What job searching feels like these days

There’s an anecdote where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, ready to hunt.  But the lion can’t seem to focus on a single target and is overwhelmed by the mass variety of options around them and runs around in circles, allowing all of the gazelle to escape.  And so the lion goes hungry and takes an L for all their troubles with no payoff.

That’s basically pretty precisely what job searching feels like to me now.  It doesn’t help that I’m at this stage of my career and life where I don’t really know precisely what it is I want to do, whether or not I want to continue to try and climb up a ladder that I’m more disgusted and jaded with more often than not, or if I just want to seek out a more menial job that might pay well but have little room for advancement, but would provide me a steady paycheck, financial stability, and the ability to be more available to my budding family.

Furthermore, I’m in this pool of indecision on whether or not I should be looking at actual companies in the Atlanta area, or if I should be seeking out one of the supposed thousands of remote jobs out there in the new, coronavirus-aided working world, where I might consider taking some cuts for the right to work 100% remote.

What it all amounts to is me sitting in front of my computer with very finite amounts of time dictated by the sleeping/eating/awake times of my children, trying to find adequate jobs to apply for, much less even hope for callbacks, and hope that I have a modicum of capability to weed, vet and find potential without completely killing my career.

Needless to say, I’m often times feeling overwhelmed and dejected by the whole process, and I’m beginning to understand why there are services out there now where you pay to set up a profile and have someone else pimp your name out there for you.  There’s just so much variety and options in the searching fields now between numerous search engines, job boards and social media services, and that’s not even including the wealth of options out there that are remote.

And much like the lion that gets overwhelmed and owned by the gazelle and indecision, I’m left feeling dejected and a little hopeless that my search during my leave will bear not fruit, and I’ll be relegated to going back to work at a job that I’ve grown to loathe over the last few years.  Sure, I’m fortunate to have that to fall back onto, but in not even a perfect world, change is still the priority objective.

I don’t even know how to start writing again or where to even begin

Like the title to this post says, I’m just like, have no idea on what to do in front of a blank document anymore.  I feel like a stereotypical author character in a story who’s got writer’s block, and is staring at a blank word document, with the cursor blinking over and over again, before they resort to more coffee and/or more alcohol, sometimes both.  Most recently demonstrated by Finn Wittrock in the most recent season of American Horror Story.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about, quite the contrary, it’s just that I have so many things I’d like to write about, somewhere around 15-16 notes that I took as things I’d like to write about, but it’s been so long since I did any sort of writing or had any modicum of time to do any writing, that I’m just in this state of disbelief and paralysis of not knowing what to do, which is why I’m ironically writing nonsense to try and get myself in the mood to write the usual array of niche-topic bullshit that I tend to write about in my blog outside of bitching about how hard parenting can be sometimes.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that as long as #2 has no set schedule or routine as she is still but an infant under three months old and cannot be set to such just yet, that I will have no time or no capacity for anything really self-serving or hobbies like writing, that require some time, silence and setting, because I’m really that much of a head case that likes to have such just to write about professional wrestling, baseball, veiled social commentary or any of the rando crap that I write about.  

But now that I’m on official paternity leave, I feel that it is important to try and carve out a sliver of time here and there to try and give myself a little bit of reprieve from dad mode, because I know I’m getting short with life in general because I’ve been going too hard too long and without any substantial breaks, and it’s going to do nobody any good if I continue to go on like this without any bit of self-care periodically.

So, I’m going to try and shoe-horn in some writing time in the coming weeks, on top of all of the other things I’d like to accomplish while I’m on leave, like yard work, refinancing my house, possibly researching a bigger car while my current one still has a lot of value, casual job searching, and occasionally getting in a run periodically so my physical being doesn’t deteriorate like Sim City roads and rails when you have to take too much tax dollars away from their budgets.

I will probably sticky this post and supplant the very deliberate sticky of the tragic passing of Sonny Chiba post I made that I’m still upset over, and probably retroactively back-post all the writing of things that I wanted to write about that might still warrant some writing about, and that is if it’s not too late to write about some of the things that might’ve been a little on the more time sensitive spectrum.  

Which are always fun-not-fun to write about, because there’s very little chance that I’ll be in the same mental states to write about things when the impetus to want to write about them in the first place might be as much as 3-4 weeks old, or if I already know what fallout/aftermath of particular events might have been.

But that’s the kind of person I am, where I’m staunch and stubborn and if I wanted to write about it at some point, there’s high chance that I’m going to write about it now, and either pretend like it was done live, or hope nobody notices, but most likely the latter since I have zero readers in the first place and I probably don’t need to disclaim this anyway but whatever.

