Since this is my first blog entry it is entirely experimental and it very well might, maybe, probably, sort of, kind of, just suck…significantly, completely, totally, utterly, madly, e.g., i.e., etc. If you stumble upon this site, you may find me to be long-winded & uninteresting (you would be in good company). If that’s the case…well…the internet is a big place…go away. If you find my writing presents an iota of intrigue, please feel free to follow along, subscribe, and comment openly! I’ll be doing this for the next two years.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with why I’m starting this blog…well…I made a choice about a year ago to join a Non-Profit organization and spend the next two years living a more simplistic existence in the service of others. This time around, I will be participating in Panama starting in late-April, 2011. However, it should also be noted that I began traversing the path that led me here, long before that. While I recognize that attempting to derive meaning from anything other than the present moment can at times be about as useful as an ice cube to an Eskimo, I think it’s worthwhile for me to retrace the decisions, influences, and life events that brought me to this point and time in the cosmos.
I SLEEPWALKED THROUGH THE MAJORITY OF MY ACADEMIC CAREER. I can remember vividly the first time I brought homework home at an early age…and I remember not doing it. My guess is that I spent my time watching Happy Days or Three’s Company re-runs, instead (I was a weird kid). Focus and motivation was never my strong suit, and I never saw the value in what I often flippantly dismissed as “busy work.” From birth until the day I graduated college, I made very little cognitive progress toward rectifying the age-old clichéd question of “what is it I want to do with my life?”
I thought about it constantly, but other than my pie-in-the-sky-dream of becoming the starting shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls (original I know), the mental moments of end goal aspiration were always vague (SIDE NOTE: when I topped out at 6’, with questionable ball skills, and the speed of an Emperor Penguin, I realized I had a better shot at going to space, than I did at becoming a Bull).
The question of how to motivate me, gave my wildly successful father his first grey hairs (now an impressive silver mop…”better grey than gone”), and left my very caring mother desperate for solutions. While I was oft-praised for intellect, I also heard the word “potential” (often preceded by “wasted”) so many times by the age of 13 or 14, that it began to give me a visceral, physically nauseous feeling every time I heard it’s utterance. However, despite all of the panic and rabble surrounding my future, I was always able to get by on a solid amount of common sense, scattered attempts to please my parents, and very occasional bursts of inspired effort. This mildly successful combination even got me into college (gotta love ‘Merica).
DURING THE FIVE YEARS OF HIGHER LEARNING I ENDURED, I attended three separate Universities, spent most of my time absorbing myself in friendships & relationships, and attending as many debaucherous gatherings as was humanly possible. After receiving mostly less-than-stellar grades, I was able to graduate from Miami University (Ohio) almost by default with a Bachelor’s (Arts? Science, maybe? I’ll give $1 to anyone who can tell me the difference) in Psychology. I’m still under the impression that they probably felt guilty continuing to accept my out-of-state tuition money, and ordered my immediate graduation. My most memorable experience was probably the time I went sledding down a hill in a canoe, in a blizzard, after drinking an entire bottle of Alizé (I was listening to a lot of hip-hop at the time).
Why study Psychology you ask? Well…it’s what both of my parents do (and do extremely well), and when I made the decision to pursue it at 18 years old, I was still woefully unoriginal and too timid and lazy to throw myself into anything with a minoot possibility of failure. Psychology seemed safe, and I simply had no better ideas. Not to mention that at this point, my attention span while sitting at a desk and “learning,” was tantamount to a Cocker Spaniel attempting to follow the themes of a Fellini film. All things considered, I was able to count on one-hand the amount of times I was inspired prior to graduating.
ENTER: THE CORPORATE WORLD! For underacheiving people, such as myself, there are few options left after conning a four-year University into giving you an undergraduate degree. You are generally left to feed the corporatocracy - a faceless machine that leaves you with little idea of what it is you’re actually contributing to society - or go on starving while trying to chase whatever semblance of a dream you still have.
