As I thought, there are some ramifications with getting switched back to working with my old boss. I’m not too pleased about it. So currently for every dollar that the company makes for a candidate that I place, I get around 7%. So in the past month, my commission check was around $700. Not too shabby. That pays a substantial portion of my rent. So now, under the new system, because I’m working under my old boss again, I’m only going to be making 1/2 the commissions that I should be. Which, isn’t all that bad, it’s just money afterall, but it still sucks. The other option was to quit. So I figure that I should just suck it up and deal with getting a little less money than I was making. The good thing is that the people that I currently have working under me are still billed to me at the same rate and they are looking like they’ll continue to work for quite some time, so at least I’ll keep making the $400 or so from my 3 quality people that I have working for me.
I’ve yet to hear back from the Hedge fund guy that I sent my resume to. I sent him another email today and hopefully he’ll give me a call back today. I may end up going to Austin this next weekend, so that would be fun and nifty. I just wonder where I’ll be staying and how much it’ll cost me to get down there and move around. We’ll see.
This morning was a great relief. I finally got my federal tax return forwarded to my bank account. So I’m not $2800 richer. Fucking awesome. Not that I don’t have plenty of places to spend that money on, like rent and credit card debt (It’s only $1000…so get off my back!) and hopefully paying for a trip to Austin. Either way, my finances are looking up, so that’s a good thing.
My task for tonight is to look through my records and see if I can find out how much money was kept from me in 2003 from my New York State taxes and how much I got refunded…. apparently that information isn’t available over the phone. The only way to get it is to send a paper request to the freaking photocopy office in Albany. So that’ll take me at least another 3 weeks before I’ll see all the extra money from the 2003 Mis-Filed return. Oh well… good things come to those that wait.

So last night I spent a considerable ammount of time looking through Facebookfinding all the people that I haven’t seen for years that I knew from school. It’s always interesting to see who’s on there and what they are up to. Well…not thatinteresting but at least something to do.
So I’ve got a gripe. It’s with Google. I’ve submitted my blog to them probably like 3-4 different times. It’s STILL not on there. That kind of pisses me off. So I did a little research to find out why my blog, which is updated pretty much 3-4 times a week, doesn’t get any exposure. Turns out that you have to have other people linking to your blog in order for the “Internet Spiders” to crawl the web and find it. Bastards. So it looks like I have to start making some online friends. Irritating. Oh well.
Now that I have glommed down my PB&J (yes, I brought another today) I think that I should go and get some work done, so off I go to do the same ammount of work for 1/2 the money…I guess that’s how it feels to be a woman. (Ouch.)

There are certain days in New York that are just amazing. Today is one of them. It’s so incredibly beautiful outside. I just look out the window and want to cry a little bit. I’m 70 degrees and breezy and sunny. What more could you ask for? I’ve yet to actually make it outside today other than walking to work this morning. I’ve been on this skipping lunch thing while at work. I get a whopping $17 for every lunch I skip so I suppose it’s worth it. Better than paying out $5 for lunch. I brought myself a delectible PB&J for lunch today…it was…well…yeah…a PB&J.
So a woman that I work with went to U.Texas law and has a friend of hers that is the portfolio manager/founder of a hedge fund in Austin. She got me his contact information today, so I forwarded him my resume. I proceeded to give him a call and he told me he’d take a look and give me a call back. That was around 3 hours ago. Not that they guy isn’t busy or anything, but I just wish he’s get on the horn and give me a call. Hopefully he’ll either know someone that needs a bright Columbia graduate or he’ll want to hire me himself. Either way, I may be making another trip down to Austin in a week or two. Even if he doesn’t get me anything, at least I’ve got my foot in the door SOMEWHERE in Austin. I’ve gotten quite a few emails in the past few days from firms in Austin, and all of them tell me that they are going to look elsewhere. What fun!