2 Under 2: The First Disney Trip (#066)

Going to Disney World with the kids was definitely something that was going to be inevitable, given its place as far as mythical wife and I are concerned.  A wedding in central Florida where the wife was to be one of the bridesmaids accelerated the trip, and no matter how ready or not we were, the time had arrived to take the girls down to Orlando for a lengthy trip that was chock full of memories, lessons, trials and tribulations, as far as I was concerned.

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It’s almost as if I spoke the TBS blet into existence

I found out about the existence of the TBS Championship from one of my friends who texted me, making a snide sarcastic remark about it, as if assumed that I had heard about it when it was unveiled.  Despite the fact that I’ve insinuated no less than a hundred times that I don’t have the time or capacity to watch let alone follow most wrestling things these days, his approach hasn’t changed, but I don’t care, because it’s through messages like this that give me any shred of knowing what’s going on in the business all the same.

Regardless, let me tell you how giddy I was to excitedly quickly Google “tbs championship” and see what this new blet was, and just how much satisfaction I received when it turned out to be basically exactly what I had sarcastically photoshopped back in May, when the news broke that TNT was going to shove AEW programming off of the network and onto TBS in favor of the NHL rights that they had acquired.

I mean seriously, it’s verbatim what I had “designed” with the exception being that the logo is plated in gold-brass instead of actually using one of the “wacky” colors of that the TBS logo is available in, because wacky variety equals the comedy that TBS declares itself to be.

But let us show for the record that I had basically called the inevitability of the TBS championship back in May, and by it coming to fruition, it further cements my self-proclaimed status as an Oracle of professional wrestling, as if that’s something to be proud of.

I will say though, good on AEW to make a women’s championship, because it is one of the few times in which they can say they beat the WWE to the punch, by implementing a mid-card title for the girls.  Sure, they don’t have women’s tag blets yet, but frankly they don’t have the roster depth to justify it yet, but they definitely have enough individual talents to warrant having a secondary blet for the women.

Now by making it a women’s blet, it kind of eliminates the possibility of a unification match with the TNT champion, since even AEW walks on eggshells at the idea of men versus women, but considering their edge-lord want to to do all the things that WWE won’t do, I don’t think it’s entirely off the table either for the time being.

But anyway, with the introduction of the TBS championship, it brings the number of blets available on AEW programming up to like 37, since they feature all the blets from Impact, the NWA, New Japan on top of their own, and if new blets keep being thrown into the mix, we’ll get to the point where the six-man tag champs will feud with the ten-man tag champs, and nobody will come out of the tunnel without a blet eventually.

This hilarious meme captures the danger of the potential that exists if television networks are the basis for them, and all joking aside, the Turner family has like 15 networks under their umbrella, and as long as Turner bullies AEW onto other networks, it’s only a matter of time before we might actually have the TCM blet, the truTV blet, and the Cartoon Network blet.

And I might actually eventually want some of them, for my own collection. 

Get with the times or get owned

TL;DR – smarmy New Yorker declares people who order their food online in advance are ruining lunch for everyone else

I know the topic of Chick fil-A is a contentious one for a lot of people.  Yes, they are/were run by some weird religious shitheads who are/were homophobic and probably also racist, and have been caught numerous times having donated money to some other hate-mongering shitheads and legitimately organized hate groups.

But their food is still delicious, there are two Chick fil-A’s within extremely convenient distance from my house, and I’ve got two kids that suck up all of my time and energy to where I have literally no time at all for myself, much less time to eat, and when I’m at a crossroads of Chick fil-A or starve to death, the chicken of bigots still wins out.  Sorry not sorry, is what the kids say these days, I hear.

Furthermore, Chick fil-A’s app is pretty much the greatest app on the face of the internet.  It’s smooth, has a clean and tidy interface, it’s smooth, executes clearly and without any bugginess or lagging, and it’s fucking smooth.  In less than 20 seconds, I can place an order and have it sent to one of the nearby CFA’s, and all I have to do is drive up and pick it up, and I barely have to interact with any of the eerily cheery teenagers and don’t have to do any exchanging of currency in person.

Not going to lie either, it gives me a semi whenever I show up to the restaurant, and pick the correct drive-thru lane, where I can check in and bypass multiple pleebs in the other lane, stumped by some luddite who doesn’t know what they want, needs a minute, and is paying in cash in person (and usually isn’t wearing a mask and is probably white but that’s besides the point here).

The point is, ordering food in advance and rolling in and picking it up is the true way of the future, and those who haven’t adopted it, or are not willing to adopt it, are fucking living in the past, and deserve to get owned for not getting with the times.

