Hey pal!
This summer somehow passed and it’s been… kind of stable? I’ve had zero weird encounters with anyone and I’ve become a functioning member of society.
Wait, what am I saying? No I haven’t:
In the spring of this year, my 96 year-old grandmother, Betty, was moved from her home to an assisted living facility. At the time she was in pretty poor shape, but somehow has made a miraculous turnaround and is as feisty and seemingly healthy as ever. Today I visited her with my dad, and there was a new person in the facility. The new person walked to our table and sat down, and Betty said begrudgingly, “Oh boy. Here’s ol’ C-R-A-Z-Y.” The new person turned her head and stared directly at Betty, saying nothing. Betty then turned to me and said, “Well. There she is. Just L-O-O-K-I-N-G at M-E.” The woman stared at us for around five minutes, us sitting there trying to act like everything was normal, until she finally got up to leave. I said, “It’s highly likely she knew how to spell, grandma.” My dad said, “Seems kinda like this new lady wants to rumble!”
I enrolled my kid in a two-week chess camp a few weeks ago, and it was held in a largely abandoned mall that has apparently become the primary “sex trafficking hub in the Portland metro area”????? Needless to say, I opted to work remotely from said mall. You know, to keep an eye on things. Did I eat every day at places like Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon and some place called Dickey’s BBQ? I’ll never tell. Did I call the mall cop on some suspicious looking young white man in camo pants and an anime t-shirt (that he was obviously way too old to be wearing) because he appeared to be scoping the place out for some kind of heist? Yes I did. Karen’s here and she has one thing to say: Not on my watch, CHAD.
If you enroll your kid in a two-week chess camp they come home with all these fun new habits such as letting you watch re-enacted moves they made in previous matches, and enlist you to do this super fun thing in all your games called notation where you have to write down every single move in a SPECIAL CHESS LANGUAGE and it’s super confusing and your 7 year-old makes you feel like a big fucking moron while you do this all while beating your ass at a game where apparently you’re supposed to be coming up with a long-term strategy and after you lose for the 100th time you become the Family Joke when it comes to anything related to strategy or math or general intelligence.
A friend told me about an amazing job opportunity that had my name written all over it so I decided to “take the meeting”, which turned into like six meetings and before I knew it I was negotiating my start date and my new boss had made plans to invite herself and her children over to meet my real-life chickens. And if you’re thinking, “wait a minute, I thought she just started a new job” then you would be accurate! I DID just start a new job, and despite the fact that this wasn’t planned at all, I decided to completely upend my brand new life and quit that job exactly four months later. Some learnings on this:
Know what’s not hard? Quitting a remote-only job after four months. You can even do that shit via email! “Sayonara suckers, I’m out!”
Some jobs are hard. Some jobs are easy. I recommend everyone go from a hard job to an easy job at least once in their lifetime, preferably during their favorite season. That just so happens to be what I did. You guys. I haven’t had a summer like this since elementary school. And it’s not like I wasn’t doing my job. I simply had time to spare! I legit nailed my projects each day and then was able to pursue some of my greatest dreams in life. Case in point, the week I figured out how to solve a Rubik’s cube:
My first meeting for this new job interview ended up being a walking meeting. You know what the worst possible interview scenario for someone like me is? A Walking Meeting. Except throw in a coffee drink to the mix as well. Do I walk in the middle of these two women? Or pick a side? What if I get out of breath, or worse, sweaty? What kind of shoes should I wear? How am I supposed to carry on a conversation while I am managing all of these unforeseen circumstances (i.e. people walking toward me from the opposite direction and making sure everyone has enough distance on the sidewalk to not touch one another, taking sips of coffee between sentences so that it appears I am both grateful and at-ease, coming up with conversation topics and thoughtful questions while observing a homeless dude 50 yards away shitting in plain sight and pretending like I’m cool with it, ensuring my arms are swinging how the other people are swinging their arms, etc.)
When you quit a job where nobody is really all that invested from a relationship standpoint, they don’t really tell the other staff that you’re leaving or why. So then the people you were on the cusp of becoming friends with will reach out to you after you’ve left and say things like, “Look, I don’t know what the circumstances were, but I hope you’re okay and let me know if you need anything at all.” In other words, these people think I got fired. Which would be way more acceptable if THE JOB WAS DIFICULT or IF I HAD DONE SOMETHING TERRIBLE or IF THEY HAD BUDGET CUTS but none of those things were true and now everyone believes I was fired because I couldn’t hack it.
I have a title for my summer of 2022, by the way. Coastal Summer. The Summer I Coasted. I made a playlist to commemorate the time, and I believe this might be the best playlist I’ve ever made. I’m sharing it with you because you’ll love it. It’s great for driving, running, walking, cooking, or solving Rubik’s cubes.
I start my new gig on Wednesday, and I am legit excited. I’m knowingly going into something that will in no way be easy, nor will it enable my newfound coasting lifestyle, but I’m so ready. Onward, pal!