Category Archives: #Life

Sep 01 0 comments
#Life

LINK: Have a mouse problem? And beer?

A mouse is living in my home. He (or she?) is a smaller mouse that rarely shows his face, but when he does, it’s certainly an event for everyone involved.

Gwendolyn doesn’t like mousetraps. Why kill a living creature that’s simply trying to make the best of its life? She bought one of those $20 traps where we tactfully lure the mouse into a large box filled with peanut butter, but the doors quickly close and trap the mouse inside. And while our dogs certainly love the peanut butter, our mouse isn’t falling for the trick.

Perhaps beer is our solution. My bloodthirsty cousin, who is nearly appalled that we haven’t slain our mouse foe yet, suggested another idea: get the mouse drunk. All we need is a pale, ramp and a little leftover Schlafly Summer Lager from a fun Friday night.

And if the mouse doesn’t like Summer Lager? Then, in my opinion, he doesn’t deserve to share in the warmth of my home anyway.

Sep 01 0 comments
#Life

On grad school and a new journey

During the months leading up to my graduation from the Missouri School of Journalism in May 2010, one of my professors used a class period to remind us aspiring journalists that the industry wasn’t looking for just journalists. Sure, we could find a job as a reporter at a small-town daily newspaper or latch onto a TV station news crew, but our journalism careers would be short.

Instead, we should aspire to be individual entrepreneurs that excel at brand management. We must absolutely own the internet. In an industry that witnesses massive layoffs and buyouts each week, we had to develop survivors instincts to simply make it. Some of us, she hoped, would do more than make it — we would develop solutions to keep journalism profitable healthy and profitable for years to come.

Wow, that’s a lot of pressure. And it didn’t really hit me until a few months ago. The message is now clear: my days as a journalist could be limited unless I actually do something about it.

Much like any workaholic, I decided to enroll in nighttime grad school classes. A master of business administration degree from Washington University’s Olin Business School will, hopefully, help me make sense of the industry numbers. Maybe I’ll be inspired by innovation in my classmates’ industries, too.

Tuesday and Thursday nights will be filled with business classes for the next three years. I’ll learn about accounting, organizational behavior and business strategy while my social life dissipates to nothingness.

Please wish me luck, friends. It’ll be an interesting and rewarding journey.

Aug 26 0 comments
#Life

LINK: One of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/323/the-super

This week, while listening to the podcast of This American Life, I was amazed at the tale I heard. It’s a replay of a show from 2007, and it’s all about building superintendents.

The whole episode is very good, but Act 1 in particular is captivating and thrilling. That section comes in at 21 minutes, but it’s worth the listen. It will make you wonder about which people in your life have mysterious pasts or devious intentions. I’ll never look at my super the same again.

Aug 25 0 comments
#Life

Smearing peanut butter on my face

This is not a metaphor.

Earlier today, inspired by a post on the usually sage Lifehacker.com, I decided to use peanut butter to shave my face. I was a bit suspicious of the technique, but I thought it might be worth trying. After all, peanut butter is one of the most wonderful substances ever created.

To accomodate my choice in shaving assistant, I decided to change the order of my daily routine and shave before showing on this particular morning. Using my hand, I began to lather on my face some of my favorite peanut butter, JIF creamy (though my parents were too cheap to be choosy when I was growing up, I always go for the good stuff).

While trying to spread the PB, it was fighting me a little bit, so I applied a much thicker layer. That worked better and I managed to cover my right cheek and neck, about 1/3 of the total shaveable area. Next came the razor, with which I made a few passes of the entire area.

It didn’t really work.

The peanut butter did a good job of keeping the razor from cutting me, but it also seemed to keep the razor from cutting the hair very well. I’d say it got about half of them off my face in the target area. And it was almost nearly impossible to get the razor blade clean.

Calling the task a failure, I jumped in the shower to clean off and planned to resume shaving with normal shaving cream afterwords. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t seem to get all of the peanut butter smell off of me in the shower. I’m not sure if maybe I got some in my nose or if I was just imagining it, but I smelled delicious all day.

For dinner — a shaving cream and jelly sandwich.

