[Before I even begin this post, I'd like to apologize preemptively for the shoddy formatting later on in the post. Interior designers don't build houses, they just make em look nice... I'm a blogger, not a programmer, so unless I get a figurative contractor to fix my house, it's gonna be bigger on the inside than on the outside... sorry... deal with it.]
Hey there killer!
Now that you and this blog have been introduced, broken the ice, learned where each other come from, what dorm each other live in, maybe even what each other's majors are, let's talk about me some more. Shall we?
My departure from Philadelphia, although seemingly abrupt and surprising to some, was anything but a surprise to me. Since I arrived in 'the illadelph' in the summer of 2004, I had been struggling in school, struggling with money, and struggling with myself.
Since actually telling the complete, unabridged, director's cut, Criterion edition of my slow, painful, decent into the abyss that is "Academic Dismissal" would require coherent sentences and maybe some sort of structure, and the use of punctuation... I've decided to put my 11 years of PowerPoint experience to good use.
Lady's and gentlemen, without any further ado, I give you:
"Just Rob's 16 Easy Steps to Being Just Like Just Rob"
or
"How I Learned to be a Sucker for Punishment"
- Have a sheltered, protected, perfectly choreographed, upper-middle class, conservative Jewish upbringing.
- Go to art school.
- Realize you had a sheltered, protected, perfectly choreographed, upper-middle class, conservative Jewish upbringing.
- Go to art school
- Meet fucked up people
- Be unable to relate to them
- Feel fake and empty
- Feel like you have no right to complain about anything
- Complain about everything!
- Become self destructive
- Don't go to class
- Don't sleep
- Don't eat
- Do drugs
- Become distant
- Hide your emotions (ed: bonus points for holding a conversation during a panic attack)
- Hit (what you believe to be) rock-bottom
- Want everything to be back to normal but do absolutely nothing to aid the process (ed: the longer this step lasts, the shorter the remaining steps will be)
- Hit rock-bottom (again)
- Repeat as many times as necessary
- Be perpetually broke (ed: items followed by an * have been found to work the best)
- Start smoking
- Max out any credit cards and stop payments
- Volunteer to handle any and all household finances
- Set up all utilities in your name*
- Unreliable roommates (or reliable roommates that hate you) preferable
- Sign up for services with subscription fees*
- Use auto bill pay if applicable
- Overdraw your bank account consistently*
- Get a job that you hate* (ed: not only will you never want to work, but this may help to speed along option 5)
- Start drinking heavily*
- Bars cost more than bottles
- Do not learn from your mistakes
- Sign a lease to move into a condemned house you've never been in undergoing renovation using non-union labor with no time frame of completion
- Wait a year
- Sign a lease to move into a condemned house you've never been in undergoing renovation using non-union labor with no time frame of completion
- Find someone to move into your current place of residence
- Agree on a specific day to move out
- Let move out day come and go and hope that the new tenant:
- forgets the date
- gets abducted
- spontaneously combusts
- Squat in your former residence until your new house is completed... unless things are becoming increasingly awkward and your new house still doesn't have walls and is at least three (3) months away from completion
- Contact every friend, acquaintance, random hookup that might have a spare room for you to live in temporarily
- Take the first offer you get (ed: if you receive multiple offers at the same time, choose the one that will make your life the most difficult)
- Leave most of your belongings in your old place of residence. Only bring the essentials:
- Computer
- Clothes
- Toiletries
- Shame and Embarrassment
- Overstay your welcome
- Stay one month for every week you originally thought/said you'd be staying
- Believe that everything is finally going to get better (seriously, for real this time)
- Move into (formerly) condemned house
- Retrieve all non-essential belongings
- Go to class
- Only go to the classes that you care about/enjoy/are awake for
- Make it to Winter Break
- Spend as little time with your family as possible
- Avoid controversial topics of discussion such as
- Examples:
- Money***
- Religion
- Sexuality
- School***
- Try your hardest to prevent any outside forces from creating discussion about aforementioned controversial topics
- Sample Problem #1
- You are home for break, but only for a week. It is 3:19am on Friday, December 29th. You get an email from your school's computer system informing you that an asterisk has been added at the end of one of your grades constituting a 'grade change.' Even though under almost no circumstances whatsoever is a single, tangible piece of paper (tuition bill, grades, blackmail) ever physically sent to your listed address, an online 'grade change' will automatically generate and send a physical, tangible grade report to your listed address. Do you:
- Change your listed address and hope the change is processed before the report is mailed?