Work has changed…once again. Now, I am back to being the slave of the most senior recruiter. She’s a nice woman, but she’s a slave driver when it comes down to it. But today, she’s been strange. I feel like she’s not very organized, so she’s not been giving me much to do. Hence me having time to blog a little bit. Honestly, I don’t really care about no longer “working for myself” but hell, it’s a pain in the ass working directly under someone. Oh well. I just keep telling myself that it’s only for another month or so and then I’ll be done with it. I can’t wait.
Okay, so I figure that I should explain the pictures that I’ve been posting. Well, ever since I was removed from school two years ago, I’ve been getting more and more into photography. These pictures that I have posted are some of my favorites that I have made in the past two years. Ever since school has started, I have been quite lax in using my camera (Canon Rebel XT) so I’ve really not been having much production, but once school is over, I intend to get back on track and really start building up my portfolio again. As it currently stands, I have to go through what I have and make some more selections because I have a plethora of quality images, it’s just a matter of finding them and converting them to fit onto the blog.
I’ve gotta go and bother my slave driver to give me some whippings.

I came to this realization today. I think that if I were in an all out street brawl with myself about 8 years ago… he could be me up. Don’t get me wrong, I think that I would do some damage, but I think that I was just more of a bad-ass back then. I think that the advantage back then was that I knew that I was the most bad-ass around. There wasn’t even a question in my mind that I could wipe the floor with whatever twerp was bugging me. Now that I’ve lived a little bit and realized that my 220+/- lb frame, while being substantial, isn’t anywhere near the proportions that it needs to be to be King of the Mountain. I regress…
Laura is currently still in Virginia. She keeps telling me how much she loves working at her company. I’m really happy for her, but at this point, I can’t stop thinking about getting the hell out of NYC and getting into a “real” living situation again. There’s just something so incredibly fake about renting an apartment in NYC. I don’t think that I’ll ever feel at home here, knowing that I don’t own my place and never being able to really save enough money to have a nice place. Granted, I’m being very short sighted, but it’s still irritating that everything is just so damn expensive.

So school has become a major drag. It’s not all my classes, pretty much just my religion and seminar class. It’s gotten to the point that I just watch the clock. And for anyone that’s ever been somewhere that they just detest, you know exactly how I feel…. the clocks just go soooo slow and it’s just painful to listen to the terrible professor stuggle through the lecture.
Okay, so the other day a friend of mine, Brad, was reading through my blog and posted a complaint that I didn’t mention him in the blog, so I figured that I would write up a story about something that Brad and I did in the past or something that really defined him. So I got to thinking about it and I thought of lots of stories about things that Brad and I did and the one that really stood out was something about Albino Deer. I then realized what terrible people it made Brad and I sound like, so I have decided not to really get into that one and just talk about the pockets story.
It’s not really a story so much as an explanation of Brad. Brad was one of those kids that grew up never really wanting to have the newest and best video game, but seemed pretty content to have the handheld Tiger LCD video game. A lover of sports, Brad was on my Division I Pop-Warner (7 year olds) football team. That’s where we met, but we’ll get to that later. Brad had a knack for having all sorts of little interesting things around his room. One might call him a pack-rat, but I’ve seen him move, so I know that he does throw out SOME stuff. Either way, there was always something interesting to check out when you visited Brad’s room in his parents home. So one afternoon at football practice when we were probably in 7th grade or so. Maybe earlier, maybe later, I have no idea. Either way, it was common practice to wear one of your father’s old shirts to football practice because well…they were the only thing in the house big enough to fit over shoulder pads and still look right. So for some reason everyone on the team wore these old shirts and for an even odder reason, 3/4 of them had a breast pocket on them. I think to my wardrobe today and I can’t recall a single shirt that has a breast pocket on it, but anyway. Odd. So it was quickly discovered that if you grabbed the pocket in a full fist you could rip the pocket straight off the shirt, leaving two little holes, but a pretty much intact shirt.
So over the few weeks of football season, Brad would tear off the various shirt pockets from everyone on the team. How anyone let him take the pockets is beyond me, but there he was, a collection of around 10-12 shirt pockets in various sizes, shapes and colors. Strange thing was, he would keep the damn things in his football pants during practice. Why he did that, I haven’t the foggiest, but he did.
So last year, Brad and I got an apartment together in Inwood at the northern end of Manhattan. When he was moving in he comes over to me
“Hey Mikey, check it out”
“What?”
“Remember when we were in football and I used to tear off all those pockets”
“Yeah, why”
So he opens up a box and there sitting there, 10 years later, inexplicably are all the pockets in their multi-colored glory. Why did he save them you ask? I haven’t got a clue. That’s just the way that Brad is. Of all the things that he’s thrown out and picked to come with him on his various moves across the country, I guess the pockets just ranked up there. Who knew.