Aug 10 0 comments
#Life

Absent-minded ranting

My girlfriend came to visit this past weekend, Thursday through Tuesday. It was wonderful to see her and we had a lot of fun, even though most of our planned activities got rained out. It was also the first time she had seen me perform my poetry in front of an audience, which actually made me a little nervous at the Poetry Jam on Thursday.

On Tuesday, I dropped her off at the airport before driving to work. Once I parked my car, I cursed myself for leaving the airport 10 minutes sooner than I had to — 10 more minutes I could have spent with Jean. And then I cried, knowing I won’t be seeing Jean for another two months. That made me glad I gave myself 10 minutes before I had to go into work.

When she called me last night to tell me she was arrived safely, she said that even though she was sad while leaving, she never cried. Instead, she thinks she’s getting used to the distance and the time apart, which makes it easier when we say goodbye. I wish I felt the same.

The longer this goes on, the longer we live halfway across the country from each other, the harder it gets for me to say goodbye. Maybe it’s because I blame myself for taking this job. Maybe it’s because there is nothing I want more than to finally, actually live in the same city as her and not have to live like a bum. I’ve always wanted to be an independent person, but now that I’m living as independently as I can imagine, I want nothing more than to depend on her.

We see so many people who are getting married and getting pregnant and moving forward with their lives together — sometimes stupidly — that I hate what’s happened to us. Sure, we’re doing what’s best for our careers and sure, it’s going to be better in the long run, but at least half of me wishes I had the strength to throw all that away. I’d give anything to be less smart and closer to her.

Honestly, while she was here, I felt like we did almost nothing. We went a few places and we saw a few people, but I can’t account for most of the hours of the weekend, which were spent sitting on the couch or watching movies or talking about nothing in particular. But I guess that was all I wanted.

Jul 22 0 comments
#Life

Fending for myself on the gulf coast

The mesh of the net wasn’t tight enough.

On Saturday, I went crabbing with some friends near Cedar Key on the gulf coast. We went with the goal of catching 20 blue crabs (5 a piece) of edible size, and two of the other actually had some experience fishing for crabs, but we didn’t know what we were doing — not really.

And that’s how I ended up sitting on the this bench at the dock, net with too loose of a mesh beside me, trying to get the crab untangled. It was small enough to fall through the mesh, but had decided it would be better if it put each leg through a different hole and then hold on with its pincers. Too small to eat, the true angler among us was going to use this crab as bait.

Everything was going fine and I was about to get the last of the legs untangled, when I heard the snap, followed by a sharp pain in my left thumb. The asshole got me.

Fortunately, it was a grazing blow that left a small, but deep, gash instead of resulting in some hip new ringwear. Also fortunately, I had just finished untangling all of the crab’s legs, so that when I jumped up in surprise and threw the net away from me, the crab fell on to the dock. There was a valiant effort from the sea creature as he walked sideways (which was pretty cool to see in person) toward the edge of the dock and freedom.

Marisol stomped it. All she wanted it for was bait, so it needed to be killed anyway. In hindsight, we probably could have stomped it before I used my bare hands to untangle its legs. For the rest of the day, I paid more attention to where I left my hands while I was digging crabs out of the net.

The process of catching crabs is actually pretty simple (go ahead and giggle). You tie some raw chicken onto a string and throw it into the water. Once a crab starts eating your bait, you pull the string in slowly until it’s within netting distance and you scoop it up. Google comes up with a lot of results to prepare the amateur for every aspect of crabbing, and we got most of the information we needed from the wonderful interwebz.

By the day’s end, we managed to net 21 crabs of edible size (or close enough that we were going to cook them). We stowed them, grabbed dinner at a beach-side restaurant and had some drinks before heading home.

At an ice cream place we hit up on the walk back to the car, we had a shopping experience straight out of The Twilight Zone. The dude serving the ice cream was so hyper and intrusive that he appeared to be on at least one kind of regulated narcotic, so much so that Marisol was too scared to actually order anything from him. On top of that, after he scooped our ice cream, he and the man behind the register walked out the door, leaving no employees behind the counter. We played around for about 10 minutes debating leaving without paying or trying to find them. Finally, an employee came from the other room, just as confused as we were about the abandonment issue.