A burgeoning Dot-Com company was my first landing spot out of college. They had stupid Monkey commercials that were insanely (and perhaps predictably) popular as a marketing tool with the American public, and so they were hiring like crazy and took a flier on me. Entry-level sales - a glorified frat house. Good for four things:
In this environment, I actually did surprisingly well, and managed to outlast every single member of my sales unit by perservering through an 11-month tenure. Maybe I needed the tough-love atmosphere to wake me up a little bit? That being said, I was completely miserable. Ironically, it wasn’t until I realized I was serving very little purpose in society, that I truly and deeply started to care about my purpose in society. Irony is stupid.
Towards the end of my time at Dot-Com X, I tried to apply for a new position within the company that was similar to a promotion, but ultimately a lateral move. Instead of being out by the airport, I’d be working in The Loop. These things are of the utmost importance when your 23 and struggling for status.
I ended up being hired, but was instructed to remain quiet and transistion at the end of the month. When my boss - an extremely bitter & venomous individual - somehow found out I was leaving the unit, she turned my life into Dante’s Seventh Circle. The unwarranted screaming and berating literally never stopped. When she initially found out, she flew into a tirade, but couldn’t technically fire me “for spite”, so prior to my transition she waited for me to show up 5 minutes late one day and used that as her “you can’t sue us for wrongful termination now even though we’re completely fucking you over” reasoning for letting me go. “You have five minutes to clear out your desk and then we’re calling security!!! BAHHHHHHHH!!!!”
ENTER: SLIGHTLY LESS CORPORATE, STARRY-EYED BOUTIQUE FIRM! After my experience at Dot-Com X, I went searching for a position that lacked micro-management and offered a little bit more creative & professional freedom. And hey…maybe I could even find a company that contributed positively to society rather than bottom-feeding off of marketing-related scraps? I found that company in Starry-Eyed Boutique Firm X.
They were very stiff, but professional, extremely intelligent, and they seemed like they knew what they were doing. They were promising me A LOT more money, and a position “at the top of a growing pyramid.” Ahhhh, what a visual. Unfortunately, what I was selling for them was an extremely complex consulting service, and what I gave away in micro-management, I also gave away in “give-a-shit-ism” from anyone in a position to give sales advice to a new employee.
I also found that even extremely successful young & small firms have a ridiculous amount of growing pains, and often your compensation relies directly on the piecemeal day-to-day decisions made those with their own savings invested in the company. In the process, promises that are made usually aren’t kept. Furthermore, I found out that my firm’s primary focus in “consulting” often eliminated skill-based labor positions and replaced them with technologically-advanced automated processes. Coming from a family largely made-up of blue collar workers, this was not really a practice that my liberal-brain was able to support. All that being said, I was making very respectable money, the firm was doing well, and relatively speaking, things were going better than they had been at Dot-Com X.
When the economy went to shit, ca. January of 2008, people started viewing our services as a luxury item. It didn’t make much sense for them to continue to invest in consultants and advanced IT services if they were already having to cut-back on their own internal staff. Sure, we salesmen cajoled and manipulated the truth, touting our ability to “operate within a budget,” but nobody bought it. I still remember the soul-crushing silence of the office around that time. No phones ringing, no salesman selling…just the hypnotic whir of the air conditioning unit, and 20 or so people sitting at their cubicles, struggling to stay awake. Bleehhhhh.
Shortly thereafter, our layoffs started. I had performed well enough to survive Round #1, when about 50% of the staff was cut. However when Round #2 came through in November, the entire remaining sales team, along with a number of the technicians, were rendered obsolete. I was tossed to the street with the rest of the overhead, and I didn’t even get the crowded restaurant treatment. Eventually the company simply could not survive at all, and effectively went under.
I realized the belief I had previously held that you sacrifice a certain amount of independence and aspiration in exchange for economic security, was simply an illusion. To the unemployment line I went (actually there’s no line…it’s all done over the phone and online these days…much more convenient…and less smelly).
Recognizing that the increase in salary and the ancillary benefits that came along with it hadn’t ultimately improved my life, and realizing once and for all that I was done with coporate sales, I was once again left clueless as to what to pursue next.
