It’s not me. It’s you.

Dear Lily

You’re not that witty.
And you’re not that hot.

And in other, non-political news..

Unemployment FTW.

Not strictly true I know. While I have no income, I won’t win shit. Well I will – till the funding runs out.

Something happened the other day. Something unprecedented, and it rattled me for a few days.

I’ll back up slightly.

So it was October 08. Our hero was a proud employee of Sensis1234, going hard, going home. Earning his keep, and, surprisingly, doing quite a decent job of it. As we all know from earlier in this blog, he then resigned from employment, to the distress of his superiors. The money stopped flowing in, but our hero didn’t care. After spending the year quitting *everything*, he was ready to venture out into the world, like some modern day Don Quixote.

The first month he spent adjusting to the freedom. He approached everything with a professional, detached demeanour, the kind ironed into the soul through two years shift work with only as many weeks vacation. It was hard to loosen up.

The second month, he began to relax a little. He stopped waking up at 7am, regardless of when he went to bed the night before. He stopped driving everywhere at 100, regardless of the speed limit. The work and small town-induced inward focus evaporated and left a twenty two year old dude running amok in a world with much possibility.

Summer took hold and the rest is history. Three months later, left with a fantastic blur of salty water, cheap wine, expensive beer, beautiful friends, hysterical laughter and aching muscles, our hero contemplates the summer of 08-09, in all it’s glory. What a summer it was. It was all I dared to hope for and more.

People laugh when I base stories around the seasons, but the weather outside is a huge influence on the inside. Of me I mean. I remember how I felt last winter, in those couple of weeks where it was bitterly cold and I’d become afflicted by some vicious strain of the influenza. I thought I might die. Winter’s the most challenging season, you have to retain your focus, keep your health afloat, and keep busting away at whatever it is that you’re doing – learning, work, etc. I got distracted last winter by girls [not the good kind, the ones who leave you an emotional husk], work [not the good kind, the stupid money-earning kind], and festivals [once again, all festivals leave you as a husk. The good kind of husk. PHEW], and got sick as hell as punishment. Spring came and I commenced the big rebuild. Took me months to fix it up. I managed to right everything by Summer, and was rewarded with a magical period.  Autumn is the laid-back comedown, and can [going on past experience] feel as good as summer. If you do it right. And so the cycle continues.

I find myself sliding down the back of February, straight into a unemployed, underachieving quagmire. The underachiever part doesn’t phase me too much, I mean, it’s what I’ve always been. Throughout the past six years I’ve taken great pleasure in throwing away opportunity after opportunity, assuming that one day, something will knock that doesn’t piss me off on at least one level. It hasn’t yet.

But for quite some time now, the focus has remained on mid year entry to university. The program I’m most likely to hoe into is a Bachelor of Environmental Management. An excellent mix of technical know-how and creative input. Plus the fact that tree-hugging is suddenly flavour of the month. That amuses me to no end, but that’s another story.

Of course, this leaves the fact that I’m gainfully unemployed. I’ve had next to no income for the past  three months and if the economy hadn’t imploded I wouldn’t be quite so concerned. But I am. Concerned.

I’m concerned because of this. You know how, out of every twelve months or so, you always have that couple where it all turns to shit. Material stuff like your car buggering up in a myriad of ways, the washing machine failing spectacularly, you noticing all your clothes are shit and if you did you get a job interview, you wouldn’t be allowed past security? Also stuff like one suddenly being afflicted with a stabbing pain in the chest, to the extent which, even after one shells out for parts to fix the car, one cannot install them due to being incapacitated.

Waity can’t relate. I was moaning to him, saying something close to the above paragraph, and his response was “You mean to say you have ten months of the year where everything’s not going wrong?”

Anyway I find myself neck deep in all these problems and more. All these things require moneyspend to fix. As you can imagine, due to the behemoth money crisis, I’m not comfortable on dishing out great wads of the slush fund right now. I can get by without fixing all this stuff, but it does begin to become annoying, weighing down my once carefree summer minset.

And so, this brings us back to me being rattled. Subsequent to the global economy imploding spectacularly and all my material shit failing, I’d decided it’d be smart to secure some sort of employment.

I applied for a run of the mill call centre job, at Sunsuper. Just  inbound work, plenty of money, 9-5 weekdays. Sounded boring but sufficient.

I put on my best shirt, updated my resume, and found myself in the foyer of a major corporate office tower in Creek street at nine in the morning on a Tuesday.

Then something happened. I became painfully aware of my surroundings. I was walking irght into a professional beehive of an office, dudemen and women, cruising about every which way. I boarded the elevator and found myself surrounded by some guys from, judging by their booming conversation, an accounting firm. And I got an insight into their working lives that disturbed me to the core.

I was one of these guys when I worked full time, back in the day. I thought nothing of it. But since not working I’ve rediscovered life. They’re so obviously bound by their shitty job in everything they do. And it’s just that, a shitty job. Noone cares about it, not even them, but they have to care. And I used to be like them. Until I threw it all away. During the ensuing three months of joblessness I’ve realised what I want to do, I’ve become a nicer person to be around. I even learnt to play the guitar somewhere in there. What in the name of hell was I doing going back to the same shit?