This smarmy Slate author and all the other pleebs he was in line with, deserved the loss of their lunch hours, for not having the wherewithal to be decisive and be prepared, because the pandemic only accelerated the timelines in which online ordering in advance was to become the more efficient and practical way to order food.

Chick fil-A has an outstanding app, but I’m definitely no stranger to using third-party apps or the restaurants’ sites themselves to put in my orders in advance.  Like Uber Eats or BeyondMenu, most of these sites will have no additional fees attached for pick ups, because you still have to get out of the house, drive somewhere and make a physical pickup, but most of the time, it’s still more efficient than waiting for someone to deliver, and usually cheaper too.

But the point is, those who are decisive and know what they want, deserve to be rewarded with the ability to get in and get out faster than those who want to rely on spontaneity or are indecisive on what they want to eat.  And if pleebs don’t want to get stuck in lines behind invisible customers, they need to both get with the times and learn to be more decisive in figuring out what they want to eat before they even put their shoes on and walk out the door.

Otherwise, I will continue to relish in skipping lines everywhere I go, to grab my pre-ordered, pre-paid shit, and be out the door while they’re stuck waiting, and getting owned. 

lol Alpharetta white people

SMH: racists sue city of Alpharetta because they can’t display the Confederate battle flag at a Veterans Day parade, get shot down in court; however, due to the attention, the city opts to cancel the parade outright

My reaction to reading this story was the following line, said in the mocking southern white supremacist impression I’ve found myself doing an awful lot more than I used to since 2016: 

if I cain’t be racist at the parade, I don’t want there to be a parade at all.

That’s kind of the takeaway of this whole story.  Supposedly, the parade still happened, whether or not it was sanctioned by the city in the first place, I don’t have the care to dig and find out, but supposedly the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not participate or fly any Confederate battle flags during it.

Either way, Alpharetta is a super white suburb north of Atlanta, and I’m actually more surprised that the courts ruled in favor of outlawing the Confederate battle flag, given their demographics.  But Alpharetta is also pretty flush with new money which tends to lean towards the left, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned throughout history, money speaks louder than racism and political correctness, and by product of it, sometimes the right calls are occasionally made.

The rando wrestling post

Looking through my queue of random notes of things I wanted to write some words down about, I realized that there was the opportunity to occasionally consolidate some things into singular posts, to both artificially suppress my imaginary queue of important things to post about, as well as not to bore my zero readers with too much rambling about specific topics that really I’m the only one who cares too much about.

Naturally, my brog wouldn’t be the brog without there being random observations about professional wrestling, and although I’m having a tremendously difficult time keeping up with the business these days on account of having, no time at all, I sometimes try to keep up by either watching the top 10 clips that show up on YouTube, or by watching episodes of WWE or AEW, by fast forwarding through most of it.

Seriously, when I do that, I don’t even watch the wrestling itself; I usually fast forward until when I think the match could be potentially come to an end, and just try to watch the endings to the matches, just so I can see what post-match interactions there are.  Also, promos, because I like to see the progressions of stories and not the actual wrestling product itself, in comparison.

Watching one of the more recent episodes of NXT two-point-oh, it’s evident of what the directive of the product is, and I kind of do really understand that Triple H’s NXT was still anchored by a bunch of older performers, when NXT really was designed to be a training ground of young, up-and-coming talent, and not a place for outside stars to assimilate into the WWE machine.  I can’t say that I’m at all that impressed with the transition, nor its obnoxious ADD color schema, but I do understand the end game with the repackaging of NXT.

But there was an ending to the show where women’s champion Raquel Gonzalez was jumped by a new stable of women, and I couldn’t help but get flashbacks to Takeover: Brooklyn III, where Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly jumped Drew McIntyre after he won the NXT championship, only to be joined by a debuting Adam Cole, and the three of them stood over the champion, signaling the arrival of a new faction.

When Gigi Dolin and Jayce Jane jumped Gonzalez and then were joined by a repackaged Mandy Rose, with the three of them standing over her prone body afterward, it basically felt precisely like the debut of the Undisputed Era, all the way to Rose grandstanding with the championship.  I mean, with the Era all but dead now, with two of them in AEW, why shouldn’t NXT just swap the genders and try the whole idea all over again?

Sure, Mandy Rose was never a stalwart in the ring, Jane is as green as ten Lex Lugers, and Priscilla Kelly Gigi Dolin will probably never let her whole arsenal be used, so I can’t help but bet that they’ll never reach the heights of the UE, but at least they had a cool debut and looked good in the process.

Moving onto the other company, I feel like I had a home run of an analogy of how the world of professional wrestling fandom kind of feels like these days:

AEW is basically like Sega, while the WWE is unmistakably Nintendo.

Continue reading “The rando wrestling post”