What Am I Doing With My Life?!

[Editor's note: This guest post comes from a good friend of mine, Jason Cook, who recently lost his job at a magazine. A talented writer, you can find his musings on sports, video games, music, and more over at his site. If you have a story you want to share, let me know!]

I considered myself one of the lucky ones. I had a (granted, part-time) job in my desired field at a comfortable location with co-workers I got along with that paid enough for me to at least pay some bills. I decided to finally move out of my parents house and move to a new city. But the Rhode Island economy is not exactly stable, so finding another part-time job to supplant my income became difficult.

My bank account began to dwindle, but I was trying to make it all work. Then rent and utilities, student loans, and health insurance started to catch up to me. I had a few leads on some part-time jobs and I still had the magazine to pay some bills. Plus, I had some freelance work to earn some extra cash. I wasn’t living the high life, but I was getting by.

In my six short months, I had seen people leave the magazine, as it’s — to understate it — belt-tightening time in the print journalism industry. I had never thought I was next.

Then, as they say, life got in the way.

I was let go — in part for financial reasons, in part for performance reasons — for the first time in my working life. By e-mail!

But my story is far from unique and not the reason I am writing this. I could be bitter. Maybe pull some proletariat dream scenario and go to the office and tell everyone to go to Hell. I could beg for my job back, promise better performance and ask for one more chance.

That’s not me.

I decided to take this situation as a kick in the ass. A wake-up call. A motivator. With no more tethers to my home town, I am now free to pursue seeking employment in my field in Rhode Island with renewed vigor. I decided to take my superiors criticisms — taking my job more seriously, improving on accuracy in editing and writing, and a score of other remarks — as constructive, rather than derisive. Call it a “I’ll show them” attitude.

Things will certainly be hard for a while, but they’ve been that way for a month or so now. No (or much, much less) going out. Cutting back on frivolous spending. Focusing on managing my money better.

I never wanted to stay forever at my first job in the magazine business anyway. I often felt like a rat on a sinking ship. The future is passing them by. That’s not to say I hated my job — far from it. But it was the first step on my career path. And even though we left on poor terms (in that it was not a mutual decision), I was assured to be given good recommendations should I ask them.

I had never before bought into all these “I was fired from my job and now I have a new angle on life blah blah blah” stories. What did I care? I had a part-time job in my field right out of college. This stuff was easy. Well it’s not easy.

I am hoping to take a lot of lessons from these next few weeks. Reflecting on my time at the magazine — what I could have done better, what I did well, the great people I worked with — and looking ahead. Lemons; lemonade and such.

Oh, and you can bet I am printing out that e-mail and tacking it up at my desk.

Jobs and Careers

Motivation can be a difficult thing to come by, especially when dealing with a task that you know is going to take several years. For example, I’ve been brushing up on my math in order to test out of as many classes as possible for this summer. Since I have decided to go back for Electrical and Computer Engineering I face the prospect of having to fight with the part of my brain that has atrophied since high school: any part of it dealing with math (and to some extent the hard sciences).

What I need to do is get myself back up to calculus by June, possibly the end of May. This is no easy task when you haven’t touched calc since Spring (possibly it was the prior fall) of ’04. That’s a lot of ground to make up, and I’ve realized I’ve forgotten most of it. So really, I need to cover Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calc all over again. Fortunately, I’ve found that The Khan Academy is a great resource when paired with a text book. Essentially, I can blow through the introduction of a chapter and the learning phase in roughly 10 minutes thanks to the instructional videos there, and reinforce the learning with examples in a text book. It’s a great system, and free (plus a book on whatever topic you’re studying). In addition to that, because of the interdisciplanary approach to marine science technology that the program I’m looking at takes, I need to also take chemistry, physics (duh), and biology (and I would assume marine biology) as well.

That is a shit ton of work that I need to be doing. I figure I can only take one math course at a time because they build upon each other, and if I have to go through them all as courses, that’s adding several semesters of time on to the actual learning for the program. That’s time and money that I don’t have. The sensible, smart, and monetarily savvy thing to do is to spend every waking moment that I’m not working (meaning all of them, because I’m not) on math, and following that up with bio/chem/physics. I managed to do this for a few weeks before I burnt out because of the pace I was going at.

My challenge now is to get myself to put pencil to paper again, and just grind on through. It has proved to be far more difficult than I imagined. It is quite easy to push it off until tomorrow, and I mean why not, its not like I have anything going on?

Well, that may be changing. Today, I took the Census test and am essentially guaranteed a job because I’m not drooling from the mouth and am able to drive, understand instructions, and capable of asking people 10 questions. Also, they need more enumerators than they’ll find here on the lower Cape. And the pay is way better than you’d ever get working on a campaign, and you’re only expected to work 8 weeks. That’s not bad. The problem is that if I’m doing this full time, it takes away my learning time, which has fallen by the wayside anyway.

So what I’m proposing is a deal to myself. Starting immediately after this post, my week days need to have a minimum of 5 hours of study, and a half hour of exercise (yeah, let’s throw that in there for good measure). Otherwise, you have to take the census job or another. Why? Because this is my full time job, and it will pay dividends in the not-so-distant future. Also: yes I know it isn’t a week day, I’m atoning for yesterday’s most excellent *insert Bill and Ted guitar riff* display of sloth.

First on today’s agenda: not math, but instead getting my Java take-home midterm out of the way. Then reading one chapter in that text, and moving on to some algebra afterwards.

Jobs and Careers, Re-Education census, Jobs, learning, Math, motivation, Re-Education, work