Our plan involved making the drive home and having a crab boil the following day, but it was here that we made our greatest mistake. In our excitement to hit the water, we all had apparently skimmed the section of the crabbing sites about how to store the creatures. It was discovered the next day that we had killed them in a way that was inadvisable and that we would not be having a crab boil.

Robbed of the satisfaction of eating our haul, I heard the nagging voice of my father in the back of my head telling me to read the directions carefully. Dejected, I went to a local restaurant for lunch. It turned out to be not so bad: their crabs were bigger than ours.

Jul 13 2 comments
#Life

Who cares when school is out?

Every writer for #Life has recently or will soon be moving. Each of us has put all our shit into boxes and duffel bags and those funny string backpacks they give away for free but aren’t actually useful for pretty much anything and we’ve relocated.

One of us even bought a house. Who does that? We’re all 20-something, and buying a house is nuts. Well, it would be nuts for me, anyway. That’s way too grown up of a thing to do.

And isn’t it summer, the time of moving? Classes are ended, campus is half-empty, the line at Shakespeare’s Pizza is reasonable at lunch. But…that’s not my life, anymore. Nor anybody else’s. We’ve moved on and aren’t supposed to be struck in that college routine anymore (though I’d give my left arm and both little toes if they’d open a Shakespeare’s here in Gainesville).

But we are still clinging to the habits we’ve learned since we were five. Our leases are based on the school year we’ve supposedly abandoned. We’re still convinced that summer is the right time to burn our vacation days. And maybe it’s the fault of our bosses children, but we still think this is the season of freedom.

I thought it would be different when I got out, but it isn’t. And maybe that’s my fault. But there’s a truth I’ve re-learned this summer that will certainly never change: moving sucks.

Jun 13 1 comments
#Life

I promise it’s not as gross as it sounds

Lately, I’ve been cleaning up my apartment and packing in preparation for a move to a new complex (a whopping .8 miles away) that will better suit my needs. Namely, I won’t have to carry my 14 foot kayak up and down from the third floor and then wrestle it into it’s tight fit against the far wall. Rent is also much cheaper, so that’s awesome.

As I did the first major clean-up of my apartment in a long time, I was reminded of two things. First, I was reminded of this poem I wrote the last time I was cleaning up, right before my family visited:

The seating arrangement in my apartment

Cleanliness sits next to Godliness, which must
then sit next to company. While loneliness,
the ugly stepsister, sits in the next room
not mopping the floors except when somebody
is watching. These interactions remind me
why I never liked to live alone. Dishes
sit on the counter and my kayak doubles
as a coffee table and there is nobody
to yell at me about the mess I’ve left.
Certainly, I can bring myself to dispose
of the trash before it smells — or
just after it smells — and to give
the cooking surfaces an occasional
wipe, usually without soap, but my
God-forsaken apartment will never actually
be clean until my mother comes to visit.

—James Patrick Schmidt

The second thing I was reminded of is that cleaning up isn’t really very hard.

That poem is an exaggeration about how bad I am at cleaning, but I am far from being a neat freak. It has nothing to do with my knowledge or skill in cleaning (though I am scared of vacuum cleaners), but rather just that I feel no motivation to clean beyond what is minimally necessary to stay healthy, and I always clean my dishes before I reuse them.

Not all of my apartments have been like this. But, as the poem points out, I usually have roommates. And I find it a lot easier to clean when I have roommates. Even in the Lake House, which would appropriately be classified as a hive of scum and villany in the non-metaphorical sense, I always did my best to clean the public areas where my friends would come over for games and parties. In my apartment now, I rarely have anyone visit.

And while I’ve let my house cleaning habits degrade, I think it’s worth noting that my personal hygiene has not. I won’t even walk to get my mail without brushing my teeth. I shower at least once a day. Hell, I don’t even like to go out unless I’ve put something in my hair to keep it from frizzing all over the place.

All of these ramblings help me realize that the times I bother to clean up is when other people are going to see me or my living space. It’s a matter of pride. And frankly, I’m not that proud of my current residence.

Gainesville is home in the sense that I live here, but I don’t feel like I’ve built any life here. I didn’t even pick out this apartment, I took over a sublease for a coworker who wanted to move for financial reasons. And rarely do I have anyone come over to my apartment, so I just let the mess go a lot longer than I should.