But while Starry-Eyed Boutique Firm X ultimately ended in disappointment, it ultimately had a very positive effect on me. I was lucky enough to have worked with an executive who helped me greatly to realize that I was being dishonest with myself. “The problem with young salesman is that you don’t know what to do with yourself. You always want to make a change, but you never do it. You just end up doing sales because you don’t have any better ideas.” Sadly, he was exactly right. He also said “the difference between stress and panic, is having a plan.” Pearls of wisdom, I say! It took me awhile to realize it but that was exactly what I needed to hear.
DURING THE 4-5 YEARS THAT HAD PRECEDED MY FIRING from Starry-Eyed Boutique X, I had taken up an independent interest in the increasingly fiery rhetoric surrounding the supposed “Global Climate Crisis.” I read every environmental story published by Greenpeace or the New York Times, and silently seethed that there was seemingly more ignorance on the topic than the world could overcome in the short timeframe there was to take action. How could there be an argument about such elementary science? How could the public not care more about the perpetuation of the species? Should we care?
I had been lucky enough to be exposed to nature by my parents during our summer vacations, at a very young age, and the scientific evidence supporting the claims of an ongoing and increasingly dangerous climate shift not only seemed readily apparent, but also quite shocking. But I had no degree in Environmental or Political Science, so I once again felt the need to succumb to my self-assigned worthlessness, and go back to the Want-Ads.
Despite my lack of professional ability in environmental matters, I kept wondering about how it was possible for a peon like me to break into this field. During a very serendipitous conversation with my younger brother, it was suggested that I consider volunteering. I had “always wanted to do something like that” (count how many times you hear this in your life…you’ll be astonished). To my detriment, I had always stopped short of cliff rather than taking the leap of faith. I harkened back to my early exposure to 80’s teen movie philosophy, and as my life mantra became more Bueller-Hughesian, I decided to say to myself, “‘what the fuck,’ make your move.”
Having no other prospects, I threw all of my energy into researching non-profits, and three months later I was moved out of my apartment and headed to The Galapagos Islands to participate in an Invasive Species Eradication and Agricultural Sustainability project. Shortly after arriving I was hired into the organization as a project leader and volunteer coordinator, and realized then as clearly as I do now, that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was out from behind the proverbial desk, developing a modicum of focus for once, and walking around with a shit-eating grin that you couldn’t have slapped off my face. I’ll spare further details here because those of you who know me well have already heard my talk about this excursion, ad nauseam.
When all was said and done, I spent three months working in Galapagos, and then two more in mainland Ecuador, and finally a month in Peru. At the end of my time there, I was not ready to come back. I missed my friends and family, but I felt as though I had so much left to learn & do…and for once I actually gave a shit about that.
Immediately upon returning, I applied for employment in another non-profit organization serving 77 countries all over the globe. After a year-long process of vaccinations, medical & psychological evaluations, countless essays & interviews, and a brick-wall of bureaucracy to penetrate, I was lucky enough to be accepted to serve in Panama.
IS THERE A MORAL TO THE STORY? A life lesson I feel the need to pass-on from my experience in "changing your life course"? Fuck…not really. Anything of that ilk would come off as completely smarmy and self-righteous. Better to go to Tony Robbins. I think I’m just someone who was lucky enough to have zero significant life attachments at a time when I was given a second chance to pursue something I personally saw as meaningful. Not to mention the incredible moral support from those around me, and more than one place to lay my head on any given night. I saw an entire economy crash and burn around my industry, and I chose to accept it as an omen and take a small risk by pursuing a divergent and circuitous route to an end goal that isn’t even completely actualized yet.
I have a good bit of determination to not fall short, but this journey I’m about to undertake in Panama, just like any other, could very easily end in disappointment or failure. I don’t think what I’ve chosen to do is admirable in the slightest…frankly it’s quite selfish!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with why I’m starting this blog…well…I made a choice about a year ago to join a Non-Profit organization and spend the next two years living a more simplistic existence in the service of others. This time around, I will be participating in Panama starting in late-April, 2011. However, it should also be noted that I began traversing the path that led me here, long before that. While I recognize that attempting to derive meaning from anything other than the present moment can at times be about as useful as an ice cube to an Eskimo, I think it’s worthwhile for me to retrace the decisions, influences, and life events that brought me to this point and time in the cosmos.
