Plays Well with Others

Job searches have certainly changed. The last time I did one was 18 years ago and I would circle want ads in the ProJo and send off paper resumes. Today it's all electronic.

I was at career services at a local college to get some hints, tips and contacts to widen my “social network.” The counselor was pretty helpful, as in realistic, instead of the “rah-rah go gettem' team” approach. She believes in building a foundation before you shingle the roof.

Above all, it's smart to have a sounding board to bounce ideas off of with someone who's experienced with this question. I've always believe comparing my own view of reality with someone else's tends to put me on track if I wander.

Not to toot my own horn, ah...rather it was a confirmation of some skills that I haven't used in a long, long time that surprised me that I still possess. She quickly stated that my interpersonal skills were honed to a sharp edge.

She said: “You talk like a natural counselor...did you know that? It just flows with you. You're very open, at ease and you drew me right in...You can do that with anyone!”

“Ah” I say “That's the Art of the Relationship. If the other person is willing, I can establish a connection fairly fast...IF they're willing, but try that on someone who's naturally lacks trust, it's like chiseling a brick wall. To tell the truth, I find people who are incapable of this, as weak.”

To tell the truth, I'm far more comfortable with the One To One than being a part of a large group where it's near impossible to reach individual people as everyone is jabbering to one another.

“Ron, it's a dying art you know. I counsel a ton of college aged kids and they haven't the ability to do face to face. It's all texting. Many of them miss the social cues needed to just connect! Sometimes it's so hard to “drill down” into them to learn just who they are because they can't express it.”

I then critically say; “Ah, We're a nation populated by people brain damaged by Aderall.” No one wants to listen, they all want to talk at once...be the center of attention.”

“I'm a dinosaur.” I say

“No, you're just from a different generation that learned how to deal with people.”

Perhaps I am? Perhaps if I texted constantly and learned that I could keep an impenetrable electronic barrier between me and the other, I could wall myself off. The fact that no body language, no facial expressions or a zillion other cues people use are blocked by electronics, it sort of give you can easy way to keep people away. Ah, No, I don't wish that.

But...in a certain sense, I have to become more aware of the social networking thingy. She tells me 70% of the positions acquired are by this. I translate that into my own brain as “It's Who You Know.”

I Once Did a Mr Creosote!

Click and Watch Mr. Creosote Make an Ass of Himself.
 

Ok, here is promised about a story of my ralphing in a restaurant.

It was another Friday in the same Friendly Tap. There wasn't a hint of anything unusual that would happen as we ate out and then off to Almacs in Seekonk to get the weekly groceries. I didn't feel the least bit sick either.

I was 10 then and my brother 15. We ate as a matter of course and nothing seemed out of place till we were about to leave. Everyone else got up from the booth but I stayed behind for about 20 seconds when everyone noticed I wasn't moving. My Dad prompted me that we were leaving and I then slid halfway across the booth when out of nowhere, I heaved all over the table.

Friday nights in the Friendly Tap are full of TGIF folks who were happy, rambunctious and ready to enjoy their weekend. It was packed that night and somewhat loud as everyone was jubilant. When I spilled my guts onto the table, the noise level in the room dropped to zero and every head turned around to see what I was doing. I wonder to this day how many appetites I managed to ruin that night.

What I saw, was this pool of thin vomit crawling to the edge of the table and dripping off, like a spilled milkshake. I sat there in a bit of a woozy state when my brother started to laugh his head off.

“AH HA HA HA HA HA! AH HA HA HA HA! DID YOU SEE THAT! AH HA HA!”

“Kenny! Stop IT!” My mother yelped at him.

I got up, sort of stunned, and in a odd moment of compassion, my Dad hung his London Fog trench coat over my head and guided me out of the restaurant with his hand on my shoulder. Once in the parking lot with the “shame coat” off of my head, my brother bust out laughing again as this was the funniest thing he saw all month.

Oddly enough, I felt totally fine after that. I had no idea just what made me puke. Perhaps Friendly Tap's shitty cooking that night? Anyway, I was good to go about 20 minutes later.

