some previously stated (but calmer) opinions.
Um, spelling correction: I meant "corporate".
Posted by: Barbour at August 1, 2007 07:13 PMWoohoo! Congrats to the Wheelers! Way to leave Longview behind! Good luck with moving and grad school applications!
And Sharpton, whatever you might say about yourself or the specific company you work for, Wheeler's sentiments (while a little too vitriolic for my tastes) have been well-proven in the last few decades as we've seen hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of corporate America and unethical capitalists screwing people (and what's best for the country as a whole) to make a quick buck.
Posted by: Barbour at August 1, 2007 07:15 PMHey, that´s great news! I just resigned from my job, but I will probably stay here and teach mathematics at a Korean school. I am going to be a substitute teacher next week and we´ll see what happens. I hope to become a private tutor, then I can charge more.
Jared, I can´t resist, but did you misspell ¨half-lives¨as ¨half-lifes¨?
Not that I know of . . . then again, as far as I can tell, I haven't written "half-lives" or "half-lifes" anywhere on my blog, so I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.
Posted by: Blame Jared at August 5, 2007 11:27 AMI assume Asa has misspelled "low-lifes."
Posted by: Wilson at August 5, 2007 01:21 PM