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the worst, coolest, most amazing, terrible idea of my life!

By • On • In scott, seattle, things i'm thankful for. • 4 min read

Okay, folks. This post is a bit of a whirlwind, because my life has been a bit of a whirlwind of late. The time for drastic measures to be taken is overdue. I am thus making a huge decision, along with Emily, while officially stepping into pursuing: The worst, coolest, most amazing, terrible idea of my life!!

So, where to begin?

I had the job at Java Bean, and it was one of the most toxic environments I’ve ever had the misfortune to operate in. After a few short months, I quit, to find work elsewhere. The plan was that I would spend the time it took to find new work writing full-time. Instead, before having a chance to catch my breath, I got called to interview for a job I never even officially applied for, working 8-5 every day at the UW School of Dentistry. Emily and I both knew that it would be a risky move to accept that job, because my insomnia-ridden, depressed mind probably couldn’t handle working those sorts of hours at a job I didn’t like. However, upon getting offered the job I accepted, because it just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Big mistake. Word from the experienced: if you are an insomniac diagnosed with ‘Major Depression’ of a chronic nature, don’t accept a job sitting in a depressing, windowless room for 9 hours a day moving charts around a dental clinic and telling people who call in that they owe you 32 bucks for access to their own dental records. Bad idea. Even though I really like the ladies I worked with, I hated the job and that caught up with me, contributing to the end of Cymbalta’s limited effectiveness in my body and destroying my ability to function.

It really was a blessing in disguise that I got fired, because I really did desperately hate that job so much. However, even though Emily kept telling me I should leave, I couldn’t bring myself to admit defeat, because I couldn’t bear willingly failing at two jobs in a row. It was too much for me. It made me feel like I was going to fail at everything, failing out of two jobs in such a short period of time. Well, I still failed out of two jobs, but the whole thing was taken out of my hands altogether because my boss’s boss was a dick and fired me without giving me a fair chance to explain what was going on.

The day that I got fired I texted my friend Eric to see if he could help me get a job at his coffee shop, because they are opening a new location here in Ballard. It looked like things were falling together for that to be my new job, less than a week after getting fired from UW. But, then I had the insane interview that I wrote about the other day, and I was left at square one.

All this time, I kept having this nagging thought in my head that maybe I should stop talking about writing as a pipe dream, and make a really stupid commitment to live off of savings for six months so that I could write full time, trying to finish a novel and build up other writing experience so that I actually have a portfolio to speak of.

This nagging idea moved back to the forefront of my mind again when I had the terrible interview, so I finally decided to bring it up with Emily to see what her thoughts were. A big part of me assumed that she would offer some perspective as to why that was a really stupid idea, but maybe also offer a compromise where we could do something similar but a lot less insane. Instead, her response when I shared my idea was, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too.”

Well, things came together pretty quickly after that. We talked to the moms. We did our best to talk each other out of it. And, at the end of that process, we’re doing it. For the next six to nine months, I am going to dedicate all of my time and energy to writing.

The various writing I am going to try to do are:

1. I’m writing a novel. It’s called The Last Guardian. I have a general outline for the story, my three main characters, and a prologue that has come a long way in the last two weeks, going from mediocre, to becoming something over the last few days that I am actually really getting excited about.

2. I’ll be trying to blog much more often, with actual writing as opposed to just posting random videos and stuff. I’ll still be posting random videos and stuff, but I want to be writing more in the really informal setting I enjoy here at RtM. This will also include trying to pump some essays out to send to various online publications that will at least get my name out there.

3. I have several avenues I am pursuing through friends, where I will offer my writing services for free, or close to free, so that I can get some more legitimate writing projects under my belt. That way, by the time this is all over, hopefully I can apply for a writing job and actually get it, while also building relationships with people who can help me keep work coming in steadily. I’ll also probably try and take a grant writing class so that I can officially pursue that avenue of employment as well.