Now that I was feeling fine, we didn't abandon our trip to Almacs. On the way, my brother kept teasing me about it all, finding any and all jokes he could barb me with. I sat there defending myself as well as I could and in some sense, getting my balls busted by my brother was more of a sting than puking and having 60 patrons witness it.

My Dad, trying to quell the kids in the back seat finally said,

“Alright Ken, enough's enough...leave him alone.”

I sat diagonally from my Dad who was driving and when he said that and I noticed he was trying to stifle a giggle himself.

I'm not sure if we went back the next Friday. I'm guessing we took a week off to let the story die down so I could return w/o everyone pointing.

Yes. Now that I look back on it, it was funny as hell.

Let's talk about pepperoni pizza, since I tend to speak so well about it.

To me, there is only one pizza shop around here that makes the best. The House of Pizza on Division St in Pawtucket. This Greek shop has been here for decades now and it's possible I put one of their kids through a semester at college with all the money I've spent there.

As a kid, I hated everything. One of the things I despised was cheese. Yes, ain't that weird? I don't quite remember why I did but I wouldn't touch the stuff. I'd watch in horror as my brother would eat those frozen school pizza squares my Mom would sometimes buy. Fine by me, you can eat the whole box, you won't have any competition from me.

The other thing he'd eat was that canned Chef Boyardee Spaghetti in some weird cheese sauce...Ugh!

*****

Every Friday night, the day my Dad was paid, we hit up a local restaurant then go food shopping at the old Almacs in Seekonk. My parents were creatures of habit and you could count on this like you could count on the sun rising the next day. These small, predictable things are what makes a decent childhood. 

We would eat at the Friendly Tap, a half bar/half restaurant that served up the same menu since before I was born probably. There were waitresses in there that should've been name “Flo.” It was full of working class 30-something girls of the early 1970's, snapping gum and still hanging on to beehive hair dos. They word baby blue uniforms with silly paper, Jackie Kennedy pill box hats too. They looked like they were waiting for their truck driving husbands to return from the road one day. You know, in some ways, it did have the feel of a truck stop, though the road it was on was no where near a trucking route.

I'd grade the place a perfect C+ for quality. It was never awful nor grand, so they get an A+ on consistency. Perfectly middling. Perfect for my Dad, a Depression Era kid who thought meat and potatoes was the only food worth eating...and lots of it.

I have to get off track here because I just remembered it.

Once in a great while, my Dad wanted to try something different...really different for him...like...Italian food! There was a new neighborhood restaurant that we tried ONCE and never went back too. I forget the name and it's no longer there but looking back on it, they did do Italian food right. This was back when Italians from North Providence were moving into our predominately Irish/English/Polish neighborhood.

When we got there, there was a line out the door but it moved fast enough. When we managed to get inside the building, my Dad noticed an awful odor that wrinkled his nose.

“Maureen, what's that stink!?”

“Richard, shhh...it's just garlic.” my Mom told him.

“Holy Moses! It's like a skunk!” he said. He said it loudly enough to insult some of the Italian/American patrons sitting in their booths. I saw them turn their heads.

I guess the word spread that the six-foot-two IRISH guy had managed to insult the one ingredient that makes Italy famous. We were seated and waited forever to be served. When we did get our food, I ate mine, simple spaghetti, while my Dad poked and prodded something he'd never seen before, Veal Parmesan. He ate half, which was surprising as Dad usually inhaled food.

After, we were sitting in the car and my Dad said,

“Auggh...We're not coming back. The service was crummy too!”

My Mom, the woman, who always had better judgment on social cues said that if he had not too loudly protested the smell of garlic to ¼ of the restaurant, perhaps we would've received better service. Leave it to the wives to be the moral compass.

Ok, back to my story...but this reminds me of another great story about my puking in a restaurant. I will tell that one soon enough, it's funny.

One day my Dad died and with him a lot of the things we used to do went with him into the grave. We no longer went out Friday nights and I had to learn to live with this change.