1.2 Early underachievement - mild success with my intensely underwhelming Science Fair Project…that’s a Cow Heart.
I SLEEPWALKED THROUGH THE MAJORITY OF MY ACADEMIC CAREER. I can remember vividly the first time I brought homework home at an early age…and I remember not doing it. My guess is that I spent my time watching Happy Days or Three’s Company re-runs, instead (I was a weird kid). Focus and motivation was never my strong suit, and I never saw the value in what I often flippantly dismissed as “busy work.” From birth until the day I graduated college, I made very little cognitive progress toward rectifying the age-old clichéd question of “what is it I want to do with my life?”
I thought about it constantly, but other than my pie-in-the-sky-dream of becoming the starting shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls (original I know), the mental moments of end goal aspiration were always vague (SIDE NOTE: when I topped out at 6’, with questionable ball skills, and the speed of an Emperor Penguin, I realized I had a better shot at going to space, than I did at becoming a Bull).
The question of how to motivate me, gave my wildly successful father his first grey hairs (now an impressive silver mop…”better grey than gone”), and left my very caring mother desperate for solutions. While I was oft-praised for intellect, I also heard the word “potential” (often preceded by “wasted”) so many times by the age of 13 or 14, that it began to give me a visceral, physically nauseous feeling every time I heard it’s utterance. However, despite all of the panic and rabble surrounding my future, I was always able to get by on a solid amount of common sense, scattered attempts to please my parents, and very occasional bursts of inspired effort. This mildly successful combination even got me into college (gotta love ‘Merica).
DURING THE FIVE YEARS OF HIGHER LEARNING I ENDURED, I attended three separate Universities, spent most of my time absorbing myself in friendships & relationships, and attending as many debaucherous gatherings as was humanly possible. After receiving mostly less-than-stellar grades, I was able to graduate from Miami University (Ohio) almost by default with a Bachelor’s (Arts? Science, maybe? I’ll give $1 to anyone who can tell me the difference) in Psychology. I’m still under the impression that they probably felt guilty continuing to accept my out-of-state tuition money, and ordered my immediate graduation. My most memorable experience was probably the time I went sledding down a hill in a canoe, in a blizzard, after drinking an entire bottle of Alizé (I was listening to a lot of hip-hop at the time).
Why study Psychology you ask? Well…it’s what both of my parents do (and do extremely well), and when I made the decision to pursue it at 18 years old, I was still woefully unoriginal and too timid and lazy to throw myself into anything with a minoot possibility of failure. Psychology seemed safe, and I simply had no better ideas. Not to mention that at this point, my attention span while sitting at a desk and “learning,” was tantamount to a Cocker Spaniel attempting to follow the themes of a Fellini film. All things considered, I was able to count on one-hand the amount of times I was inspired prior to graduating.
1.3 My expression in this picture largely sums up my general attitude toward just about everything during the ages of 8-23 (and completely cracks me up)
ENTER: THE CORPORATE WORLD! For underacheiving people, such as myself, there are few options left after conning a four-year University into giving you an undergraduate degree. You are generally left to feed the corporatocracy - a faceless machine that leaves you with little idea of what it is you’re actually contributing to society - or go on starving while trying to chase whatever semblance of a dream you still have.
A burgeoning Dot-Com company was my first landing spot out of college. They had stupid Monkey commercials that were insanely (and perhaps predictably) popular as a marketing tool with the American public, and so they were hiring like crazy and took a flier on me. Entry-level sales - a glorified frat house. Good for four things:
- A good-looking young staff straight out of college with lingering bad habits and little professional acumen…
- A $28k a year salary, which to a 23-year-old still living at home and paying zero rent is spectacular…
- A culture that encouraged excessive partying and often times funded it…
- A decent opportunity for growth, despite a constantly manipulated compensation plan…
- A staff of easily irritated middle-managers and low-level directors whose sole purpose it was to metaphorically beat you into mantra-chanting submission and convince you that you were worth nothing without the company, it’s product (which does not work), and a healthy record of hitting your sales quota with no exceptions.
