Minimum Wage Is Not Enough

Photo by jpmatth via Flickr

Minimum wage in the U.S. is pretty low compared to the standard of living.  I know, most of you have probably already realized this.  The thing that surprised me was that federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009.  It is still $7.25 an hour and basic expenses such as food, utilities, etc are increasing in cost every year.  Not to mention the obvious fact that we are in a "Great Recession" where jobs are scarce and getting a home loan is harder than it used to be.  My home state of Georgia, along with Wyoming, has the lowest state minimum wage at $5.15 an hour.  However in most cases the federal minimum wage applies and not the state minimum wage, but why should the state minimum wage even be as low as $5.15? 

Another big issue facing the average American in this economy is that it's very much an employers market.  Employers can afford to be picky when it comes to choosing employees and the current employees feel they are privileged to even have a job and therefore put up with working conditions they normally wouldn't have to.  I know, I know...life isn't easy and working has always been hard and employers are always mean to their employees and we should just suck it up and stop complaining.  I get that.  I have no aversion to hard work....well, maybe I do have a little bit of an aversion but I'd still put in the effort.  That doesn't mean I'm not justified in being a bit frustrated. 

I suppose it's this type of frustration that leads many young people to camp out in local parks and get arrested as some sort of hippie initiation rite.  I have no qualms with the aims of the Occupy Wall street movement and other spin-off movements (even though those aims are often vague ideas instead of bulleted points but don't try to regulate our thoughts man) .  What I'm not so sure of is the method to the madness.  The Occupy movement wants to overhaul the entire political and economic system which can't be done by camping out.  A large enough protest can lead to changes in widely unpopular policies but something else has to happen for change on a revolutionary scale to occur.  To be honest I'm just not ready for a revolution.  I guess I'm a little past the age where the idea of a coup d'etat is appealing to me.  If I was an idealistic young person looking to create change on a national level I suppose the first thing I'd do is to make sure I educate myself on the issues, vote, and encourage others to vote as well.  If I was unemployed and in need of work I think a better way to spend my time would be looking for work instead of camping out in a park all day and all night long.  I also think that a big social statement could be made in the form of organizing, not to camp out in a park, but to volunteer at a soup kitchen or in some form of community outreach program. 

I know I'm being hypocritical here as I'm not a member of an outreach program and I'm not actively involved in any political organizations.  I do intend to vote on issues that I feel are important and I feel obligated to educate myself on the issues even though it sometimes feels like I'm getting mired in a molasses of ideas and posturing.  I guess if there's anything I want people to take away from this is that there are many ways of bringing about change and very few of those ways are instantaneous and complete. Enthusiasm is good as long as we temper it with a bit of realism.            

Stalked By Bad Luck

http://atom.smasher.org/pack

I must have the worst luck ever.  Or at least that's the way things seem from my perspective.  Every task I've undertaken lately, no matter how simple it seems at first, always ends up being 10 times harder than it should be.  I could go into detail with my encounter with the harpies that work at the DMV (or DDS as they now call it...probably had to come up with an alias due to multiple death threats from disgruntled customers).  However, I am too upset as a result of my five visits across the river Styx to really comment on it at this point.  Maybe at some point I'll acquire a GA driver's license, but until then at least my VA license still seems to like me.

You may be one of these annoying people who want to tell me that it must be due to negative thinking that these bad things are happening to me.  I can assure you that on multiple occasions I have happily walked into the DMV, called someone, emailed someone, etc expecting no problems whatsoever only to be blindsided with problems that only Hades could invent.

My husband, on the other hand, has the best luck.  He often gets special treatment, easy breaks, and rarely runs into unexpected problems.  As a result, he has the annoying habit of expecting that everything should go great for me too and believes that it must be a result of something I said/did or possibly a genetic predisposition to bad luck that causes me to have such difficulties.  He also tends to overreact and exaggerate claims which leads to conversations like this:
Me: "The DMV said they wouldn't accept the document because it doesn't have a stamp on it and so they won't give me a license."
Husband: "What?! What is the matter with those retards?! If that happened to me I'd take a shit on the counter and tell them to shove those papers up their ass!!"
 For the record, he would not actually take a shit on the counter and even though he may make a smart-ass comment to them, he wouldn't tell them to shove it up their ass either.