My brother, who was 18 at the time and wanting, more than anything, to live his own life w/o having to deal with my Mom, started getting take out from a Greek pizza joint behind Saint Ray's High school every Friday night and ate it by himself.

My Mom and I'd eat whatever she cooked while my brother sat in the living room eating his pizza. I'd finish up pretty quick and joined him to watch and goof on Star Trek that was on the TV in late afternoon.

One Friday I finally got curious and asked if he would get me the same pizza he was eating for a Friday night treat as I missed the Friday treks we used to do. I suppose if I could have this, it would be something like we used to do...at least a tiny part of it.

He came back with two pepperoni pizzas and I when I lifted up one slice, I could see the underside looked sort of burnt. This isn't good! Not only that, if you tilted the pizza, a slow progression of oil could be made to crawl across it.

“Well, this is going to suck.” I told myself.

That judgment was reversed in a damned hurry when I got the courage to try, with what I thought, was a badly cooked piece of food. The flavors that spilled across my mouth were amazing. The salt bite, the heat, spice, the incredible CRUNCH of the pizza dough busting on my teeth. I never knew!

That was probably July 1977. Since then I've eaten more pepperoni pizzas than was probably healthy to do.

The House of Pizza is still there, a couple of the original owners, gray haired now, are still running the ovens to this day. Had my Dad walked into this place, he would've been thrown by all the murals, Greek vases and how the employees shout at one another in that language.

Or perhaps not? Perhaps, he would've been surprised as I was.

The original book Frankenstein by Mary Shelly is far more complex and interesting than any cheezoid movie made of it. Though the exception would be Young Frankenstein which was a scream. The authentic story was considered a piece of serious work than one of horror and science fiction way back then. Mary Shelly was something of a prodigy as she wrote Frankenstein when she was 18.

The book has a great opening. In it, there's a washed up British scientist trying to revive his career while on an expedition to the North Pole. While on the ice cap, he spots a very large man on a dogsled disappearing over the horizon. A few miles on he encounters a starved and near frozen Dr. Frankenstein who had to give up his pursuit of the dog sledder. The Dr. then tells this scientist his entire story of how he managed to end up chasing some shadowy figure across the Arctic.

It has been 184 years since this book as been published and people have based dissertations, to achieve a Ph.D., on various readings of it. That's how seriously this book was taken.

One reading, which I resonate with, was the view on how society picks a scapegoat to heap derision on. Even in the cheapo movies, you see the monster being harangued wherever he goes, typifies all that is evil and is hunted down.

 

*****

 

We all know them. We all know who they are and may have even dumped all over them while in High School. It's that poor kid who occupies the lowest rung on the pecking order. When you're living down there, nothing rains on you but shit.

This kid I knew was Stephen. He was too tall for 16 years of age and bulky looking. He had flat, thin straight hair that was ordered in a boring haircut that never changed during his entire time in at St Rays. The clothing he wore day to day reminded one of a janitor who wears Dickies. His voice was thin. He had an odd way of hanging his head to one way he had a long history of being abused since kindergarten. Also, and I kid you not, his head was squarish in shape and if you drove two bolts into either side of his neck, he could pass for a sympathetic looking Monster in Frankenstein.

Too boil it all down, he wasn't handsome in any measure of the word.

As teenagers, you become acutely aware of your own self image which can be fragile. Teens attack one another with the most vicious criticism knowing that it'll find it's mark and fast. If you're caught not conforming or being different, you might as well have a laser sight spotted on your forehead. Stephen was the target of teen snipers every day.

I never knew him well. Our circles enveloped one another when we shared the same algebra or gym class. But this was enough to see him tortured on the rack by those who did know him better.

*****

A few days before Valentine's Day, the teachers would hand out forms to the boys to buy roses to be delivered to their girlfriends or perhaps as an introduction to a girl they liked. You could have them delivered with or without your name attached and then perhaps later, reveal yourself to her.