I’m going to put this in writing…
It is actually PAINFUL to be at a job that you hate. I didn’t even realize how much I hated this particular job until today when I was being a typically bad employee, or so I thought, and then I realized what the real situation was. In the past two weeks, I’ve submitted 15 candidates to job orders that we have. Because I’m a junior member of the firm, I don’t have any client contact, so I rely on the senior recruiters to deal with the clients and forward on my resumes… take a guess at how many of the 15 have been submitted to the various clients? That’s right…none. So what’s the fucking point? I get to work here day in and day out reviewing resumes and calling people, convincing them that they want to take terrible temp jobs, just to have their resume sit in the theoretical in-box of my boss? Fuck that.
Ugh… and I realized another thing. I hate my last name. It’s German and everyone mis-spells it. People just don’t understand how you can cram 4 constanants in a row like that and yet it’s done and done with pride. I just wish that people could spell it, or at least not comment on it EVERY TIME I SPELL IT. Even the bastards that typed up my social security card fucked it up and mis-typed it. What did they do? They just sent it to me anyway… mis-type and all. I was able to get a passport so it didn’t really matter, but it’s still irritating. At least they spelled it right on my birth-certificate.

The thing that I’m looking forward to more than anything else is the fact that when school is over in 5 weeks, I’ll no longer have anything hanging over my head. It’s just such a terrible feeling to constantly know that anytime you are having a good time you could be doing something that would benefit the all important and omnipresent GPA. It sucks because I honestly don’t give a shit about my GPA other than for the fact that I may actually need it one day if I want to go to grad school. Damn you GPA and your longevity.
The feeling of having a large paper due is kind of similar to the feeling that you have when you know you have done something wrong and you don’t have the balls to say anything. Like when you side swipe your mothers car while driving your fathers car…you know you should say something about it, you just can’t bring yourself to confess. So all day long you sit there just stewing about it, knowing that eventually it’ll catch up to you. And sure enough, when your father goes out to wax the car a few days later…it’s as apparent as a ton of bricks. (True story). It’s the same way with having a paper due, and having Laura there to wisper in your ear that you have 1000 other things to do…Grrrr.
So Laura is out of town this week on business, I don’t have any papers or anything due in the next week, so I finally have some down time which I’m kind of looking forward to. Don’t get me wrong. Laura isn’t a stressor or anything, it’s just nice to know that you have zero obligations when you come home from work. There won’t be any discussion about what I’m going to have for dinner because….well…I’m a cheap bastard and I’ll probably make some rice and chicken which is super easy but rather bland. I feel like I’m acutually going to be much more active this evening when I get home. I have this strange desire to clean up the house. It’s fairly messy and it will keep me from doing what I should be doing. That is…if I still feel that way after sitting through my terrible seminar this evening.