In this environment, I actually did surprisingly well, and managed to outlast every single member of my sales unit by perservering through an 11-month tenure. Maybe I needed the tough-love atmosphere to wake me up a little bit? That being said, I was completely miserable. Ironically, it wasn’t until I realized I was serving very little purpose in society, that I truly and deeply started to care about my purpose in society. Irony is stupid.
Towards the end of my time at Dot-Com X, I tried to apply for a new position within the company that was similar to a promotion, but ultimately a lateral move. Instead of being out by the airport, I’d be working in The Loop. These things are of the utmost importance when your 23 and struggling for status.
I ended up being hired, but was instructed to remain quiet and transistion at the end of the month. When my boss - an extremely bitter & venomous individual - somehow found out I was leaving the unit, she turned my life into Dante’s Seventh Circle. The unwarranted screaming and berating literally never stopped. When she initially found out, she flew into a tirade, but couldn’t technically fire me “for spite”, so prior to my transition she waited for me to show up 5 minutes late one day and used that as her “you can’t sue us for wrongful termination now even though we’re completely fucking you over” reasoning for letting me go. “You have five minutes to clear out your desk and then we’re calling security!!! BAHHHHHHHH!!!!”
ENTER: SLIGHTLY LESS CORPORATE, STARRY-EYED BOUTIQUE FIRM! After my experience at Dot-Com X, I went searching for a position that lacked micro-management and offered a little bit more creative & professional freedom. And hey…maybe I could even find a company that contributed positively to society rather than bottom-feeding off of marketing-related scraps? I found that company in Starry-Eyed Boutique Firm X.
They were very stiff, but professional, extremely intelligent, and they seemed like they knew what they were doing. They were promising me A LOT more money, and a position “at the top of a growing pyramid.” Ahhhh, what a visual. Unfortunately, what I was selling for them was an extremely complex consulting service, and what I gave away in micro-management, I also gave away in “give-a-shit-ism” from anyone in a position to give sales advice to a new employee.
I also found that even extremely successful young & small firms have a ridiculous amount of growing pains, and often your compensation relies directly on the piecemeal day-to-day decisions made those with their own savings invested in the company. In the process, promises that are made usually aren’t kept. Furthermore, I found out that my firm’s primary focus in “consulting” often eliminated skill-based labor positions and replaced them with technologically-advanced automated processes. Coming from a family largely made-up of blue collar workers, this was not really a practice that my liberal-brain was able to support. All that being said, I was making very respectable money, the firm was doing well, and relatively speaking, things were going better than they had been at Dot-Com X.
When the economy went to shit, ca. January of 2008, people started viewing our services as a luxury item. It didn’t make much sense for them to continue to invest in consultants and advanced IT services if they were already having to cut-back on their own internal staff. Sure, we salesmen cajoled and manipulated the truth, touting our ability to “operate within a budget,” but nobody bought it. I still remember the soul-crushing silence of the office around that time. No phones ringing, no salesman selling…just the hypnotic whir of the air conditioning unit, and 20 or so people sitting at their cubicles, struggling to stay awake. Bleehhhhh.
Shortly thereafter, our layoffs started. I had performed well enough to survive Round #1, when about 50% of the staff was cut. However when Round #2 came through in November, the entire remaining sales team, along with a number of the technicians, were rendered obsolete. I was tossed to the street with the rest of the overhead, and I didn’t even get the crowded restaurant treatment. Eventually the company simply could not survive at all, and effectively went under.
I realized the belief I had previously held that you sacrifice a certain amount of independence and aspiration in exchange for economic security, was simply an illusion. To the unemployment line I went (actually there’s no line…it’s all done over the phone and online these days…much more convenient…and less smelly).
