Ramblomatic

Sitting at Sugar Brown's, desperately wishing I didn't have to be working on this junk - junk being documentation for an outdated system at the company I work for. This particular system hasn't been used in five years, but my job is to go through and document the entire system just in case we missed something before we shut it all off.

When I got out to my car this morning to drive out here, I had an unpleasant surprise. Some asshole decided it would be a good idea to put a bumper sticker on the back of my new (used) car, and then key up the trunk and the rear bumper. Sunday night, coming back from Celtic Ensemble, it was pouring rain, and the closest spot I could find to park was between two gigantic pickups, both of which were over the line on the left by about 5 inches or so. Thus, in order to park there, I had to shift over slightly - and since I don't drive one of those gas-guzzling behemoths, I was only just barely over the line.

The bumper sticker said "I PARK LIKE AN IDIOT" with a nice illustration to boot. Well done. As you might very well be thinking, I am ashamed of my erroneous parking ways, and am a new person. I have had an epiphany! Things will be different from here on.

On another (perhaps related) note, I have come to find that I just can't stand Christians in this town - and I am one. It seems like every time I come here (SBs) or nearly anywhere else in Lubbock, I encounter a person or group of people meeting for the sole purpose of discussing Jesus in the loudest voice possible - so they're not really talking to you, but at you. Perhaps this is a bit over the top, but from what I can hear (snippets of conversations) their intolerance and bigotry is in direct proportion to their volume.

I need to talk to my chairman soon about possibly TA'ing this summer. I don't know how much it will pay, but as long as it is just barely enough, I won't have to work at this place anymore. It pays really well, sure, but the fact of the matter is that I'm spending ten hours of my life every week on something that I'm not learning from and that I have every intention of quitting as soon as I'm able to do some work that's actually related to my area of interest. My ideal situation, even now, would be to work as a TA for the university, and just take classes. I know that even then, I would probably be doing it for a class that isn't related to my research, but at the very least it would count for something later on, and I could learn from it. More than I can say for my situation at present.

The other battle I've got to fight to be able to stay here over the summer to take classes and work is with my family. I wonder if it's common to meet with this much resistance (r.e. graduate work), but for some reason everyone seems to think I need to just do an MS (read: if I absolutely must) and go back into industry. What makes all of this difficult is that even with my current wages, I'm not quite ready to be totally financially independent - if I can save up enough money over the summer, I might be in the fall, and getting the car and insurance in my own name was a big step. But essentially, money is what it always comes down to. My conversations on this topic with my mom always boil down to that: "so long as I'm paying for things, I will tell you how it's gonna be."

Last chapter in this rant. I desperately want to be a validated musician - that is, I want to be one of those people: able to just show up at a session and play it down. I don't have the repertoire or the chops just yet, and with my schedule and academic pursuits nearly diametrically opposed to that kind of development, it isn't easy. But the feeling I get from playing the little bit that I do know how to play is so fulfilling that I just can't let it go. That's why it just kills me that I probably won't ever make it Zoukfest, or even one of the Friday night pub sessions. I'm entirely too aware of my own shortcomings as a trad musician for the latter (primarily, I just don't know the tunes well enough), and I have to spend my summers working and taking classes if I want any hope of actually getting a damned degree in a reasonable amount of time and without going into serious debt.

And, to wind it all up, even though the pay is great, that's why I'm in what I consider a dead-end job. Because at the end of the day, what really matters is being able to pick up an instrument and strike up a tune, not being able to sit down at a computer and retype ten pages of code into a Word document.

Be excellent to each other.