On Valentine's Day, the girls who did receive roses beamed with pride, as girls will when they are singled out of the crowd for such a gift. The girls who received anonymous roses were even happier and curious as to who had affections for them. I'd hear a clutch of girls in the corner, discussing every boy they knew and the likelihood that one of them was the sender.

Ashley, who was your typical “girly-girl” and very feminine in nature even among other girls, had an anonymous rose. Her happiness lasted the entire of home room period and was ruined by the end of her first class.

I was told, as I was not in her history class, that Stephen rose from his chair, went over to her to announce that it was he that had sent the rose and asked her as a date for the Junior Prom. I was told Ashley's jaw hit the floor. She had no idea what to do but to deny his request. Stephen I was told showed nothing but dejection in his face and sat back down. Ashley, in her mind, having her standing and reputation besmirched by the affections and attention of the Biggest Loser in the school, then spent the rest of the day deriding the fact that someone like him, would even have a snowballs chance in Hell of dating her.

The other girls in the lunchroom busted Ashley up about it, with Ashley vehemently denying that anything of the sort would happen.

I happened to overhear parts of it.

“Oh, Ashley, don't hide it from us! You want to be his love, you want to have his children....THOUSANDS of them!”

“I do NOT!!” Ashley protested.

“Don't lie to us Ashley, we saw you coming out of an empty classroom with him the other day, wiping your mouth!!”

“STOP IT!!!!” she'd yell back.

The teen political world sure did have some hard tasks at times. Ashley was fighting for her position on that ladder as her friends comically were trying to shove her down a few notches.

I saw Stephen later on in the day in Chemistry class. As usual, he bee-lined to his seat and sat down without talking to anyone. As the class filled up, you would hear islands of laughter arise here and there, with the kids shooting looks at Stephen. All knowing smirks would be directed his way and delivered with the effect of further condemning him.

When we graduated, I never saw him again. At the reunions I attended, he never appeared. He escaped over the horizon on his dogsled.

A few years after graduation, I'd wonder about him and puzzle just why he was such a target. It seemed so over the top the amount of harassment he put up with. Perhaps it was just particular event that borne itself in our school alone.

No.

I met our gym teacher in a Greg's restaurant, a guy with an unusual first name, Saar, about ten years later. We talked some of the old times and I asked him if the kids were any different now. He told me not in the least. I then asked if there was a “Stephen” in that year's class.

 

“Ron..there is always a 'Stephen' in every class. This year his name is Michael.”

I found out this latest version of Stephen was just as ill treated as the original one I knew.

The “monster” in Shelly's book survived, escaped and won. I wonder if Stephen did?

Flannel Shirts Soon Enough

My eyesight isn't what it used to be. I find it harder to ride at night as I can't make out the potholes and deeper cracks in the road before I smack them and give my skeleton a nice jarring. The bike will survive fine, it was made for that. My body isn't made for these sharp jolts as I can feel my teeth clack together when that shock runs through the handlebars, up my arms and into my jaw.

So I check when the sun sets and time the ride beforehand if the weather isn't cooperating in the morning. Today, the sun sets at 8:11 PM. By the end of September, the earlier darkness will be very apparent. Fall is coming. I've even seen the low flying geese blazing overhead at dawn once more.

What I'll miss about the summer is the long daylight and at times, room temperature outdoor air. I also love having the windows open to let that breeze through. If I could, I'd have one of those houses in the Cayman Islands where entire walls swing up on a hinge and stay propped up. I'd be OK with just having a roof over me. Outdoor living is liberating.

What I won't miss are the jungle dew points and the 90+ degree days.

I don't mind autumn at all. In fact, it can be enjoyable. The warm temps stick around till late October now, thanks to global warming. At the same time, the damned slop humidity retreats pretty quickly too. A double bonus.

Autumn used to mean school. My first year out of college when September rolled around was strange as I was done with school. There was no fresh start each September used to bring. New clothes, new classes and new people to meet were what September meant. It became just work, which didn't show much difference between August to October. Since then fall has meant a change in the weather only.