Recognizing that the increase in salary and the ancillary benefits that came along with it hadn’t ultimately improved my life, and realizing once and for all that I was done with coporate sales, I was once again left clueless as to what to pursue next.
But while Starry-Eyed Boutique Firm X ultimately ended in disappointment, it ultimately had a very positive effect on me. I was lucky enough to have worked with an executive who helped me greatly to realize that I was being dishonest with myself. “The problem with young salesman is that you don’t know what to do with yourself. You always want to make a change, but you never do it. You just end up doing sales because you don’t have any better ideas.” Sadly, he was exactly right. He also said “the difference between stress and panic, is having a plan.” Pearls of wisdom, I say! It took me awhile to realize it but that was exactly what I needed to hear.
DURING THE 4-5 YEARS THAT HAD PRECEDED MY FIRING from Starry-Eyed Boutique X, I had taken up an independent interest in the increasingly fiery rhetoric surrounding the supposed “Global Climate Crisis.” I read every environmental story published by Greenpeace or the New York Times, and silently seethed that there was seemingly more ignorance on the topic than the world could overcome in the short timeframe there was to take action. How could there be an argument about such elementary science? How could the public not care more about the perpetuation of the species? Should we care?
I had been lucky enough to be exposed to nature by my parents during our summer vacations, at a very young age, and the scientific evidence supporting the claims of an ongoing and increasingly dangerous climate shift not only seemed readily apparent, but also quite shocking. But I had no degree in Environmental or Political Science, so I once again felt the need to succumb to my self-assigned worthlessness, and go back to the Want-Ads.
Despite my lack of professional ability in environmental matters, I kept wondering about how it was possible for a peon like me to break into this field. During a very serendipitous conversation with my younger brother, it was suggested that I consider volunteering. I had “always wanted to do something like that” (count how many times you hear this in your life…you’ll be astonished). To my detriment, I had always stopped short of cliff rather than taking the leap of faith. I harkened back to my early exposure to 80’s teen movie philosophy, and as my life mantra became more Bueller-Hughesian, I decided to say to myself, “‘what the fuck,’ make your move.”
Having no other prospects, I threw all of my energy into researching non-profits, and three months later I was moved out of my apartment and headed to The Galapagos Islands to participate in an Invasive Species Eradication and Agricultural Sustainability project. Shortly after arriving I was hired into the organization as a project leader and volunteer coordinator, and realized then as clearly as I do now, that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was out from behind the proverbial desk, developing a modicum of focus for once, and walking around with a shit-eating grin that you couldn’t have slapped off my face. I’ll spare further details here because those of you who know me well have already heard my talk about this excursion, ad nauseam.
When all was said and done, I spent three months working in Galapagos, and then two more in mainland Ecuador, and finally a month in Peru. At the end of my time there, I was not ready to come back. I missed my friends and family, but I felt as though I had so much left to learn & do…and for once I actually gave a shit about that.
Immediately upon returning, I applied for employment in another non-profit organization serving 77 countries all over the globe. After a year-long process of vaccinations, medical & psychological evaluations, countless essays & interviews, and a brick-wall of bureaucracy to penetrate, I was lucky enough to be accepted to serve in Panama.
IS THERE A MORAL TO THE STORY? A life lesson I feel the need to pass-on from my experience in "changing your life course"? Fuck…not really. Anything of that ilk would come off as completely smarmy and self-righteous. Better to go to Tony Robbins. I think I’m just someone who was lucky enough to have zero significant life attachments at a time when I was given a second chance to pursue something I personally saw as meaningful. Not to mention the incredible moral support from those around me, and more than one place to lay my head on any given night. I saw an entire economy crash and burn around my industry, and I chose to accept it as an omen and take a small risk by pursuing a divergent and circuitous route to an end goal that isn’t even completely actualized yet.
I have a good bit of determination to not fall short, but this journey I’m about to undertake in Panama, just like any other, could very easily end in disappointment or failure. I don’t think what I’ve chosen to do is admirable in the slightest…frankly it’s quite selfish!
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