Today, I used the above wrestling gif in a work group chat thread, and it was 100% topical and relevant to the conversation that we were having.
I can’t remember the last time I felt more satisfied in my professional life.
Shoutout to the company for not putting a purchase limit on an on-sale item and not anticipating that an ambitious customer would literally purchase 600 of them and completely derail an entire promotion.
We’ve already found their eBay listing, re-selling them at a profitable price point, but there’s nothing the company can do about it, except marvel at one man’s entrepreneurial spirit.
: Bentonville teenager accepted into numerous prestigious schools, among them multiple Ivy League schools and . . . Georgia Tech
Shoutout to this kid who decided to flash his Georgia Tech acceptance letter in the same photograph with Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and Stanford. He must really think highly of their robotics program, or perhaps he’s a thrill-seeker wanting to go to a school where students are allowed to concealed carry.
Aside from the obvious clowning about Georgia Tech, this kid really is among the higher-tier TRYHARDs of the SZN, having notched five of the eight Ivies, and it seems pretty clear that Brown and Dartmouth are the Ivies that people either forget and/or don’t care about, because of all these TRYHARD stories that I’ve been trying to track this SZN, those are often the two that are omitted with these kids. Or maybe Harvard is trying to outreach and not be so staunch, while Brown, Dartmouth and seemingly Yale want to keep their velvet ropes up intact and do as much curating as possible.
Either way, what drew my attention was the fact that this particular TRYHARD being from Bentonville, Arkansas, to which I would guess most people might be aware, is known for being the home and headquarters to one of the biggest capitalistic cancers in history, Walmart.
Which begs the question of what if this bright young man were to forego the pursuit of college, and be one of those guys that just got his foot in the door young to a literal Fortune #1-caliber company like Walmart and just began applying himself into the corporate grind.
As unsexy as it might seem, there are countless stories of people who enter large corporations at the ground level, and through almost no other means than longevity, eventually begin climbing up the corporate ladder, and by the time their peers have graduated college with avalanches of student debts, they’re sitting in management with a very high ceiling still left to achieve, and ultimately end up being the stiffs in suits that make six figures and live in Microsoft Office all day long, when they’re not delegating.
I’m curious if a kid as bright as this TRYHARD were to just forget school, and put his brain into the Walmart machine instead, if he would ultimately have a more lucrative career in the long run, instead of becoming a cog in any Ivy League school or Georgia Tech, and falling into student debt, bad habits and academic rat racing. I don’t know what this kid’s specialty is, but perhaps being as bright as he is, he doesn’t have to slave away at the store level first, and can get into corporate early, and work on technology, POS or other technological ways to part their shoppers from their money.
But then again, this kid is either Indian or Pakistani, and living in a hicktown like Bentonville, Arkansas, I get why he probably wants to get the fuck out. Forget everything I said about considering Walmart U over Harvard or Stanford. Good for you kid, for being smart enough to light the path out of Arkansas; hopefully you’re smart enough to not pick Georgia Tech over those fancy Ivy League schools.
That’s what I’d want to do if I had the manpower, time, cooking acumen, multitasking ability and most importantly, didn’t have to sweat the whole needing to work for a living thing.
I volunteered for a charity event at work, because sometimes I just want to get the fuck out of the office, and honestly I do like doing charity work, so it’s a win-win getting to do something that makes my soul feel a little less droll, but at the same time doing it under the banner of work, so I get out of the office and it makes me look good all the same.
It was for the Atlanta Community Food Bank’s pantry center out in Bumfuck Stone Mountain, South Carolina; admittedly, I didn’t really look much at the details of the event, so firstly I failed to see that it was in Stone Mountain instead of their main offices in West Midtown next to the Fulton County jail, but also since I’d done volunteer work for ACFB before in the past, I also assumed it would’ve been more manual labor of packing boxes or unloading pallets or something of a similar nature.