There's probably no other place in this country to enjoy fall except here in New England. There is a definite change in people's character and mood when it creeps in, and it's not necessarily a bad one. The cooler, drier air invigorates you. It wakes you up from those sleepy days during the height of summer and there is, in me at least, a boost of energy. I can get things done whereas in the summer I can draw it out. Try hanging wallpaper in an upstairs room when it's 90 out. That project draws out day after day hoping for a drop in the temperature.

After living here for so long, I'm not sure I'd adopt easily to a San Diego style Halloween where it's 70 degrees out at night. San Diego doesn't get N'oreasters either. What's great about those storms is that they remind you that you have a dry, warm home. New England can teach you just how great it is to be lying in a warm bed late at night, with a roof over your head while the rain, wind and tree branches slap the side of your house for hours. The next day the sun returns with nice, crystal clear Canadian air filling in. In San Diego it's a consistent 70 degrees all year long with no change in the weather. You might as well live inside a windowless office building w/o any idea of what the day is doing.

In a couple of months the leaves will turn and fall and there's no mistaking it then. You even can smell it. Back in the Jurassic epoch when I was a kid, you could legally burn leaves on your property in order to get rid of them. Sears used to sell perforated steel garbage cans you stuffed with leaves and set on fire. As young kids we would crowd around it as that was the closest we could get to fire w/o our parents screaming at us. I do miss that scent at times. However, that's been replaced by people firing up their wood stoves for the first time and that has a pungent but sweet smell. Unless they're burning packing crates they've stolen from work. Then it smells like a residential house fire.

So, it's coming.

Advice from the Devil Himself

“Machiavelli argues in The Prince that political life is divided between fortuna, the unexpected event that must be dealt with, and virtu, not the virtue of the religious -- the virtue of abstinence from sin -- but rather the virtue of the cunning man who knows how to deal with the unexpected. None can deal with fortuna completely, but some can shape and mitigate it. These are the best princes. The worst are simply overwhelmed by the unexpected.”

--a quote I've stolen from StratFor Global Intelligence.

Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a complete farce and as a sarcastic stab in the face to Lorenzo De Medici & Family. De Medici came to power in Florence and had Machiavelli imprisoned, tortured and finally exiled. Niccolo wasn't happy about that at all and satirized tyrannical rule by advocating it in it's worst forms.

But, as the centuries passed, people who never understood the joke or the relationship of Machiavelli to the Powers That Be, took this treatise as real and turned it into a philosophy to be praised. Once again, humanity proves itself dumb as a bag of sticks.

I read this when I was in college, a kid basically. I then understood that “Machiavellian” meant to be the biggest, most viscous prick in the room. Once the course was over, I forgot all about Machiavelli; that was until I read the above quote at the head of this page.

I guess one of the reasons The Prince was so touted as the next philosophy back then was that there were gems of knowledge in it. But ideas, like trees in the forest that are scattered and happenstance, don't form up to make a cohesive argument just because they happen to be near one another and are similar. True. But if you take gems lying on the ground for what they are, as they are, you can learn something.

*****

So, now it's past Labor Day and I'm keeping my second promise to myself. I'm hitting the job market again. I haven't written a resume in over 18 years (as I didn't have to as I was always employed) and I find it harder than I thought. You just don't sit down and string together some ACTION words, you have to write a small thesis in order for it to persuade. Also, I love the spellchecker as sending out resumes with mistakes makes you look like an incompetent.

I was given a book mid summer about career choice called Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life. The gist of the book is that it reminds you that greater powers than you can change your life but also provide options at the same time. The book advises to abandon the idea of the “career path” and make use of any opportunity that may arise in along your way. Also, it's great for slapping your face with reality in each chapter. Sure, you can have a dream job, a dream career, but be ready for Plan #2 if the first doesn't pan out...and Plan #3 if need be too.

You have to learn to dance to the new music as fast as the band changes the tune. If you're lucky, a chance may happen by that you can manipulate and form up, but you have to be awake and quick to spot and then jump on it.  

Another thing I like in the book is this: Do NOT be afraid to fail. It advises you to chase after a particular idea you like and if it smashes against the wall. So.be.it. You'll dust yourself off and readjust your plans.