So after going over my finances, I have come to the realization that I am going to be able to pretty much take the entire month of May off… Off you say? Yes, as in just not going into work. Seeing as how I hate being a legal recruiter (AKA Resume Reviewer) I think this is a wonderful idea. It’ll give me plenty of time to just relax once I’m done with school, go on vacation with Laura and overall really just clean up all the little things in my life that need to be addressed prior to starting my new job. It’s gonig to be great and I can’t wait.
Laura and I were able to find our lease agreement last night. We thougtht that we had to vacate our apartment at the start of June and as it turns out, we have till the end of June which is great. Gives us plenty of time to figure out if we’re going to stay there and how that’s all going to work out. I think that I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again…I HATE moving, so hopefully if we are going to be moving we’ll be going somewhere new, fun and interesting, not to some shoddy apartment on the upper east side.
Anyway, I keep getting these terrible over the shoulder glaces from my boss, so I think that I should probably get back to doing a better job of faking work.

Turns out that the Miami Dolphins (my team) are going to be playing the Steelers in the anual Thursday night NFL season opener this year. This is awesome. As it turns out, their 6 game win streak at the end of the season, coupled by the aquisition of Dante Cullpepper has really made them them a worthy group. There was a nice little stint about it in the Miami Herald. Not going to lie… I’m looking forward to it. I’m thinking that Laura isn’t but that’s okay.

So this past weekend Laura and I went up to visit my parents and hang out with their new shitting machine…or should I say Puppy. My god….cute…yes, but that damn dog could piss and shit like you wouldn’t believe, and FAST too. She woudl practically do it mid-stride. It was more than a little irritating. I must have cleaned up around 10 wet spots in the house in a 24 hour period. I’m not going to lie, it really made me re-consider getting a puppy. Laura and I have been debating getting a puppy for quite some time, but we’ll see about that. It’s just the potty training and the constant attention that you have to give to them so that they will get potty trained.
My friend Allison came into town the other day and Laura, Allison and I went to dinner at Barmarche. It was good food, but they over fucking charged me. And we’re not talking like $3 here, we’re talking like they charged me three times more than they should have, so now I have to end up giving them a call and “working it out” with them. Ugh… I hate dealing with that shit. Oh well.

So I got a comment from my friend Brad the other day on my previous post. He was complaining that I didn’t write enough about my trip to Houston, or more importantly the fact that he was also there. I told him that I’d post a little story about him, but it turns out that I’m not really in the mood for it, so he’s going to have to wait.
So I’m officially like damn close to finally being done with school. The only thing that I have left to do is one paper for each class. That’s not much at all. Two of the papers are very short (4 pages) so that’s nothing. The other is 5 pages….so that’s again…nothing. I still have the whopper of 35 pages due for my seminar, so that’s a little more of something so that’s going to be the goal of this weekend. In between watching the final four and drinking beer, I’ve gotta find some time to get working on that. I just don’t want to get down to the last week in April and be like…damn it… I have 20 pages to write. So hopefully this weekend I can churn out a solid 6-7 pages.