I was jolted out of my contemplation by the elevator doors opening, depositing me on the nineteenth floor of the recruiting office. I walked in to the group interview, a room bursting with the latest victims of the financial crisis doombear. Go getters with way more experience than me. And they were also without a rather significant handicap that I’d suddenly developed in the elevator.

This shit isn’t my world any more, I realised. And the rest is history. I was way too much myself in the interview. Suddenly I couldn’t turn it on anymore. I couldn’t say the right things and act the right way. I sat too slouched in my chair, I poured myself water before it was polite to. I contradicted the interviewer. I made a smartarse remark when a woman with a clipboard entered the room to take notes of our interaction with other interviewees in the group exercise. Three hours later I left the building with a growing uncertainty.

And I got rejected.

Sounds a bit bratty maybe, but I’ve never been rejected for a job before. It saddened and annoyed me, and left me not knowing what the hell to do.

I ended up realising this is the way it should be. This is the path I’ve started down and I’m going to complete the goddamn mission. I’m giving uni the best shot possible.

And as for employment in the mean time? I’ve got another interview in the city tomorrow. I’ll wake up, put on my nice black shirt, and smile. But I’m not going to be anyone other than Dirk anymore.

Dunno what to think

In this difficult age we live in…

I’ve become this odd mix of mean-spirited scepticism and idealistic optimism.

Take for example, the Victorian bushfire crisis. I mean, it’s a really terrible thing, right. As the reports of the death toll rolled in I felt that pang in the pit of my stomach same as everyone else. The whole debacle disturbs me but I’m dealing with it.

What I can’t figure out how to deal with is the subsequent outpouring of dollars, grief, facebook groups, and capitalist grandstanding.

I can’t figure out if things like “SHOPT AT COLES THIS FRIDAY, THEY’RE DONATING ALL THEIR PROFITS TO BUSHFIRE VICTIMS” are examples of the goodness of humanity, or examples of overcapitalisation and herd mentality. In any case, a day’s profit has to be a fair bit of money.

I’m not sure what to think about this. I mean it’s obviously a clever opportunistic piece of viral marketing. But is that all it is? Or is there some honest human empathy seeping through there somewhere. Am I just being mean-spirited and cynical if I decide not to participate because I believe it’s just another monopolistic corporation lunging for the spotlight?

I tend to think I am. We live in a capitalist democracy after all. The money, power and leverage is in the corporations. Even if Coles is only doing it for the image mileage, a few million bucks are still going to go to some people who need it more than Coles shareholders. So maybe I will do my shopping tonight instead of Monday. Not that I’ve got any money. That’s another story.

Someone else who wants to gain some mileage out of this tragedy is the Prime Minister.

Rudd wants the government to give people money. As a kid I used to dream about situations like this. Then my parents would explain to me, no, that’s not how it works.

I’ve found a lot of those sorts of situations arising in the last couple of years though. Thing’s I never thought were possible or logical. But I guess, as a planet we’ve found ourselves in a rather unprecedented shit storm.

Anyway, back to Rudd and his deep pockets. Turnbull has already realised that the only way he’s going to get noticed is if he stands directly in the path of the Rudd money train. You have to give it to the man – he’s got balls.

It almost looked like it was going to work out for Turnbull.

Then came the fires, and a kind of situation which must lead any opposition leader to drop the C-bomb behind closed doors.

In the wake of this latest crisis, K-Rudd has pledged uncapped funding for those in need – but only of course if the Turnbull and his merry band allow stimulus II through the senate.

Brilliant [albeit cynical] strategy from Rudd. I’m with Turnbull on this one though – there’s totally no need to tie disaster relief for bushfire victims to the economic stimulus package. Turnbull has chastised Rudd for playing politics and he’s absolutely right. He’s suggested separate legislation be pushed through to get the money to victims, so the stimulus debate can continue uncompromised.

Makes sense. But I doubt anyone will listen.

Of course, Labor can get the package through, but only with the help of the Greens, an independent, and that dickhead Fielding.

Independent Nick Xenophon is against the one-off payments because he thinks people will blow them on the pokies.

This might surprise some, but I’m not with Xenophon’s infamous pokies stance. I know, generally I embrace most left-wing crusades against evil, but honestly, the government can’t legislate against everything that’s bad for us. Also, as my friend pointed out, gambling is one of the most taxed ways you can fritter away money. So even if Xenophon’s right and people do drop it all into the pokies, at least forty percent or whatever will goes back to the government. To me that’s no worse than people blowing cash on Chinese junk they don’t need like big TV’s and digital photo frames. Whoops. Cynicism.

It must also be said of Xenophon, that he also demanded that more stimulus funding be earmarked for various projects designed to rescue the Murray-Darling river system. He reasons that that the river system feeding two capital cities and the biggest agricultural region in the country is worth shelling out to save. And he’s right. Golf clap for Nick.

Meanwhile I agree with everything Bob Brown says. One day I will shake that man’s hand, one day.