No, the pantry center is kind of cool, in the sense that it’s set up to look like a tiny grocery store, where needy families can make appointments to come and “shop” for donated food, in the name of preserving their dignity and giving them the opportunity to feel like they’re shopping instead of being handed handouts. My task during my shift was to keep watch over the freezer area, to make sure people weren’t taking more than they were allowed to, as well as making sure the shelves were well stocked.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to be a hardass on people who needed this kind of service, so if there was the occasional person who grabbed a second package of frozen meat or pouch of lunch meat, I wasn’t going to say anything, and at the end of the shift, we had serve 75 families and donated about 6,000 lbs. of food, so as far as I’m concerned, I like the idea that we’re helping impoverished people as well as preventing a tremendous amount of food waste.
However, while on my shift, I couldn’t help but notice that the majority of the food stuffs we had on the shelves on this particular day, man, could we have thrown such a banging taco party if we were to just cook up all of the available food and distribute it to the homeless or give it out to low-income areas where people might be hungry.
Tons of chicken and beef products were in the freezers; at or past their marked expiration dates, but if they were thawed and cooked that day, it wouldn’t be a problem. There were pallets of taco kits, so all the meat could be seasoned and doled out in crispy corn shells. Cans of beans, pinto and refried were in massive quantities, and some Whole Foods somewhere donated an endless amount of bags of blue corn tortilla chips.
Needless to say, plenty of ingredients for a baller taco party were on hand, and I was thinking during my shift that if I were like a more ambitious type or something, what I’d want to do is just take all of the meat and taco kids and tortilla chips in the pantry that day, cook up a ridiculous amount of tacos, and be that guy that goes around the city giving away taco meals to homeless people, or title-1 school kids or anyone in the city that is hungry, needs a little food assistance or just wants to get together to share tacos for a greater cause.
It’s definitely one of those ideas that only those with time, manpower and not needing to sweat the need to work for wages could accomplish, but hey, there are worse ideas to ponder about when you’re trying to do something good in the world.
Not directing my beef at maverickmother, she’s probably my favorite of mommy vloggers I’ve come across
I don’t know what it is about my general existence and the algorithms of social media, but quite often, I am spoon-fed a lot of theFacebook/Instagram reels of stay-at-home-moms doing stay-at-home-mom stuff, and when I wasn’t aware of it when I originally saw them, I’m quite familiar whenever I see the acronym, SAHM.
Because I am being spoon-fed this content, I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve seen a lot more mom vlogs than I thought I’d ever see in my life, and the thing is, I feel a tremendous amount of ability to relate to a lot of these moms, because a lot of the shit they do, I do.
Sometimes, I’ll find myself unconsciously nodding in solidarity at the bullshit moms have to deal with when it comes to cleaning, cooking, the behavior of toddlers and children, and sometimes I’m pretty sure I’ve been downright triggered at the fact that unsurprisingly, there are parents out there that are going through things that I may or may not be going through at the very exact same time as they are.
Here’s the thing though, and where my disposition tends to turn sour: these broads are all stay-at-home-moms, where all of this bullshit is the only thing they have to deal with. I deal with almost all of the same shit that they go through, and on top of it, I work a full-time corporate job for 8-9 hours a day.
And honestly, the ones that are being spoon-fed to me, I probably make way less money than they do, because if they’re successful enough to be suggested viewing material to others, they’ve accomplished a lot in terms of views, hits and general engagement, and seeing as how mythical wife has been able to monetize her own YouTube pursuits, I can only imagine what a lot of these SAHMs are making when all they have to worry about outside of their homes and kids is generating content, without the constraints of The Man’s slave chain around their neck on top of everything.
Make no mistake though, a lot of these SAHMs know what they’re doing. At least the ones that are being suggested and fed to people on the internet, they’re almost all of the easy-on-the-eyes persuasion, look good in yoga pants, obviously clean up extremely well, and are appealing to watch by just about anyone.
And this is where I lament on the fact that it’s a shame that I too, could probably clean up on the internet if I looked good in yoga pants, and if I just so happened to be a woman too. If I were a SAHM, I know that I have the constitution and disposition to be able to commit to churning out content on a regular basis and not eventually abandon it like 99% of so-called content creators on the internet eventually do.