Anyway, there you have it. The worst, coolest, most amazing, terrible idea of my life. I’m getting over being really sick the last few days, but I’m still really excited about this! I hope some of you will come along for the ride!

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star ratings systems suck.

By • On • In scott • 2 min read

I don’t normally write about things I don’t like, but I just need to share my hatred of star rating systems, today. Everyone has those little things that bother them more than they should, and this is one of my things.

The reason why things connect with you, and why they don’t, is vastly complex. There is often no way to know if you didn’t like a movie, book, etc., because it was poorly and unimaginatively made, or if it was because it just didn’t happen to connect with you. It’s even possible it just didn’t connect with you on that particular day, and that if you watched it on some other day you would have loved it. Even if we truly did hate something, the arrogance it takes to believe that we are the sole arbiter of whether or not something is worthwhile is amazing to me.

The idea that with a few seconds of thought, we can sum up someone else’s passion, sweat, and work with a number stars, and that this is somehow adequate, pisses me off. It’s the height of arrogance to presume that we can judge someone else’s work that flippantly anyway, especially because the vast majority of us have never created anything, much less submitted it to the world for appraisal. It’s stupid, plain and simple.

More and more, I think that at the center of a well-lived life works curiosity. Yet, more and more, we live in a world that shuts off that curiosity, that tells us that we should be pure consumers who judge everything on a spectrum ranging from Boo! to Meh. to Yay! Really? That’s the best we can do as we engage with art and beauty, or at least the attempt at the creation of art and beauty? I think we can do much better than that. I mean to.

You’re not merely a consumer, programmed to respond to things purely through a lens which helps others sell you things you might like. Your experience of art shouldn’t be belittled to the over-simplicity of how many stars you’d rate something on a scale of 1-5. It should be nuanced, complex, and should teach you as much, or more, about yourself as it does about whatever art you are engaging with. Even terrible work, when interacted with well, can teach you something wonderful in spite of itself. Yet, a consumeristic world can’t work that way, there is no room for genuine awe, wonder, and the ability to learn how to appreciate something you normally wouldn’t. Instead, it requires that you move from shiny object to shiny object, endlessly entertained but never truly engaged, quickly growing bored with your newest obsession so that you can move on to the next one.

You deserve more than that from life. More than summing up the beauty of life’s experiences based on how many stars you’d give it. And heaven forbid, maybe how much you enjoyed something isn’t the most important issue anyway, but that’s better saved for another post.

Ask better questions! You’ll be glad you did.

 

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win win, and more generally, thomas mccarthy. [things i’m thankful for #26]

By • On • In movies, scott, things i'm thankful for. • 1 min read

I loved this movie. Everyone should watch it.

I fell in love with all of the characters early on, and delighted in them for 106 minutes. I want to write like Thomas McCarthy does. All three of the films he’s written and directed are perfect (The Station Agent, Win Win, The Visitor. He also wrote the story for Up.)

He’s a master at writing these small, intimate stories that restore my hope in the beauty of interpersonal relationships and the power we have to love each other, and heal each other, and just how much we all need one another. It was exactly the movie I needed, at exactly the right moment. Right down the The National playing over the closing credits.

Seriously. Watch this movie.

 

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awesome bartenders and baristas. [things i’m thankful for #25]

By • On • In scott, seattle, things i'm thankful for., Uncategorized • 2 min read

Well, it’s been a rough few days. Or, as I like to call it, my worst month ever. I’ve had my meds bottom out, leaving me mired in overwhelming despair. I’ve been fired for the first time in my life. And I had an interview yesterday that was one of the weirdest, and worst, interactions I’ve ever had with a person I wasn’t related to.

The bad experience was an “interview” at a cafe here in Seattle. The meeting was with the owner of the shop I was applying to work for, and the first interview I had was fantastic. Said first interview had been with the manager of the particular location I would have been working, and it was clear quickly that we got along swimmingly. The way we understood coffee, people, and the place of the cafe in Ballard fit together so well. I was excited about the opportunity to pour my energy into working alongside her in making this cafe an indispensable part of the Ballard neighborhood.

