After giving my first podcast a try, I noticed I couldn’t get the “Show/Hide Player” and “Popup” to work. It was already past midnight, but rather than just turn in and try again in the morning, I resolved to work on it until it was fixed.

I spent three hours on the problem and finally gave up at 3AM. Man was I cheesed. I hated it when something wasn’t working right, but the more I kept at it, the more it seemed to break. When I woke up the next morning, I sat down and resolved the issue inside of 5 minutes. Sheesh. I need to learn how to let things go until I can come back to a problem with a better frame of mind.

I had other issues to fix though, but nothing really urgent (an invalid feed here, a few poor link colors here, etc..) Still, I spent the better part of my day just doing blog related housekeeping. I hadn’t even eaten till around 4.

I think I need a life. With my plans of attending law school shot to hell, I guess with nothing better to do I’ve been turning my focus to blogging again, even though I’m still not really sure what my niche should be. Hearing the success stories of how some bloggers have managed to monetize their blogs to the point that they could quit their full time jobs has me wistfully yearning for the same. With few exceptions, there’s nothing I’d like more than to travel the states and abroad, living the life of a nomad without being tied down to a job that keeps me in one place. And wherever I went, I’d use my newfound freedom to try to help people. It was the kind of life I could only dream about.

Theoretically, such a life could be possible by being a professional blogger (or writer). But the problem with me is that I have nothing interesting to offer (which also explains why no woman wants me either). I don’t have the kind of material that could draw a large crowd, and I’m just not smart enough or creative enough to build content that could land me a sizable audience. The really sad thing is that I consider writing to be one of my better talents, and I still suck at it. Ugh.

I guess even after 30 years on this planet, I still don’t know who I am, what I like, what I should do, or what I’ve been made to do. This sense of helplessness and lack of purpose is what continues to fuel the suspicion that maybe I wasn’t meant to be born after all. But if I was, then the question remains: who am I? Am I a writer? A preacher? A musician? An actor? A lover? No…. definitely not a lover.

I guess hiding under a rock for most of my life has made me completely ignorant of what really matters to me. Maybe the more I put myself out there, the more I can come to know where my niche really lies.

God has seen fit that I should not make my journey through life without having a persistent, (and oftentimes irritating) conscience to guide me. Unsure as to how I could introduce this important figure on my blog, I decided just to name “him” Jiminy Cricket. And my old friend Cricket was at it once again when I took the stack of textbooks and primers I had bought some time ago to prep for law school, and started putting some of them up for bid on eBay.

“What are you doing?” Jiminy inquired.

“I’m selling my books. My law school plans are done. It’s time to move on.”

“Why don’t you wait a little while longer?? You might still be able to go!”

“Why?? My boss screwed me over, it’s already two weeks past the deadline to make a deposit, it’s finished!”

Ole’ Jiminy then hopped onto my desk. “Give God a chance to work, it’s not over yet. There’s still plenty of time, and God always tends to move when things look impossible.”

I threw my hands up in frustration. “Look, how long do I have to put up with this? My prayers haven’t been answered, in fact just the opposite of what I asked for happened. I’ve been running around in circles with this for over 18 months. I’m sick of it. I’m tired, and I just want to move on with my life.”

“You need to be patient, my friend. You’ve seen in the past that God is never in a hurry. Give Him space to work.”

“Space this,” I said, and shooed Cricket away as I placed 2 of my law books up on eBay.

Ahhh, Friday has arrived at last, giving me a little time to reflect on the failure that is my life.

I couldn’t help but notice how the entire world and God Himself blew me off this week. I got blown off by my boss when I begged him for help in working new hours so I could go to law school. I got blown off by my union rep in trying to resolve some of the ongoing issues at work, from the mouse droppings on my desk to the bigwigs’ initial refusal to accommodate my disability. I got blown off by personnel, who I inquired of for a transfer so I could get the *bleep* out of here. I got blown off by Uptown Girl, who strung me along for weeks before finally ignoring me altogether. I got blown off by friends, by family members, and finally God Himself, who I’ve appealed to repeatedly with many tears and pleas for answers and relief from my troubles.