I’m really struggling to feel like I belong. I’ve found friends and found places to go, but this city doesn’t remain on my long-term plans and I think that’s part of my problem. It’s probably a bad attitude to have, and it’s an attitude I’d like to shake off as I transition into my new apartment.

Maybe I just need to throw more parties.

Jun 05 1 comments
#Life

On the hunt…

St. Maximilian Kolbe once said to “preserve order, and order will preserve you.”  I just need to figure out how to do that!

I’m always seem to be on the hunt these days.  When I’m at work, I’m figuratively on the hunt for birds, especially those fantastic owls.  At home, I’m on the hunt for entertainment; I read occasionally, play some Xbox, waste time with archived Seinfeld episodes, watch all of my movies too many times over, and sometimes I just stare until I think of something to do (something cheap is the key).  Socially, I’m on the hunt for some meaningful companionship–pinpointing that match I’ve been waiting for.  Intellectually, I’m on the hunt for challenging debate–reading up on tenets of my faith, establishing my stances on social issues, and trying to understand those who will be guaranteed to disagree with me.  Psychologically, I’m on the hunt for virtues that I’ve always needed (e.g. patience, selflessness, self-sacrificing love, etc).  Most of all, I’m desperately scavenging for the concept of discipline in my life.

That’s the most challenging one for me, securing a sense of discipline.  I read things that interest me from cover to cover in no time, but if something in a story gets too boring or dry, I shelve it immediately.  “Just finish the damn thing,” I say.  Instead, I always find an excuse to not do so.  Keeping a good schedule during the day is another problem.  Some days breakfast is there, ready to be consumed.  Other days, it just doesn’t happen.  The “most important meal of the day” just gets rare attention from me.  Waking up at a certain time and going to bed at another time also becomes an illusion.  Going to church on Sunday is never a problem, I’m always there eager and willing to worship.  I feel that I get to go to church, not like I have to go.  That’s a good thing; there’s some discipline there.  My prayer life is where the lack of discipline rears it ugly head again.  I need to work on that too.

Without real, regular discipline, I don’t know how I make it from day to day sometimes.  A few experiences at work over the past few weeks have been a result of this issue as well.  Our work trucks at Green Diamond take daily beatings.  Travel between work sites are typically on rough gravel roads and (occasionally) off-road.  This can lead to functional issues, naturally.  Of course, though, I’m the driver whose had to deal with the majority of them over the past few weeks.  It has made me look like an operational maniac, when I honestly (and full well) have operated the vehicles like anyone else does–often “babying” the trucks more than not.  Last week, I took my most recent work truck in to get new tires at a local shop. 

Within minutes, the mechanic leads me over to the front right tire well to point out that the frame rail is completely fractured.  That’s a steel support rail, by the way.  So… no new tires; instead, a call to the boss for a solution.  Back at the office, I’m given my old work truck from a month ago (I was “upgraded” to the most recent truck from this one because a coworker had resigned; I got his truck).  This older truck is perhaps the most tender one in the fleet.  “Swell,” I say.  Knowing of the current issues with that truck, I continue to drive it the next few days without the frequent inspection it seems to require.  Then, on Friday, it dies while I’m driving it on the highway…  The serpentine belt is off the main drive and steam is pouring out of the oil well–the well was dry.  Either a slow leak was flowing without my notice, or the oil pump was disfunctional and just trapped the bulk of the oil that was left.  Again, I sit stranded with a broken work truck (fortunate that I was on the highway and not miles on-property, I guess).

Embarassed again, I call the office.  Tow truck and supervisor in route by an hour, and I was rescued.  Everyone seems to have a great sense of humor about the whole issue (i.e. the fact that I’ve single-handedly taken out two department trucks).  For once in my life, I don’t find much humor in something like this.  I feel embarassed, just terrible about it all.  We’re already strapped as it is for using adequate vehicles, so my recent escapades certainly can’t help.  Despite the reality that, more than likely, the issues with these two trucks have just been waiting to happen, I still feel responsible for their collective demise.  Perhaps with a little more discipline, I could have identified these problems long before they became an issue.  On the other hand, maybe I really don’t have much luck with anything.  I certainly don’t have any Irish in me. 