So, we'll see what out there for the pickin's and hopefully something will provide a very malleable and profitable chance for me. If not, I'll plug along.

More Alluring than the Super Bowl

The above is a snapshot of a trading platform I used to use. Most of these programs fling far too much information at you and the learning curve is pretty steep as well. You have to play with it using fake money, in order to familiarize yourself before you get the balls to plunk down real bets.

I haven't bet on these ponies in a long while. The reason why is that my little computer, which happens to have a four core AMD (a latest and fairly powerful CPU), cannot in a zillion years outplay the mainframe computers built by Intell and sit in high rises in Manhattan. Who am I to think I can out gun Goldman Sachs?

I'll tell you what the major players do today. They have access to computers like this one below. This is not a Star Wars CGI creation, it's real.

 

These computers can out-think, out-trade and out-do anything my little desktop can do. Not only that, these major players hire MIT math geeks to write formulas that sniff around to exploit trends I’ll never see.

One little completely legal trick they do is they'll “front run” any trade they want. If I make a trade, in a millionth of a second, their computers will spot it and then jump ahead of my trade. In doing so, they'll force the bid up by one single penny, forcing me to pay that. Not much huh? Their computers do that a million times all day long. That's one legal trick they do. There are many other cunning plays that border on felonies and those are designed to manipulate the herd. JP Morgan was busted a few years back with stock manipulation software but, being as rich and connected as they are, they walked away from any prosecution.

****

I'm not a gambling person. I never was. I have never been to Mohegan Sun nor Foxwoods. I haven't the interest. I have made two bets in my life on the dogs at Lincoln park and lost twice when I was 18. But put me in front of a trading screen and I'm hooked.

I started this before the Dot.com boom back around 2000. I wasn't a day trader, I was more a month trader. I'd look around for companies that seemed stable, wait for a general drop in the entire market, then try to time a trade when it looked like the entire thing was turning around and try to get off on the top.

Did I succeed?

Sometimes massively so. Other times I got my head handed to me. On the whole, back then, I was winning more times than I was losing. Though it all stung me when the Dot.com boom blew up which coincided with the Bush/Gore court case on who was to be President.

There are soo many variable to take into account when placing a bet. At the time then I was paying far too much attention to the political side and ignored the overheated technology sector. I figured once this court case was solved, the markets would settle down and begin again its rise. Wrong. I got porked as the real reason for the fall was due to the overly priced tech sector. Ouch!

Well, dust yourself off and try again they say.

I did. But the best wisdom you can have is the one borne from pain. I was far more careful in the trades I made and in doing so, the pay outs became less so, but the losses too hurt less.

*****

The slaughter that occurred during August and the autumn of 2008 really woke me up. I was going to bet the entire farm on Black 13 and spin the roulette wheel when the market finally bottomed but being a scardey cat, I didn't. You cannot predict the future and a fall from 14,000 to 6,500 on the DOW has a tendency to chill your feet. Had I done so I'd be living in a house in West Greenwich with the Happy Maids company cleaning up my house. But as you can see, I didn't.

Do I regret it? No. I had learned to temper my personal greed and emotion with a very sobering fact: You can lose and lose big.

But some years have passed since 2008 and I have made perhaps three trades total and those were conservative ones as well. There are times when I fire up the trading screen and watch it, but don't bet a penny. I just watch the game from the the seats and see the action play out before me.

The Euro Union is teetering and has a larger GDP than the entire US economy. That is true if you can believe it. If it goes, it takes the majority of the world with it. China is choking. We have the US “fiscal cliff” coming up late this year and the fact that whoever is President will have NO influence on the market as it's an unmanageable gorilla. I don't see myself betting anything until the S&P smashes itself against the wall again. And we'll see if I have the guts to do that.

I don't watch sports. I don't attend games. My Monday Night NFL game starts every morning at 9:30 AM and I'll have my screen on, watching this competition...and it's going to be one hell of a ride soon enough.