 Today was one of those days when it comes to a head for me.  I have reached the limits of giving a shit and aren't quite sure if I should yell, cry, just give up trying to fix things, or lay on the couch for the remainder of the day eating junk food.  I compromised by getting a large Mocha from McDonalds and telling myself to set aside all this angst for the weekend as there isn't anything I can do about it until Monday anyway. Essentially I'm doing what humans tend to do best which is to ignore problems and hope they go away. It's been my experience that this works better than beating your problems to death because they'll just come back as zombie problems anyway and try to eat your brains. When that happens you become the zombie that just causes problems for other people.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zaxl4/167271115/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Black Hole of Indecisiveness

I didn't know what to do. Like any true liberal arts graduate I wavered back and forth between going back to college to pursue a second Bachelor's degree, to pursue a Master's in History, or to forget school for now and focus on continuing my career in the Intelligence field. I applied to a college in Virginia as an undergrad with the intent of picking up a few more history courses before charging in as a graduate student. I was accepted but didn't register for classes. Between the time I applied and time for registration came about, my husband and I had decided to move back to Georgia. So, I focused on applying to intel jobs in the Atlanta area....of which there aren't many I assure you. After a couple of promising interviews and emails I met with a wall of defeat. It turns out that this economy isn't the best in which to look for a new job (who knew?). So, now I've come full circle to applying to college again, this time as an undergrad in Georgia.


This year of insanity has provided a lot of insight into my tendency to be indecisive. Because I can't figure out exactly what I want to do I end up not doing much of anything. I even stopped writing because I felt that it would distract from my job search and that it wasn't productive so why bother. I was being bitter basically. So now I say screw it. I should just do what I've been wanting to do for 2 years now....go back to school. I'm not totally abandoning logic here. A BA in Anthropology isn't much use even in a good job market and my 7 years of intel experience is restricted to the military field and civilian employers don't give flip about that it seems. I have no intention of going back overseas or moving all over kingdom come again to hunt down an elusive intel job. So, changing careers seems like a good move as long as I pick a degree that will give me good job prospects after graduation. I have no problem working a dead-end hourly job as long as I'm in school and working toward something better.


For those of you who even read this and have wondered what I've been up to this past year the answer is simple and boring - nothing. Well, I have made significant strides in fitness. I took up running (I needed to see progress in some area of my life) and I've since competed in a 5k, 10k trail race, half marathon, and marathon. My next race is a half marathon on Thanksgiving Day so at least I'm physically better off than I was a year ago. I tend to have a one-track mind so focusing so intently on improving my running has resulted on everything else being out of focus. "I have a two hour run in the morning! I don't have time for anything else!" That's how my messed up brain works. A multi-tasking corporate mogul I'll never be.

Having a Dirty, Racist Friend Can be Awkward

  I discovered the site xtranormal that's responsible for so many of those funny videos that you see around the internet.  Here is my first attempt which took zero planning and thought to produce.  When I have the chance I plan on doing something better.

Jesus Isn't Available Right Now

     So, I had a pretty disturbing dream the other day that I'm still trying to decipher.  It wasn't one of those nighttime dreams, but was one of those midday nap dreams which always tend to be a little bit weirder.  The content of the majority of the dream really isn't relevant.  Lucky for me because I don't remember most of it anyway.  What I do remember is making some reference to Jesus in the dream and being told that Jesus is busy right now anyway.  I was then led to a shack where Jesus was sitting in a chair, staring like a zombie at the television, and being guarded by a couple of demon-like (or possibly biker-like) dudes.  It was reminiscent of the scene from Shaun of the Dead where Ed the zombie is playing video games in the shed out back.