Last night I had planned on working late. And seeing as how Laura works from home, whenever I tell her that I’m going to be working late or if I have class or whatever, she tends to go out with friends or with her sister. Usually ends up being out really late and doing something much more fun than I am. This was the case last night. She was out watching the basketball games at a bar, drinking with friends and I was sitting at home, writing up a Midterm exam, eating leftover pasta from the other night (it was actually quite good), and searching for jobs online.
It’s true. I’m still hunting for jobs. Laura and I had a long E-Mail discussion yesterday (isn’t it funny what the world has come to? Long discussions over email…) about our moving out of New York. She pretty much accused me of sitting back and not working on finding myself a job in Austin or whatever the hell else we’ve been looking. After much debate, I’ve come to see her reasoning and once again, realized that I’m a lazy bastard. Little too much Madden 2006 and too little job hunting.
So I got to thinking about it and realized that now that there are around 2 months till I’ll actually start to work anywhere, I should really crank up my efforts. So last night (and yesterday at work…shhh!) I was applying all over. Well… more like 5 good applications. I think the bigger effort came with me sending out about 5-10 feelers to see if I couldn’t network somewhere. I mean hell. I go to Columbia, and I know a bunch of people…SOMEONE must know SOMEONE. We’ll see how my “networking” goes.
So this morning, as I was leaving the house, I yell to Laura:
“Hey, I’m going to work till 5 today.”
“Don’t you usually work till 2?”
“Yeah, but I need the money.”
“What about your midterm and your paper?”
“Why do you have to question what I’m doing?”
Of course as soon as I walk out the door I realize that she’s right, and that I do have a 35 page paper that’s due in around 40 days. I also have a very difficult midterm that’s due on Monday. So I suppose that going home and working on one of those would be a good idea. I think that I’m going to end up compromising and heading home around 3:30. Midway between 2 (my usual time) and 5 (the official end of the day).
Laura and I face another enigma… if we do end up staying in New York, do we move or do we stay (in our apartment)? We have a nice 2BR in Williamsburg about a block from the subway. We have a private back yard, a BBQ Grill (propane), and a huge living room. The only problem is that Laura works from home, so she feels like she’s not connected to Manhattan. I feel like we STILL don’t have enough space. There really isn’t any point in writing all this, because well…. we still don’t know what’s going to go on.

I’m not going to lie. I like having people read my blog. I don’t really know why. Maybe it makes me feel important that someone else outside my little microcosm would find my life interesting…
I also have to admit that for a long time I wasn’t really a blog reader… well, the big ones like Slashdot.com, Engadget.com, rotoworld.com and all those sorts of business based blogs, but recently I have been getting into reading random people’s blogs. One that I found which was particularly interesting is “The Known Universe“. It’s just an interesting well written blog by a guy that lives in Williamsburg not too far from me. He’s an interesting guy and he writes a hell of a lot better than I do.
I just got my terrorism midterm (take home) yesterday. I was quite pleased that it didn’t look quite as hard as I thought it was going to be. So now it’s just a matter of doing it. So this shouldn’t be that bad. Laura and I are going up to my parents house this weekend in order to look after my parents new puppy.

She’s pretty cute and Laura found a great place to go riding (horses) up near my house. So she’s all excited about doing that. Even though we just got back to the city last weekend (from Houston) I’m looking forward to getting out again. I guess that’s a bad thing, but whatever. We’ll deal.
So Tuesday, I finally sucked it up and did my taxes. I have all this strange stuff on there because I rolled over a 401K and I have my school stuff and long story short I found out that my refund is close to $3K! I was totally excited because this means when I finally leave this crappy recruiting job, and before I start with the Consulting firm, I’ll be able to take a nice vacation with Laura. My parents, aren’t going to be hearing about this windfall because well… a) it’s not their business b) well… I own them close to 5K. I know the responsible thing to do would be to save the money and to forgo the vacation and just start to work ASAP, but honestly, I don’t care at this point. I’ve been waiting to get done with school for 6 years now and damn it… I’m going to take advantage of being “unemployed”.
On a side note of other places that I really like on the internet…. if you enjoy music and like to find new stuff, I highly recommend going to the Music Genome Project: Pandora. It’s a great page that allows you to listen to high quality streaming music. You punch in an artist or song and they find you songs and artists that are similar to the one that you selected. It’s a nice service and as of right now, there aren’t any ads in the stream, so that’s nice too. I’ve also heard that you can rip the stream so as to increase your MP3 collection in a semi-legal way. Or at least in an undetectable way.
Anyway, the boss just walked into work, so I should be “productive”