Then, I had a second interview with the owner. It wasn’t an interview. It was an ambush. He literally spent the entire interview berating me for having the audacity to apply to work for him when in my heart I really wanted to be a writer. He said he wasn’t going to “finance [my] writing by paying [me] to be a barista” for him. He said there was no place for me at the cafe unless I could make my first and only priority coffee. He complained about a friend of mine who works at the cafe, saying, “We’ve had problems with [him] putting [his wife] and school ahead of the cafe.” He really fucking said that to me! First, he talked negatively about one of his employees to a random person who was interviewing at his cafe. Second, he complained that someone was putting his wife ahead of his hourly barista job. WTF?!?

The guy also used Million Dollar Baby as his example of how much I would need to care about coffee to work at the coffee shop. He said everyone who works for him would be able to say they had no regrets about working in the cafe, even if the job somehow paralyzed them for life. I’m not exaggerating, there is no hyperbole there, he really said that to me. It was the most wearying experience I’ve had in some time, just trying to keep from freaking out and walking out on him. In hindsight, I guess I probably should have just freaked out on him and left, instead of listening to him go on about how I wasn’t a good fit for over an hour! 

I left pretty heavy, and since I forgot my phone at home I was stranded in downtown Seattle with no way to contact my ride. It wasn’t a big deal, just one of those insult to injury things.

Anyway, things have been pretty heavy lately. However, there has been so much support from friends, family, and, oddly enough, local baristas and bartenders. I prefer to frequent places where I can get to know the people behind the bar. And those people I’ve gotten to know have been kind to me when I’ve really needed it over the last few days. I’ve been given two and a half free cocktails, three shots of whiskey, a beer, and two free coffee drinks, just because. One bartender friend bought me a shot and a beer out of her own pocket because she wasn’t even working when she heard about my terrible interview, she just asked the bartender to give us each a shot, and said “his beer is on me, too.”

I can’t wait until I have an income of some kind so I can return all this wonderful kindness that I’ve received.

 

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caffe fiore, ballard. [things i’m thankful for #24]

By • On • In scott, seattle, things i'm thankful for., Uncategorized • 1 min read

Well friends, much has happened in my short absence. For those who don’t already know, I got fired the other day. My meds (Cymbalta for the curious) bottomed out, and I was leveled. That being the case, I missed a few days of work, and without warning they fired me. It was my boss’s boss who did the firing, and the deciding. He didn’t care why I was out, or what the story was, he just fired me. “Released” is the word he used, I guess that sounds nicer than “Fired.”

I knew I was in for some trouble. Earlier in the day my boss told me that I had a meeting with her boss at 4. They only schedule meetings that late in the day for bad reasons. She also made an odd comment when she told me about the meeting, she said “I tried to advocate for you.” When I asked if I was being fired or warned, she said she didn’t know, but I did, deep down I knew she was trying to hide the fact that I was fired.

I was hoping to get an ultimatum. Some sort of, “Look, your attendance has been unacceptable, if you miss another day of work, you’re fired.” Alas, that wasn’t forthcoming. My coworker, the woman who has been training me, was shocked. At first she thought I was joking, just because it seems so absurd.

There are upsides though. For one, as long as I have a few bucks lying around, I can come to Fiore again! Something that was sorely missed when I was working from 8-5 every day. This little caffe is like my second home. It’s one of the few places I can spend a whole day and not feel awkward, as long as I am making purchases and not just taking up space.

I’m so happy to be back!! Hopefully the writing will be coming with greater frequency for a while.

 

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movies. [things i’m thankful for #23]

By • On • In movies, scott, things i'm thankful for. • 1 min read

I love movies so much. Even lately, when I don’t have much energy for consuming stories and such, I still find myself pulled into film when I force myself to sit down and watch something. I hope that soon I can find the energy to interact with film on a deeper level, so that I can write about it here on RtM and share it with my friends.

Has anyone seen anything great lately? Or even just good?

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