So now I have developed quite the record of transport-issues at Green Diamond.  Both of my trucks just decide to break.  One night, my quad crapped out; I could barely get it back to the truck (a few miles down a muddy drainage).  I got smacked in the face (under the helmet) with a stick while driving it another time, and then I’ve managed to get both trucks stuck somewhere (once per truck, respectively).  Is this all from a lack of discipline, pure stupidity, or just bad luck?

I have no idea, but I’ll blame it on adiscipline–that lack of order in my life.  I think that I am going to start on the hunt for some better luck too–cover all of my bases.  With all of the precipitation lately, dozens of rainbows seem to show up out here; maybe I’ll start at the end of one of them.  There’s a bit of humor still left, I guess.

Jun 03 0 comments
#Life

My own little caravan of courage, or, my caravan of little courage

There’s been this spider stuck on a web on the staircase of my building. It’s been hanging there for about 10 days, and I was away on vacation for five of them. I do appreciate that the spider, which seems to be caught on some other spider’s web, was sporting black and gold legs in obvious support of Mizzou, but I have this policy it’s violating.

I understand that spiders are an important in the fight against other buglife that can spread disease and annoyance. I also understand that I am never farther than 6 feet from a spider at any given time, according to the old wives’ tale, and I can accept that. But my policy states that when I have to see a spider in my living space, we are dealing with an overpopulation issue. There are plenty of dark corners and crevices that spider could be sitting in where I can’t see it, and I’m going to step on her if she leaves them.

This particular overpopulation occurrence should have been taken care of when I first saw the spider, but it was a bad time for me. It’s this big ugly web in our outdoor staircase that I don’t want to have to walk past, and it’s on the second floor landing of the staircase. I could have gotten a stick and walked back up to the landing to deal with the problem, but when I am leaving my apartment, I am almost always late, and that is not an option.

Then, when I am walking up the stairs, I usually do not remember about the spider until I am looking at it. At that point, I’m usually so tired that I don’t feel like walking back downstairs to get the stick and come up again. This has been compounded by the fact that I just came back from vacation and have been carrying groceries or cleaning supplies or luggage most times I’ve come up the stairs. Tonight was different, though.

Tonight, I remembered where the spider was and picked up a stick before climbing the stairs. It was about 3/4 inch thick and 15 inches long, and I was going to wrap the web up on the stick and throw it back down to the ground. Once I reached the second story landing, however, I paused for a long time. This Mizzou-themed arachnid was not a small creature, and I feared that if I started jousting the web, the owner of that web, which I presumed had to be bigger than it’s prey, would start crawling around where I could see it.

This prospect frightened me because I am, as my overpopulation policy suggests, scared of spiders. I don’t usually freeze up or run away from a spider, but I will vocalize my distaste and sometimes even jump back a step or two. Sometimes, I wonder how I can be so scared of spiders because I have spent so much time around them in scout camps and ravines and even my old apartment, but I am definitely arachnophobic. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. And when I start to picture a big spider, I don’t imagine a tarantula — I skip straight to that huge spider they fight in the Ewok movie, Caravan of Courage.

I had three recurring dreams as a small child, and one of them was about my irrational fear of spiders and conflicting love of Spider-Man. In the dream, I would be running around hiding in my house while Spider-Man tried to entice me to come out and lay down in a suspiciously coffin-like box that he would spray webbing over. It was supposed to protect me or help me do something, I don’t remember exactly since I was only about four, but I remember not wanting to have anything to do with it.

And so there I stood, stick in hand, web in sights, ready to remove the fear-inducing eye-store I’ve dealt with for 5 of the last 10 days. And I almost didn’t do it. Hell, I even considered asking a maintenance guy I saw yesterday to take care of the spider, but would have been too embarrassed. After a moment that probably wasn’t as long as I remember it being, I jabbed the stick into the web, twirled twice, and then tossed the whole thing onto the ground below. The feeling that came over me would best be classified as the heebedy jeebedies, but at least now I know that there wasn’t a bigger spider waiting for me.