     What in the world does this dream mean?  It could be some subconscious effort to tell me I'm losing my religion (props to REM), but then again it could just be a result of the cold medicine I took before the nap.  Not every dream has to have a hidden meaning, but how can you tell which one does and which one doesn't?  Am I supposed to write this down as some Nostradamus-type prophesy about zombie Jesus?  Should I start my own cult of Zombieism (Christianzombie, Zombianity)?  Just because zombie Jesus is glued to the television, should we join in or does it mean that our religion(s) don't mean as much to us anymore now that we have a glowing box to worship?  Did the second coming of Christ already take place but he was too freaked out by all the technology he saw and has since then been in a shack watching T.V. somewhere and no one knows? 

     People major in Philosophy in order to ponder these and other of life's biggest questions.  I say ponder because they never get around to actually answering any questions.  Makes you wonder how someone can validate majoring in Philosophy.  Makes you wonder just how difficult the doctoral theses has to be.  Just throw in a bunch of references of famous philosophers and a bunch of esoteric ideas that no one can prove or disprove and you've got yourself a PhD.  Zombie Jesus would be proud.      

Put Me In a State of Torpor

   From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:  Definition of TORPOR : a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility : extreme sluggishness or stagnation of function 

  It is cold, very cold.  Lately the temperature at night has gone down into the teens and rises only a little above the freezing point during the day.  I don't deal well with cold weather.  After all, I'm just not used to it.  I grew up in Georgia and spent most of my adult life moving around to areas known more for hot summers than cold winters.  So, this weather makes me wish I could go into a state of hibernation or at least a state of torpor until it gets a little warmer out.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

   

  Not all animals that go into dens or burrows during colder weather enter into true hibernation.  Skunks, badgers, and raccoons enter into a state of torpor which is different from hibernation in that they can actually wake-up, move around, and eat when they need to instead of sleeping away the whole winter.  Their body temperature decreases as does their heart rate which allows them to conserve energy.  Bears, on the other hand, aren't really true hibernators at all.  Their body temperature only decreases slightly and they often wake-up and move around in their dens and may come out for food if they get really hungry.  So basically, bears are a lot like people during the winter.

   Unfortunately humans can't truly hibernate or even go into a state of torpor.  If our body temperature falls too much we suffer from hypothermia which ain't a good thing.  Prolonged hypothermia = death and not happy-sleep-hibernation time.  I know, you're probably just as disappointed as I am.  Doctors have been researching the possibility of putting people into a state of hibernation to help with various illnesses and reduce the shock of some surgeries, but they haven't been able to get past that hypothermia problem.  How nice would it be to ride out some painful or debilitating injury or illness by just sleeping it off for a few months?  Alas, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

   As intelligent as humans (think they) are you'd think we would have this hibernation thing figured out by now.  We have been watching animals sleep for thousands of years and still don't know much about it.  I guess that's the price we have to pay for intelligence: we have to be awake during winter so we can sit 
around and complain about how cold it is outside.  

My Dog Hates Me

  I think my dog hates me, or at least is somewhat sadistic.  Sure, he looks up at me with puppy dog eyes most of the time and he is cute and whatnot, but that is likely all a ruse to gain my trust.  As evidence of his hatred for me I will present exhibit A: he responds to training while at home but once we get to the training class he acts like he doesn't know what "sit" means.  He obviously wants to make it seem that we haven't been practicing any of the commands in our free time.  But, I like to give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute his behavior to some sort of puppy ADD.

  The thing that really makes me wonder whether or not he cares for my well-being is his desire to frolic in sub-freezing temperatures.  This is a dog who, in the summer and fall, had no interest in playing outside or going for a leisurely walk.  I had to make him go on walks and he was always eager to return home.  Now that it is an ungodly temperature outside he decides to spend some time in the great outdoors.  He wants to go out more often, run around while he's out there, and is reluctant to come in.  I have a cold (and possibly the flu as I have a fever) and this dog wants to drag me outside multiple times in a day, in the cold, to play.  Well, that's just mean.  Shame on you Indy, shame on you.