The Craziest Day Ever, written with help from Coors Light (TM)

So, today was the craziest day ever, fraught with strange happenings and existential crisis. Which is much better than actual crisis, which I seem to be having on a regular basis this year!

To recap actual crises in chronological order: I unknowingly moved from one shitty apartment complex with trashy tenants to another, shittier apartment complex with trashier and potentially-lawbreaking tenants. To be fair, I really like the actual unit in which I live, just not the surrounding sketchiness.

My grandmother passed away this year.

My boyfriend almost passed away, and suffered a traumatic brain injury from which he still hasn't fully recovered.

My 12-year-old cat has been in and out of the hospital the past few weeks from a disease more humorously named than should be for the seriousness: "Megacolon". It sounds like a supervillain! Long story short: this is an incurable disorder, but it can be managed. It was just a scary couple of weeks. And then a scary couple of days in which he was leaking out the ass...........but that's over.

So, I can probably say without hyperbole that this has been the worst year of my life, so thankfully we're already into the 8th month of it.

But! Today was insane, but not in any life-altering way. Now, I try not to include too many identifying details about my life, so bear with me.

Today I got to witness a bunch of side-workers (not coworkers, but I work alongside them!) freak out all over the place at each other because someone threw a bunch of cardboard all over the room that contains both the cardboard crusher AND major trash compactor (laziness to the extreme?). No one wanted to clean it up because they have "things to do" and they didn't make the mess, until one of the managers flipped out and, with the help of extreme cursing and yelling at everyone for "whining like fucking babies", emptied the room in less than a minute. So that was entertaining.

Then, my old boss appeared at my new job (and to talk to someone else with his company) to tell me he offered me a part time job back with my old company, but since I didn't respond to his voicemail (which I honestly never received, though he probably thought I was bullshitting), he told me it was now filled. Someone else out there needs the money/job more than I do, so I guess that's good! ...Maybe he called me at my old company voicemail, which I definitely don't check anymore...

Then, a bunch of people who do not even work for my company, but have a similar job, were trying to tell me I was going to somehow get penalized (zero balance or *negative* paychecks, even!) for something the guy who had the job before me had done! Pull the other one, people, cause 'that ain't happenin'. I don't know if they were trying to "haze the new guy" or what, because everything they were telling me seemed insane.

So, in other news, I'm about one crazy catalyst away from pulling up anchor and hiding in Vermont for the rest of my life. Though I would like to have my same job or company in Vermont; I wonder how I can bring that up without sounding sketchy?

The existential crisis is such: what the hell am I doing with my life? I have a good job with good benefits, but I'm still on the Eastern Shore, which makes me feel like a failure. I'm not doing anything related to my degree, though I am now making more money than the average person with this degree, and both my parents. So, while I am very fortunate (or blessed, if you swing that way), something just doesn't feel right.

I don't actually *want* to do anything with my degree. Once I escaped college (which I rushed through for reasons I shouldn't have, and won't go into here), I realized how much my education sucked, and I also realized how shallow and hollow much of the field is. {Example: Let's make this four-dollar bottle of Febreze with these fancy designs made in Adobe Illustrator, so you can feel like a luxurious millionaire while the economy is crumbling and you're eating Dollar Menu every night.} Unrelated, I also realized how virtually talentless I was in the field. :O

Unfortunately, after reading Michael Pollan's life-changingly awesome In Defense of Food, donated to me by a great lady who put me up in B-more when Sean was in the hospital!, I also realized how fucked up the field of nutrition is. It would be great to tell people how to eat for health, but I don't need a degree to do that, and a lot of the medical information is skewed by, say, ...lobbyists... of certain...industries...

The thing I love, evidenced by my bookshelf (and waistband, lawl), is FOOD. I have a million cookbooks, and I love to cook! And it scares me, because I can't sublimate it in nutrition. The last ten years of my life have been a series of experiences and regrets revolving around cooking, and my apparent fear of entering a culinary school or restaurant.

I took a ton of cooking classes in secondary school, and actually entered a career technology program in Culinary Arts, for a short time. The teachers loved me, and I abandoned it because it couldn't fit into my school schedule. Though I don't regret the experiences I had in lieu of it, I wish I had either tried harder to make them both work, or chosen the other path.

In college, during a summer I spent in Boston, I spent six weeks taking a class at RISD (what what), right across the street from Johnson & Wales. I walked to the parking garage by J & W every single day, peering through the gates and wondering what could have been.

I don't know how to wrap this up, and my deteriorating buzz is making me sleepy!