Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Striking Out (In a Good Way)

[Hi. I'm going to be utterly shameless and pretend that the past however many months of inactivity haven't happened. I hope you'll indulge me. If you won't, well, there's always bribery by baked goods, so maybe that'll work.]

I'd like to start off by saying, in an answer to the last post on my lovely blog, I didn't make it into Pitch Wars. I did, however, make it into Pitch Madness, and had both some success and some failure there. Overall I was pleased.

Except for when I thought I might actually get a contract with an agent and then got the email that dashed that for the moment. But hey, you win some, you lose some, and you spend more time in life doing an abbreviated cha-cha than probably walking in a straight line.

I have no idea if that made any sense, but I've already put in an hour and a half of overtime this week, and it's only Tuesday.

Good news! I got a job in my degree field (chemistry) and moved out of my parents' house. This is the start of my second full week in my little apartment and, coincidentally, the beginning of the second full week of my new job.

I am a performance grade (PG) binder technician. This has to do with asphalt, and what I do is that I look at the binder, or the stuff that holds what crews later put on the road together. I run lab tests on it (I get to use a blowtorch on a regular basis, how cool is that?) and I ensure that product meets certain specifics. So, if we have a batch of something the guys at the tank farm have made up, I get to certify that it meets certain requirements and can actually be used.

It's pretty cool. It's fun, it's definitely different, and I do enough different tests to where my days are probably not going to devolve into the pattern of "same shit, different shift."

Also, said job pays more than minimum wage (not that there's anything wrong with minimum wage, but let's be honest, minimum wage isn't a living wage, not in today's world), and has a full benefits package. I have my own health insurance. I'm twenty-four years old, a recent college graduate, and I have a job that's got benefits and a 401(k).

With all that good stuff comes the other side of it - I pay my own rent, and my own utilities. I caved in today (because Mother Nature has seen fit to dump snow on CNY like it's still January) and turned up my heat (because I don't need pneumonia), and I'll also pay my gas bill, too. However, I don't have cable, with no real intentions of getting it, either, but I did go get a MyFi from AT&T, because the whole living without internet thing? Yeah, not a big fan of that. I lasted a week, and then realized that I would probably burn through all of my data and going over that wouldn't make my mother happy.

So this is really the first time I've been out and about in such a way on my own. Yes, there was that little apartment my ninth semester of college, but it wasn't really mine. I had to give it back. Granted, if I move out of here I have to basically do the same thing, but it feels different. And that's the important part.

Do I feel like an adult? Eh, sometimes. Usually more so in the morning when I put coffee in a to-go mug, fight rush hour traffic, and park my little Buick between the massive pickup trucks everyone else in my building seems to drive.

I'm quite happy where I'm at, and content to take it a day at a time.
"The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't."

-Joseph L. Mankiewicz