March 14, 2014

A Lamp Unto my Feet

I started working! for a t-shirt company! It's awesome and fun!

Okay, now that I've got that off my chest, I can tell you, faithful reader, about it. First off, allow me to clarify, this is my second part time job which brings me up to about 2/3 of a full time job. I host Quizo in Philly. Two Quizos, actually. One is at the New Deck Tavern in U City and the other is the absolute farthest away from New Deck as possible. The Victoria Freehouse on Front St. Luckily, they are on different days or I would probably just die.

Here's the thing you have to know. I love Quizo. I mean it. I really love Quizo. I love trivia. I love bars and spending time with people. Quizo combines all of those things but with the added benefit of always being right and getting paid for it. I look forward to my quizzing days like a child looks forward to Christmas. or Halloween because let's face it, Halloween is the shit. Hosting Quizo gives me the ability to pay most of my bills and live my daily life without collapsing into a jiggly weeping ball of gelatin at the vaguest mention of bills I owe or money or gas prices. And it's Quizo and my boss is awesome. I love it.

My boss must think I'm awesome too, because he now pays me to go to his warehouse and do worky things for his t-shirt biz too! Double the fun! This will either be the best job working for the coolest guy, or we will spend too much time together, freak out, and never speak again. However I think the later is highly unlikely. Mainly because bills. And I don't know what I would do without Quizo in my life.

I'll be brutally honest with you, everyone on the internet, I have been slipping into a depression the past few months and it sucks. Being unemployed makes me feel like an utterly useless human being. I'm fun! I have skills! I like people! Hire me dammit!

Unemployment is like a dark black oubliette that's cold and lonely and why get out of bed at the crack of mid-afternoon? No one loves me, I have no friends (even the sun left me!), I'm a burden to those around me, everyone in the western hemisphere thinks i'm useless and unskilled and I don't know, maybe they think I kick puppies. (Side note: I don't kick puppies.) 
My Oubliette

I'm sure that everyone hits a funk now and then, but this wasn't a funk. If you sit in that oubliette long enough, with all of the darkness in you written out on the walls in lights, it's all you can see. You start to believe it. Even now I don't believe it when someone tells me that I'm cool, or nice, or a good friend or, last week Ronan (my boss. bosses. new bff. whatever) told me that I am a likable person and that everybody likes me. Everybody likes me? No, Ronan's just messing with me. There's no way that people can think I'm a useful human being. They just don't know me well enough. It's insanity. No one can live like this. Not for an extended period of time. It will break your soul.

Having a job is like having Hoggle (Labyrinth reference) open the door at the bottom of that little room, call the sun over and allow the light to shine on your face. Why yes, I do have to wake up and get dressed today, I have to go to work. No, I can't stay out late tonight guys, I have work in the morning. I have a reason to wake up. I have a reason to leave the house. I feel appreciated and useful and skilled.
Having a job is like that.

So if you know someone who is going through a long-term unemployment, invite them out. Ask them over to watch movies or just hang out. There is nothing worse than felling like your friendship is a burden to someone and that's what not having a job feels like.
Hopefully and prayerfully, I will kick ass at this job and they will think I'm as awesome or awesomer that what they expected in hiring me and Everything else in my life will fall into place. Okay, that may be expecting a bit much from a part-time job, but I feel a change inside of me for the better.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I'm no longer in an oubliette, but in a tunnel, and I can see the light now. and the way out.