But in my current state as a full-time working male whose physical appearance probably does not appeal to the vast majority of the internet whose pay grades would actually be able to support my own, I don’t think burnt-out-full-time-working-dad (BOFTWD) vlogs would be nearly as fruitful.
We’re #1! Or #50: Georgia ranks first (or last) in happiness of employees, according to rando website, then reported by WSB
Considering the fact that I have very specific brog tags for “ohatlanta” and “ohgeorgia” I’ve been critical of my home state since basically, I moved here. It did not take too long for me to recognize bullshit when I saw it, combined with the age in which I moved here, really growing up into bullshit recognition and as my generation is often liked to be labeled, as woke, there is an odd sense of ironic satisfaction at seeing Georgia win, or tank at employee happiness.
It validates a lot of criticisms I’ve had and witnessed throughout my life living here, and there’s a part of me that likes to pawn off my own struggles with depression as having reason on account of working.
But back to the data aggregation itself, the rankings were based on criteria such as quit rates, commute times, working hours, injuries, paid time off and state positivity levels. Considering the fact that Georgia has turned into a battleground state politically, it obviously has a very high rate of contention in general state happiness, as at any given point, nearly half the state is pissed about the color of it. But if I had to guess what is really anchoring down the state’s general workforce happiness, has got to be the commute times, in which is further anchored down probably by Atlanta itself.
According to GPS, I’m barely six miles from my office, but I still need to give myself an entire half hour in order to traverse home to work, and I don’t actually have to touch a highway either. I’m usually below the median commute time of 28.7 minutes according to this study, but barely, and any little divot such as a fender bender or some rando school bus being late easily pushes me past it.
And to think there were varying times in my life where I had commutes of 70+ minutes and 55 miles each way, and I was living my life then, I couldn’t imagine going back to such hellacious commuting conditions ever again.
But again, I’m just going to assume most of Georgia’s ranking is weighted heavily by Atlanta since lets face it, outside of pockets of civilization in Augusta, Macon and Savannah, there ain’t shit else in Georgia that could muddy up the picture of the state, and even those pockets are merely blips of population compared to the five million-plus that live in the Metro Atlanta area. And most are innately aware of the escalating cost of living in the Metro Atlanta area, with obviously the wages not rising commensurate to meet them, which would of course lead to a lot of unhappiness. I’m sure this is nothing different than lots of other major cities across the nation, but based on this study, it’s very apparent in Georgia, more so than everywhere else.
Honestly though, when I came across this article, I thought I’d have way more to say about it than I apparently do, but continuing this post any further would just be parroting things already said. Georgia is apparently full of a bunch of unhappy people in the workforce, and although I don’t necessarily think I’m one of them, I’m definitely not really in the happy camp on a daily basis, but I don’t think a lot of these correlating conditions really help either. I know my general sense of happiness wouldn’t mind some extra wage to help alleviate a lot of my anxieties and issues.
I also want to point out that I used AI regenerative fill to AI the people in the background the fuck out of this selfie
So I’m on the red-eye flight back to Atlanta now, and I’m telling myself to write something, before I go into zombie mode and watch Castlevania or the Mandalorian on my iPad, because once I start, I’ll probably until we touch down.
So Adobe MAX is now in the past, and I can say that it was a pretty good trip, overall. Adobe really put on a flashy and fairly informative conference, and from what I could hear from those who have been to prior years, it was run smoother and had fixed a lot of issues.
Traveling with some work colleagues was enjoyable and I feel like we’ve gotten a little bit of opportunity to get to know each other a little bit better. The hotel was nice, and I was the tryhard who brought some gym gear and managed to get in two maintenance workouts while out there.
Best of all, it was all covered by work, so all of my food and the airport transport are expensed, and they naturally picked up the tab on the show admission and the hotel.
Despite being there for some work purposes, I still made a point of carving out some me-time, in the form of wandering around the city and eating some abominations of Mexican food that the internet has been teasing me of their existence for the last year. Of course, they fell into the parameters of my daily food per diem amount, which only sweetened the pot that I could expense things that I would’ve gladly paid for out of pocket to begin with.