So we got back from Houston (Laura and I) and it feels good to be back. The house is a mess as usual, but it’s not that bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really HAPPY to be back in New York, but I’m glad that I’m back and getting school done and over with. I think this is going to be a theme in the next six weeks till I’m finally finished with this hell that they call an education.
I did get back some of my papers and midterms (99/100 on my Planet Earth…sweet) and I’ve been doing pretty well, so that’s good. I have to re-hand in my paper for my seminar, so that sucks. That’s actually due tomorrow, so I’ll be working on that a little more tonight. I did a bunch of it yesterday, so I’m almost done with it, I’d just like to add a little more content to it this evening, but we’ll see how I feel.
I think that this evening is going to be comprised of eating, working out, doing some work, and gasp…I’m going to get my ass in gear and clean up this massive pile of clothes on the couch. Eventually I think that I may download some of the photos that I was able to bring back from Texas and put them onto the computer. I totally didn’t bring them all back, which pisses me off, because well… I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to get them from Laura’s Mother’s computer. For some odd reason I couldn’t get the damn things to upload to Laura’s Laptop. Oh well. I suppose that I should have tried harder.
So the job hunt is…well…. not going well. I’ve yet to hear from anyone other than fucking recruiting agencies. If I wanted to get a job as a recruiter it would be amazingly easy. I mean there is just a crazy demand for people to place others. Too bad I can’t find myself a position. As I’ve written before, I still have the position open here in NY, so that’s good at least I don’t have to worry about that one falling through. I am also still looking into the prospect of working at Laura’s company, but there have been some issues with that recently, so we’ll see if that ever pans out. If I were able to do that, then Laura and I would be a small step away from actually moving out of this city.
Anyway, I think that it’s about time that I get my ass in gear. I need to head to the gym before I lose all motivation to be in shape and healthy for the evening.

It’s 11:30 and I’m at work. Decided to put in some hours doing some work before I took off for Texas. I’m pretty excited about it. Going to watch some bull riding and some calf wrangling and such at the rodeo. We’re also going to head up to Laura’s father’s ranch to go horseback riding. Not that I’m at all qualified to ride horses, but it still should be a good time.
So this morning I had to run up to Columbia with all my bags for the trip so that I could drop off my religion paper. Pain in the ass, I have to say. Not even the fact that I had to go up there, but I was hauling around like 50 lbs worth of crap. So I finally made it down to my office in midtown to get into work and I thought to myself “Wow..you are a stud. You went up to Columbia dropped off your paper, and made it to work by 8:15….but you are a moron who forgot the keys to your office.” So I sat outside the office for close to an hour before someone finally showed up to let me in.
I actually didn’t mind it because it gave me the chance to play with the laptop that I had gotten from my father. It’s this old 233mHz Pentium laptop that was running Windows ME (I know, right?). So I figured that it wasn’t really worth having, but then I realized with my latest experience in Linux, this may be a good platform to test out a different distro. So last night I had downloaded DSL (Damn Small Linux) and had it on a bootable CD. So I threw it into the computer and off I went. I had time to run two separate installs (a testament to the speed of installing DSL) and by the time someone showed up I had the system configured. The only thing that I really couldn’t get working was the wireless internet which DSL is notorious for not being easy to get going. I figure that with some tinkering or perhaps a $20 wireless card I can get the thing working and be all set.
So I had a recruiter call me this morning and I just had to laugh. He was your typical sleazy recruiter (unlike myself). He pulled classic lines like “your resume was very impressive” (I’m thinking to myself… I have two years at a no name law firm, and 6 months at a no name recruiting firm and don’t’ even have a college degree yet…the only thing that’s remotely impressive is the fact that my degree happens to be from Columbia…but notice no GPA). Once I told him what I was going to be making at the Consulting firm, he quickly replied that this job was offering $10K more than that. I just had to laugh because it’s like… ya know…lie to someone that doesn’t do your job for a living. It would be like me going into a chef’s kitchen and telling them what the best kind of flower is. Oh well. Terrible person that I am, I passed on the info to one of the other recruiters so that she could see if she would be interested in the position. HA! If that happened, that would be the second recruiter (of 4 that are here) that I have aided in their departure.
I should actually do some work now that it’s getting to be almost noon.