- Hope the report has already been mailed and arrives before you go back to Philadelphia in less than two days?
- Wish you had several packs of cigarettes on hand?
- Prepare for the worst?
- Answer: all of the above
- Try to make yourself believe you are in the clear (but don't actually believe it)
- Screen your phone calls (ed: you should always screen your calls if you don't know the number, but now you might want to screen all your calls)
- Keep yourself busy or at least distracted
- Treat every minute like it's the last
- Review, remember, and rehearse the materials you prepared for the worst during the last step
- Get busted
- Don't answer your phone
- Chain smoke
- Check your messages
- Don't call back until you're confident in either:
- Your debating skills
- Your negotiating skills
- Your crying skills
- Your Jedi Mind Control Skills
- Put up enough of a fight
- Debate
- Negotiate
- Cry
- Don't waste your time with the mind control
- Give up
- Deal with it
- Prepare several responses to "So... um... what exactly is like... going on... with you?"
- Response for family members:
"No I'm not going to kill myself! No I don't think this is any reflection on mom and dad's parenting skills, I brought this upon myself. Yes I'll probably go back to college soon."
- Response for friends:
"I'm really gonna miss you guys. I'll be back as much as possible, I promise."
- Response for really close friends:
"Oh come on, you seriously didn't see this coming? Yeah, that's what I thought."
- Response(s) for potential employers (depending on the quality of the job):
"Of course I plan on going back to school, I just need to take a year off, get a temporary job, and save up money so I can go back and get my degree."
"Of course I plan on going back to school... is that before or after taxes? I just need to take some time off... wow, including dental? Really? I'd really like to get some real world experience... impressive 401k! And just nail down exactly what I want to do with my life... no I have no problem flying out to the LA office every other week."
- Do everything you can't do at home
- Drink
- Smoke
- Drink
- Drink
- Smoke
- Go to Wawa
- Smoke
- Don't tell anyone that doesn't need to know (including... no... especially your landlord)
- Make it a little harder for your parents than it has to be
- Offer little assistance when cleaning/packing
- Let them deal with your lease
- Eat all their food
- Get readjusted
- Be lazy and unenthusiastic enough to bother your family, but don't get carried away
- Sleep through your alarm
- Late enough to miss The View but not too late to catch at least the Showcase Showdown
- Apply for jobs, but don't look for them
- Keep your email client open at all times so you can tell your mom that you at least looked at the listings she sent you
- Beggars cant be choosers but hell, even homeless people don't take pennies!
- Avoid broadcast television from 12 noon until Oprah
- Everybody knows that early to mid afternoon is the perfect time to air commercials for online degree's, two year trade schools, and syndicated sitcoms about working class families that are often struggling to make ends meet (ed: I'm looking at you Roseanne... fat fuck!)
- Start blogging, both reading and writing
- Kill time
- Fill up with knowledge that is more focused, and (slightly) less useless than what you learn in core classes
- Keep your friends current with your doings
- Slow the slipping of your grasp on the English language
- Blogs can be updated as news breaks as opposed to newspapers
- Blogs are less painful than watching public interest stories
- Blogs are infinitely better than diaries
- Times New Roman = neater than handwriting
- Google's servers = cleaner than my room
- Keeping a diary = totally gay
So there you have it folks. I hope that answers any questions you might have had... if not then I hope it at least questions the answers that you did have. That's where I was, where I am, and a little bit of where I will be (well goddamn! It
does have some semblance of structured storytelling!) In just 16 simple points (not counting the countless other points) you've been given a comprehensive overview of the past two and a half (2.5) years of my life.
Some may see this as a sad overview, tragic even. Others might find this overview to be a glowing bastion of wisdom. Different others might view this overview as absolutely pathetic or maybe even full of hope. Even other different others might think this overview is as incomprehensible and unintelligible as a rough draft of
Eragon (and seeing as this overview has taken well over five (5) hours to complete, and I don't believe in revising, it very well may be.)
So what do I think?
Well I think this overview is just that... an overview. It
isn't good or bad, happy or sad, precious or worthless, insightful or meaningless... it just
is, and that's all.
Simple as that.
Such is life.It just is.-Just Rob