First, I tracked down the quesarito-burrito that I first saw on some rando-Instagram reel that was fed to me for some reason despite being all the fuck away in DTLA. The best part was going in there and explaining that I wanted something that wasn’t on the menu and that it was something I saw on the internet; and I had to show them their own reel to jog their memory, but it was good enough for them to get me the burrito I had been covering for months.
And it was basically everything I hoped it would be, a California-style burrito, but wrapped in a quesarito instead of an ordinary tortilla. I could’ve finished it, but in doing so, I could’ve really derailed a large part of my trip, plus I was getting the meat sweats something fierce from just how rich it was, or maybe it was the Reaper sauce that added to it or maybe both, so I tapped when I was like 75% finished.
Next, came the trash can nachos that I had heard about, and became enamored with. Ordinarily, I’d have tried to go there for dinner, but upon learning that being in DTLA, they operated at downtown hours, so I kind of had to pivot and hit them up for lunch instead.
They were located in what google called the fashion district, but seemed like a giant shopping district for quinceñeras or something. Regardless, it took a little bit of walking around but I found the place in this quirky small food court loaded with nothing but Mexican and Asian foods. Again, I had to ask for the trash can nachos as they’re not on the menu, and once again I felt like some secret agent or something asking for some illicit.
Ten minutes later, it was brought out to me in what looked like a coffee can. Just like I had seen on the internet, the can was pulled up, and pouring out onto the plate was a mountain of chips, guacamole, beans, jalapeños, sauces, more chips, more cheese, and carne asada. Naturally, it was as good as it looked, and much like with the quesarito-burrito, I opted to throw in the towel instead of forcing myself to finish it.
Between the two internet-found foods, I’m hard pressed to decide on what was better. The quesarito-burrito is a true novelty item, but the nachos had some insane presentation value. Frankly, nachos really should only be made and served trashcan style, and if I had to really pick one of the two, I think I’m going with the nachos.
But I suppose I should say something about the conference seeing as how it was what brought me out to the left coast in the first place; again, it was a fun show in the sense of production value, and shine and presentation that went into it.
My job is sending me out to California to attend the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. This is pretty cool because I can’t ever say that I’ve been on a work trip such as this before in my life; the last time I skipped town for a work function, it was to like Macon, Georgia where maybe like 12 people from various other satellite offices could meet my entire office when I worked for the state.
But yeah, work trip to California where they’re paying for the flights and the hotel. You’d think I’d be more excited for this as it’s at the same time a little bit of a forced break from parenting, but I’m not treating this like it’s going to be the greatest experience of my life or anything. It’s still a conference full of other graphic designers and creative types, and most of my zero readers probably know I have a bit of an eyeroll-ey contentious feeling towards that demographic.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing it for so long that I think most of the bullshit high-up creatives say is full of shit and made up word fluff, or maybe I’m envious of the next generation of creatives and the talent that they bring to the table or maybe a little of both. But the idea of being a conference full of these types isn’t necessarily my first preference of people to surround myself with, but that’s also probably me just being a curmudgeon about everything that’s usually the norm.
Honestly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most probably shouldn’t be any surprise, but it’s some of the potential food options I’ve scouted out. Years of seeing drive-by reels of restaurants that usually anywhere but in Atlanta are now within reach, at least for ones found in downtown Los Angeles, or as the kids say, DTLA. Yeah, I’ve found a few that are within reasonable distance to where I’m staying at, and as god as my witness, it’s my time to get my hands on shit like hot Cheetos loaded quesaritos, twice-wrapped burritos and trash can nachos.
However this isn’t to say that I’m completely no-selling MAX. Instead of coasting through the event and scheduling nothing but layup workshops of shit in my wheelhouse, I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to schedule as many workshops and seminars of the things I’m not as versed in, so that I can actually maybe learn some shit and get on the path to some career advancement.
All the same, as a whole I really am looking forward to this trip as I’m nearing embarkation. It’ll be nice to have a little bit of purely alone time, eat some trash I’ve always wanted to try and maybe I’ll learn something useful.