And now, once again, it’s Friday night and I’m here all alone, with only the wedding photo of a girl I had a crush on here at work to keep me company. Evidently someone thought it’d be nice to leave a copy of our department newsletter on my desk, turned precisely to the page that showed a caption and photo of her recent wedding. Thanks dude! assface…

My latest failures, the problems at work, the loss of yet another career dream, the loss of my latest romantic prospective, all finally took its toll on me last night. As I went through my normal work routine, I suddenly broke down and started sobbing. A wave of depression came over me like a dark fog, draining all my energy and strength. I just wanted to sleep and never wake up again. A day later, the depression is still lingering around (and probably will for a while).

It’s times like this when I start to wonder if my parents can still collect life insurance from me if I commit suicide. But for the time being, I decided instead to enjoy tonight’s lineup of Stargate and House, and go to hell with myself by ordering pizza. With extra toppings. And a chicken roll. And some cheese fires. And baked ziti.

Yep, I’m going full on Italian tonight. To heck with you all.

It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either.

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along.

It was quiet yesterday at work. My boss hadn’t said a thing, and nobody came to clean up the mouse poo either. I’m assuming this means the men upstairs haven’t spoken to my boss yet about anything. Guess they don’t want show they can be bossed around by a lowly civilian, so they’re dragging their heels. Oh well, if the mice continue to use our area as their own personal restrooms for another few days, and upstairs still doesn’t do anything about it, I may have to call OSHA. If it comes to that, I can probably expect some real fireworks then.

Like a good possible-future-but-not-likely attorney, I realized if I was going to make a solid case for discrimination, I needed to give my boss and upstairs enough rope for which they could hang themselves. As of now nothing really happened that was actionable. One of the elements needed to make a successful cause of action is show that there had been harm. So I asked myself, “Where’s the harm here?” The only thing I received thus far was an idle threat, but my hours hadn’t been changed, I hadn’t lost any pay, and I hadn’t been disciplined. So rather than be a good boy and inform these lovely folks what rights I’m entitled to under the ADA, I think it’s best to stay quiet and see just how far they’ll take their threats.

I also realized with some sadness that as long as there would be this much turmoil in our division, I’d never be able to attend law school. All the added stress would make me flunk out my first semester for sure. I needed some stability at my job before I could take such a risk, and with them jerking me around about changing my schedule and creating other needless chaos, who’s to say that even if they agreed to a schedule change, that they wouldn’t pull the rug right out from under me the minute I started school?

Oh well. It ain’t over till it’s over. For now I just have to keep rolling with the punches.

The REAL storm wasn’t the Nor’easter that recently hit us, it was the one that followed me to work today (and beyond).

When I came in I proceeded to get absolutely pummeled by a mountain of work, completely catching me off guard because stupid me, I actually thought the Nor’easter would create a slow work day for us. Yeah right. Evidently our esteemed court system thought otherwise, and happily dished out more restraining orders than I’ve ever seen in 3 lifetimes. Good grief.

Then I got into it with my boss as I kept grilling him for why he was refusing to help me in putting a schedule together that would allow me to go to law school. His ultimatum was that if I didn’t like it I could always transfer out, and with a shrug he washed his hands of the whole matter.

But it didn’t stop there. I complained to him about the mouse droppings that were on my desk, and he asked me why I didn’t clean it up myself. Was this guy purposely being dense here, or was he just born an assface? You don’t just clean mouse droppings with a simple wipe and expect it to be clean. The area needed to be sterilized before it can be used again. But this seems to matter to my boss, not at all.

Then I found out he was no longer authorizing overtime for my coworkers, which meant I’d be by myself at the busiest time of day to man the phones, an absolute no-no for me since I was hearing impaired. I did the best I could under the circumstances, but after dealing with clerks who spoke secondhand English with a thick accent for the better part of an hour, I knew it was not going to be a good day.

The day would mercifully come to an end, but not before I find out that Uptown Girl had in fact been stringing me along this whole time, and never did have any serious interest in me, except possibly as distant friends. Gee I wish I would have known that before I sent her the damned flowers for her birthday. I want my 30 bucks back.

What a day.