Searching For What's Next

Hi. Remember me? My name is K. It’s been eight days since my last blog entry. That sounds pathetically like an opening line to a “blog writer’s anonymous” meeting or something. The truth is that, in addition to being busier than the proverbial one armed, one legged wallpaper hanger and butt kicker, I am completely distracted. It’s not just Netflix either. I just finished Lost Season 4, and season 5 isn’t out yet. I’m current on Burn Notice and Leverage, and CSI, NCIS and The Unit are in summer reruns at the moment. So, I’ve got a little down time from my non-stop, marathon TV show episode watching addiction until the Doctor Who DVDs come in the mail.

I wish I could explain this away as a garden variety mental unhinging, but I haven’t gone on a shooting rampage yet. Not that I would right now anyway. There’s the whole “Thou shall not murder” thing in the way, and people generally frown on having semi-random gunfire aimed in their general direction. Not to mention the fact that I’d have to clean the guns first after my last outing to the range (which has been a while). I have procrastination issues in addition to my many other character flaws. Besides, I’m running low on ammo and there’s not really anyone or anything that I think just really needs to be shot right now. That is, unless you count corrupt politicians and televangelists. They’ve always got it coming.

I think the source of my detour from coherent mental processing and the ability to put two sentences together is the realization that my life is boring, I no longer enjoy what I do for a living (mainly because of corporate seagulls adding plenty of fertilizer to my already overgrown workload) and I am generally not in a position to do anything about it in the immediate future. It didn’t help that I got in touch with a high school classmate via Facebook who owns his own engineering company making racecar parts and races cars on the weekends. Yes, I’m jealous.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame anyone else for the current state of affairs. Well, actually, I could be like everyone else and blame my parents. They’re easy targets. Sadly, though, I mostly did it to myself. My dad’s dad, before he died, would occasionally ask me “what I wanted to do as my life’s work” to which my reply was usually something like “Huh?”. It was supposedly Confucius who said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” Somewhere along the way, I started working and never took the time to find a job that I loved.

Now that I’m closing in on middle age, I’m trying to rectify that defect in my existence; however, I’m finding it difficult due to my upbringing (see I told you it was my parents’ fault) which gave me the mistaken impression that I was capable of doing anything. Actually, it’s not an entirely mistaken impression. I really am capable of doing just about anything I want to. The secret, however, is to figure out how to do what I want and get paid enough for my efforts to support the Queen in the manner to which she should be accustomed and support my various less profitable interests. I’m mean, shooting guns is fun and all; but, it just doesn’t pay enough to support my Netflix bill much less a wife and a mortgage unless you’re a professional hit man. That “Thou shall not murder” thing gets in the way of me of taking up that particular vocation. Morals really interfere with earning a conspicuously luxurious living sometimes.

To achieve my occupational renovation, obviously, I need a plan. This may be more of a challenge for me than others as I was not exactly a poster child for career planning when I was in school and not much has changed since I graduated. Fortunately, I have discovered several things that I do NOT want to do which I consider to be a good start. For instance, despite the fact that several people have told me that I’d be really good at it and that it would be a natural progression from what I am doing currently, I have absolutely no desire to become a lawyer. I have had my fill of the legal profession and the American judicial system thank you very much, and I’d be very pleased to walk away from it with my soul intact. Everyone thinks being a lawyer is prestigious, honorable, and respectable. The truth is closer to making sausage. It can be messy, disgusting, undignified and you really don’t want to know what goes on. I have thought about going back to school to study aerospace engineering given my love of airplanes, but the math really scares the stuffing out of me. I barely made it through calculus with a C. Then again, that may have been due, at least in part, to my lack of academic diligence at the time. I may come back to that one.

Or I may just work at being a starving writer/artist/pilot/potter/chef/etc. until I hit it big and become sufficiently wealthy such that I don’t care about being taxed into oblivion anymore. Hey, if you’re going to dream, dream big.